‘Until the last soldier is home’: The women nurturing IDF troops with homemade food

At nine o’ clock at night on Wednesday, as most people are winding down and curled up in front of their Netflix or with a good book, Ruti Spitzer is gingerly placing a steaming pot filled with vegetable soup into the trunk of her Toyota.

As she drives (very slowly) uphill to the army base, avoiding speed bumps, she explains that the small group of women – recently regrouped as part of a 10-year effort called Sayeret Tzuparim L’chayalim (Treats for the Soldier Patrol) that treats local soldiers to soup once a week – washes the soldiers’ laundry and brings special goodies to celebrate each Rosh Hodesh (beginning of the month).

The Soup Ladies of Samaria first started when the women got together to bring meals to the family of a young girl after she had been wounded in a terrorist attack in El Matan. After the family no longer needed support, the women began bringing their homemade food to the local army base, which included falafel nights and barbecues.

Since the current war, they realized that the soldiers needed more support, and the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters of soldiers felt helpless and wanted to do something substantial for the soldiers around them. Spitzer has two sons who have served more than 200 days in Gaza and Lebanon so far.

“I know that wherever my sons are stationed, someone else is taking care of them,” Spitzer says. “Here we celebrate soldiers’ birthdays, distribute 100 laundry bags weekly, and on the cold nights the women bring soup that keeps the soldiers warm to fuel them for their night missions.” The group comes equipped with serving ware and soup nuts, as well as hot plates in case the base doesn’t have one. 

Spitzer started the group with Liat Petrover, Yaara Yaakov, Chen Elhadad, some of whom have husbands and children in the army, and the group expanded to more than 20 neighborhood women. They collected furniture from the community to furnish the public areas of the army base.

The base cycles recruited soldiers, reservists, and volunteers. One group called Hagmar consists of older soldiers who want to help.

“Tonight is going to be a tough one,” says a soldier at the base as he sprinkles some soup nuts into his cup of orange soup. “I have to arrest a terrorist who will hopefully be asleep at home. He will have his family, his children, all around him. This helps,” he says, lifting his cup.

Spitzer, who admits to being a soldier “wannabe,” says that recently she was on the base setting up the soup pots when an alarm came in, and the platoon was activated to chase a nearby terrorist.

“It was scary,” she recalls. “Suddenly, everyone was putting on their vests and helmets and running for the door.”

The bases are part of the protection of Samaria communities, whose soldiers frequently go on night raids to seek out terrorists, weapons, and laundered cash.

Josie Eisner, a former caterer from Karnei Shomron with grandchildren in the army, is a regular contributor, making soups and occasionally cooking other dishes. Another volunteer is Dvora Brand, an Israeli realtor and mother of nine, who has many soldiers in her family. She prepared weekly soups and salads for the units that were stationed in a Payis building in Neve Menachem.

“It’s amazing to be part of hundreds and thousands of Israelis who have helped soldiers all over the country and brought them a bit of home wherever they happen to be,” Spitzer says. 

The grand Cannons 

In Yad Binyamin, where Route 3 meets Route 40, the crossroads to the southern corridor, Friday is the day that food is collected and distributed by a local group called Totachay Hadarom (Southern Cannons). Their homemade contributions are taken to soldiers in and around Gaza and along the Lebanese border.

The group was formed on Oct. 7. As soon as the community got word that the army was mobilizing, two teenage sons of Yad Binyamin resident Noa Uman collected food from all the synagogue kiddushim that were canceled due to the sudden state of emergency and brought it to the troops amassed at the junction of the road leading to the Gaza border.

Four hundred soldiers were fed that day, and the group quickly mobilized with volunteers, youth, families, yeshiva students, collecting orders from army personnel, processing eager volunteers, packaging and distributing food to wherever there was a need. At its peak, they provided as many as 1,800 meals each day, sending WhatsApp messages to request home-cooked meals from the town’s residents.

After army logistics adjusted to the demand, the group began to deliver meals once a week, involving 40 to 50 local families in their widespread food distribution efforts.

Jane Turbiner, a retired college administrator from Berkeley, California, began cooking for families displaced from the North and the South who were evacuated to Zichron Ya’acov at the onset of the war. The evacuees arrived with limited possessions and were immediately helped to find housing. The community provided them with clothing and food, as well as gas money, since they were housed throughout the town. Turbiner then began providing meals for reservists’ families, some of which were quite large.

Turbiner, who made aliyah with her husband, Jonathan Lyon, a retired speech pathologist and trumpet/flugelhorn player, was no stranger to cooking for strangers. While in between jobs at the university, she ran a catering business in the Orthodox synagogue in Berkeley, offering weekly menus with choices of meat or parve main courses, to accommodate the vegan community. 

She learned how to procure ingredients, cook and distribute meals, varying her menu selections from Chinese and French cuisine to basic soups and sandwiches, based on the weather and on whatever looked fresh in the grocery store. 

“Cooking was something I always loved to do, and I would have loved to spend my life cooking, but it is a very hard job,” she says. “My skills happen to be a match for what I started during the war. First, I fed reservists’ families and displaced families for 11 months. Then I joined a group of 500 people from Zichron called Cooking with Love for Soldiers – a combination of Anglo olim and Israelis.” Started by Galit Saar and Idit Sidel, the group distributes meals to thousands of soldiers every week.

Turbiner cooks eight to 10 liters of food three times a week, preparing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday dinners that feed 1,300 soldiers each alternating day. The community set up a makolet (small grocery store) in a MADA-owned building.

“The store stocks packaged goods, produce, and meats,” she says. “You sign up for what you are going to cook, and then get the ingredients from the store.

“In Berkeley, cooking was a creative process. Since we were limited in finding kosher packaged foods, it involved using fresh ingredients and cooking from scratch.”

Potstickers for the platoon

Turbiner says she still cooks and bakes everything from scratch and makes food inspired from her world travels.

“When I was a college student, I studied in Northern China, and a Chinese friends taught me to cook authentic Chinese food,” she recounts. “I studied in graduate school at Berkeley in Asian studies and first learned to cook when I was 10. My grandmother was famous in Boston for her French cuisine, and my mother was a great cook.”

While she can’t always find certain specialty foods, her Israel version of stir-fried vegetables includes cabbage, carrots, Asian and shiitaki mushrooms, bell peppers, ginger, onions, and plenty of garlic. Sometimes she makes guotie – potsticker dumplings that are crispy on one side and chewy on the other. When she can find them, she stores snow peas in her freezer. She says that Zichron has many options regarding ingredients because there are specialty stores that cater to the many olim (new immigrants) there. But she isn’t limited to her Chinese dishes.

Turbiner also prepares arais (pitas stuffed with chopped beef and lamb), vegetarian enchiladas, chili, mujadara (“pockmarked” rice and lentils), and lentil vegetable soup. Living kosher in Berkeley taught her to alter all sorts of recipes to be kosher, vegetarian, and/or gluten-free.

“Cooking for an army is not really difficult,” she says. “My mom always said, ‘If you’re going to have eight people for Thanksgiving, you might as well have twenty.’ The love and attention you put into it is the same. You have to scale up the ingredients and use a much larger pot, but it is exactly the same process. 

“I don’t necessarily cook for Israeli sensibilities because I cook food that tastes good to me and my family,” she states. “For me, there’s no difference cooking for an army and cooking for a family. I use no shortcuts or ‘alternative’ ingredients, and I don’t cook things that I can’t get real ingredients for.”

Volunteers come and pack up the food and drive it to soldiers throughout central and northern Israel. The food is delivered directly to soldiers in the field, not to army bases.

“It’s a way of getting them away from MREs [Meals Ready-to-Eat] and giving them an alternative to canned goods,” Turbiner explains. “After living in the US for over 50 years, I saw there was something for everybody to do. I can cook – and I can cook in quantity. It was my way to contribute to the war effort.”

‘Until the last soldier is home’

Yael Kaner, a resilience coach and former chef/mashgiach (kashrut supervisor) who lives in Ma’aleh Adumim, posts pictures and updates on her Facebook account, coordinating the cooking, packing, and delivering of 350 portions of food to serve soldiers.

Her son, who passed away in 2020, is her ongoing inspiration to cook in the copper pots he had purchased for her. She sees all her soldiers as surrogate children and has taken off only two weeks for sickness since Oct. 7.

 “Our cooking group is about 20 women who cook and drop off food each week,” she says. “All the women volunteer their time, and all the food is paid for by donations. I was a rabbanit [rebbetzin] in San Francisco, DC, and Great Neck, Long Island, and picked up a mosaic of recipes from my different congregations. Joan Nathan became a close friend. I tend to cook Lebanese and Syrian for the soldiers, and over the years I absorbed all kinds of cooking influences like a sponge.”

She says that the volunteers have no room in their refrigerators and freezers for their own food until Friday morning after the food for the soldiers is on its way to the army bases.

“One of the volunteers who rides shotgun with a car full of food to the Lebanese border and back on Friday is almost 70 years old, and she gets back home in time for candle lighting.”

Kaner’s offerings include many kilos of chicken, matbucha, babaganoush, tehina, beet salad, coleslaw, kugels, international specialties, stir-fried noodles, pasta salad, and eggplant salad, as well as her husband, Yosef’s, Amazingly Healthy Brownies.

“When you see the level of hatred that is directed at us…We are fighting for our lives and our home. An army travels on its stomach, so I’m doing everything humanly possible to support our soldiers,” she asserts.

When a wounded lone soldier had his jaw wired shut, who “is allergic to beans in a country where the national dish is hummus made from garbanzo beans,” Kaner pureed chicken soup, vegetable soup, tzimmis, and beef stew for him.

“I’m going to throw in a few smoothies,” the puree purveyor adds.

Kaner vows to continue cooking for an army “until the last soldier is home.”