Kathy Goldman, Who Fought Starvation in New York Metropolis, Dies at 92
Kathy Goldman, who devoted her profession as a civic chief to establishing meals banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch applications in public faculties to maintain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.
The reason for dying, in a hospital, was congestive coronary heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, stated.
Ms. Goldman was decided to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over 5 a long time she labored with many collaborators to efficiently foyer for federal subsidies like meals stamps and diet help for girls, youngsters and infants; create partnerships between company suppliers of provisions and native communities; and increase the mandate of anti-hunger applications to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, training and different wants.
In 1980, she based the Neighborhood Meals Useful resource Heart, a meals pantry, as a buffer towards stricter eligibility necessities for welfare. Three years later she helped manage what’s now the Meals Financial institution for New York Metropoliswhich served scores of soup kitchens and meals pantries across the metropolis from the Hunts Level market within the Bronx. She was the middle’s govt director till she retired in 2003.
In 1984 she began the Neighborhood Kitchen of West Harlem, an revolutionary program that not solely supplied meals, but in addition helped the hungry with different wants, together with housing and well being care. After renovations to the eating space, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered it the greatest compliment of all time coming from a kid,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).
Within the early Nineties, she persuaded the town to open college cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the single most important voice fighting hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools, which resulted in literally thousands of kids actually eating the food as opposed to throwing it out,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, stated by e mail.
In creating federal college breakfast and summer time meals applications in New York, Ms. Goldman “hired people who had expertise and got out of their way,” stated Ms. Barrett, who had been one in every of her collaborators (together with Liz Krueger, who would turn into a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Neighborhood Belief).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to hold the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York and in 2012 was honored by President Barack Obama on the White Home as a “champion of change” for serving to to cut back starvation in America.
After she retired from the meals middle, she and Agnes Molnar based Neighborhood Meals Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common college lunch and different authorities methods to fulfill the dietary wants of Individuals.
As Ms. Goldman usually stated: “Tomorrow morning, if the will were there, we would not have to have any hunger. There’s no dearth of food.”
In 2022, she moved to a retirement group in Sleepy Hole, N.Y.
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later modified her title to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on Jan. 15, 1932, within the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Japanese Europe. Her mom, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a author who based a Hungarian girls’s journal. Her father, Samuel, was a cupboard maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating among the many first group of ladies admitted to the Bronx Excessive College of Science, three blocks from her house, she grew to become the primary in her household to go to school, learning movie at New York College then briefly attending Metropolis School and Hunter School. In 1986, she earned a grasp’s diploma in city research from Queens School of the Metropolis College of New York.
In 1949, she traveled to Budapest, the place she labored as a translator on the World Youth Pageant; at school she joined the Labor Youth League, which had been established by the Communist Get together (though she later stated she balked on the crimson flag-wavers’ self-importance, dogmatism and denigration of girls); and took programs in Marxism and Black historical past on the Jefferson College of Social Science, as soon as described in The Instances as “the principal training center for Communists and Communist sympathizers in this city.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, had been lively within the City League’s marketing campaign towards racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a gaggle of white middle-class mother and father who supported college desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and one other activist, Ellen Luriein contrast the studying check scores of each college within the metropolis and publicized them as proof that Black college students had been receiving an inferior training.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to enhance South Bronx public faculties, growing a bilingual coaching initiative for adults via United Bronx Dad and mom and introducing a federally financed free summer time meals program for youngsters in 1971; she helped draft rules when this system was expanded nationally in 1979.
She and her husband divorced in 1974. Along with her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; 5 grandsons, and two great-grandsons. Most of her relations who remained in Europe after her mother and father immigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary) had been killed within the Holocaust.
“I was really raised to believe that if more people had said something, then the Holocaust would not have happened,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying. “If there would have been a fight back, it would have been mitigated. I believe that ’til this day. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”
