'Nourishment For The Soul': Deli Feeds 300 Floridians Evacuated From Israel

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — With nearly 300 Floridians airlifted out of Israel following the Hamas attack on the country and brought to Tampa on Sunday, organizers of the rescue effort realized there was something they hadn’t accounted for: feeding so many evacuees.

That’s when Jo-El’s Kosher Deli in St. Petersburg got a call Monday morning.

“The call came from a gentleman who works with the Emergency Relief Catering Company and he said, ‘We need to feed 300 people,’” Sharon Goetz, who owns the deli with her parents, Joe and Ellen Goetz, told Patch. “He called at 11 a.m. That is not a joke. I didn’t know if it was real, but they needed kosher food, so I said, ‘Yes.’”

With the help of her parents and staff members, including her chef, Lana Estabrooks from Ukraine, and butcher Gregory Maidenberg from Russia, she got to work.

Still, Sharon wasn’t sure if it was possible to pull together lunch for so many so quickly. She even wondered if they had enough supplies for it.

“I didn’t know how we were going to do it. I didn’t know if I had enough food. But I knew that whatever we had, I was going to make something happen,” Sharon said. “We’re a little tiny family-owned, mom-and-pop kosher deli. We maybe do 300 sandwiches all week.”

She scoured the deli for all the sandwich-making supplies she could find.

“We started with turkey sandwiches for lunch and when we ran out of turkey, we went to corned beef. When we ran out of corned beef, we went to salami and then bologna, and we went until there was not any meat left in the store,” she said. “There wasn’t a slice of rye bread left in the store. We didn’t have a pickle left. We didn’t even have a bag of chips.”

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As her crew finished making lunch, she received another call from the Emergency Relief Catering Company. They also needed dinner for the nearly 300 evacuees.

“I didn’t know what to do. I laughed, but of course I was going to say yes,” Sharon said. “We cooked every piece of chicken in the store. We cooked every vegetable. We cooked rice and potatoes. Did everyone have the same thing? Again, no, but we made it.”

Then came the matter of getting the meals to the evacuees. She learned they needed to be delivered to four different hotels in Tampa or even farther, rather than one central location.

The deli called upon former delivery drivers and even a courier service they’d worked with before to make this happen.

“We sent out as many people as we could find and then they came back to us and did it all over again,” Sharon said.

Though the deli was paid for its food and services, she said they plan to donate the money they made to local Jewish organizations and causes. She was simply honored to assist the evacuation effort in any way she could.

“When the call comes and you’re asked to do something, you don’t think, you just do,” she said.

“We have friends (in Israel) and know people who have family there. Everybody knows somebody that’s been affected. Our Israeli customers, the stories we’re hearing, they’re just heartbreaking.”
Sharon added, “Food is one of those things that brings people together, and I think food is so much more than just nourishment for the body. It’s nourishment for the soul.”