J.D.C. Canteen Feed Hungry Jews of Europe
By Laura Margolis In post-war Paris, where the problem of obtaining a nutritious meal is today an ever-pressing one, more than 60,000 meals are served to Jewish men, women and children each month in seventeen canteens maintained by French social welfare organizations supported by the Joint Distribution Committee—canteens which, to many, are the only available sources of v/.:oZesome food.
These are not "soup kitchens" or "bread lines," but simply restaurants where the Jews of Paris are invited to be the guests of the J.D.C. They come to eat and no questions are asked, no applications to fill out, no scrutiny of their eligibility. They are made welcome and served cheerfully and are made to feel that they are invited to come again. And the attendance is regulated by an unwritten rule-strictly adhered to by all—that if other food is available or money is had to eat elsewhere, they do not come.
To these canteens come the school children, the old women, the old men. They are joined by working men and women who do not earn enough to buy the necessities for a meal in this food short city. All eat good, wholesome food, so necessary to build them up after the harrowing war years.
And eating with them are Jews from all over Buroe, for these canteens are not restricted to just the Je^f/B of Paris—they are open to any Jew. They sit together, the Jews of Buchenwald, Dachau* Auschwitz—Jews from Germany, Aus-ria, Czedhoslovakia, Poland. The canteens are a common meeting grotmd and there the Jews of France welcome their brothers.
The canteens have been the setting for niunerous reunions of long lost relatives and friends—reunions such as the one that sent two brothers to new homes in Palestine together instead of seperately. The brothers, one 30 and the other 26 each believing the other dead, had somdhow survived the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau where they had been taken in sealed trains from their homes in Warsaw. They had searched for each other tmsuccessfully after the war and finally, spurred on by a single ^HMWIimWillililliliiifflllffWffi
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motive, both had made their way to Paris, hopmg to go to Palestine. Duruig their stay in Paris they were invited to eat at the canteens and there one afternoon the brothers accidentally met A table was overturned and three meals sent icreshing to the floor in the ensuing commotion—but for once no regrets were voiced for the wasted food.
A. regular "customer" at one of the canteens, eighty-year old Isaac Kaplan, appears (promptly at 1 o'clock every afternoon. Mr. Kaplan eats only one meal a day at the canteen. "Better to leave it for the yoimg ones," is his laconic reply when urged to come more often. Mr. Kaplan was once a prosperous merchant in Paris. "Now I'm happy just to eat once a day," he says. "That's more than my three children and two grandchildren can do; they were killed."
In addition to food, those who eat at the canteen where Josef Gettfarb and his wife have two meals a day also get a "floor show." Mr. Gottfarb, sixty-five years old, is perhaps the most popular man who eats at any of the canteens. His table is always surrounded and those sitting at other tables are always shouting for quiet so that they can hear what he is saying. Mr. Gottfarb is a one-man show; he keeps up a numing stream of conversation filled with philosophical remarks, jokes and comments on current events. He never seems to be eating, but he always leaves a dean plate at the end of mealtiine.
Mr. Gottfarb and his wife, Sarah, live here in Paris. They survived the war by assuming false names. . At one time Mr Gottfarb vras nearly detected, but managed to get by with some rapid fire talking. "Those are still sad days," he says, "â– but at meal time it is not good to be so. I try to cheer up my friends who have much to be sad about. At least here whwe they get their daily bread, let them laugh."
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