Bat Yam’s beloved volunteer kitchen seeks a new lease on life after founder’s death

For decades, Bat Yam’s “Meir the Fat Man’s Kitchen” served as a volunteer-run lifeline for needy children, founded by the late Meir Shoaf as a personal initiative that grew into a major food aid operation. In an interview with ynet Studio, his daughter Irit Shoaf and chef Erez Nachshon described how they are now trying to preserve and revive the project after Shoaf’s death in November.

Irit said her father decided at a relatively young age, after suffering a stroke, to devote his life to helping the community. He began volunteering at Beit Shanti, and after reading an article about child poverty in Israel, he chose to act rather than just move on. He built “Meir the Fat Man’s Kitchen” from nothing, without special means, and deliberately did not define it as a soup kitchen because, in his view, it was not a place for children.

Over time, the kitchen created a system of donations and volunteer chefs, including Nachshon, to keep the place running. It distributed hundreds of sandwiches to schoolchildren, including children who forgot food, and later expanded to lunch meals and extracurricular activities. Irit said the operation ran continuously from the time her father started it in his 50s until his final day, when he was over 80.

Nachshon said he first came to volunteer after a friend recommended the place, and immediately connected both with Shoaf and with the mission. He later held volunteer cooking workshops there on Fridays. When he attended Shoaf’s funeral with his friend Sharon Mazen and heard there was no one to carry on and the site might close, they decided on the spot to take on the challenge. Their goal is to honor Shoaf by keeping the Bat Yam project alive, expanding beyond food under what Nachshon calls “nutritional security,” and recruiting as many volunteers as possible to renovate the kitchen, bring in new equipment, and relaunch its work for children in need.