September 21, 2010|By Sergio Carmona, Staff Writer
Homebound seniors Hermine Kreinces and Yave Shteyrenberg rarely get any visitors to talk to in their Miami Beach apartments.
Jewish Community Services of South Florida’s annual Milk & Honey Food Distribution was a rare exception when the two elders received not only kosher food baskets from Miami Beach Commissioner Deede Weithorn, her husband Mark, and JCS board member Madelyn Merritt, but conversations that inspired the volunteers, especially their stories of perseverance through Nazi Europe and the Soviet Union.
“I was thinking while they were speaking that we all complain about the conditions we’re in but compared to what both of them really went through we should be so thankful that we live in this country,” Weithorn said regarding the visits. “There’s just no comparison to what they’ve had to endure in their lifetime and to what we go through on a daily basis.”
Kreinces and Shteyrenberg were among several homebound seniors throughout Miami-Dade County that received visits from approximately 200 families who delivered 500 trays of food to them during the distribution designed for the High Holidays.
Barry Schwartz, JCS’s vice-chairman of the board, said the visits are more than just about the delivery of food.
“The food is simply the vehicle that gets us in the door,” he added. “Many of the people we visit don’t interact very much with the outside world. We bring the outside world to them. We let them know that there are people who care about them.”
Kreinces said regarding the visit of the volunteers, “Some angels came today.”
During her conversation with the volunteers, Kreinces spoke about her escape from Austria in 1938 because of Adolf Hitler and told them that she has nobody to talk to today. She also spoke to them about her life and showed them figurines that she has made. Mark Weithorn was also able to speak about his parents who experienced a similar plight as Kreinces as they were Holocaust survivors.
“It’s very inspiring,” Mark Weithorn said about the conversation. “There’s a common thread with a lot of these people who survived the Holocaust. My parents were also part of that thread.”
Shteyrenberg, meanwhile, spoke about her tough times in Russia where she wasn’t allowed to practice Judaism there because she would’ve been killed. She also showed the visitors photos of her parents, conversed with them in Yiddish, and talked to them about her family. At the end of the conversation, she told the volunteers, “Thank you for making my life a little bit better. I’m wishing you all a good life.”