First Kosher Soup Kitchen To Open in Milan

Chabad in Milan, Italy will open the city’s first-ever kosher soup kitchen by summer’s end. According to Rabbi Avraham Hazan, director of Chabad-Lubavitch in the city, the kitchen’s “Meals on Wheels” style dinners will partner with the city’s official home-delivery system to bring kosher food to needy families and hospitalized patients.

While the program will cater to Milan’s Jewish population, meals will be available to all those in need. The idea for the kitchen was hatched as a byproduct of renovations at the Bais Chana Day School in Milan.

The school launched a redesign and expansion of the facility’s existing kitchen and cafeteria to accommodate the growing number of students and staff, totaling some 350 people.  The modernized and enlarged facility has made it possible for Chabad to add the soup kitchen to the range of services offered to the community

At a recent gala dinner to raise funds for the food distribution program at Milan’s Vetra Theatre, Gennaro della Volpe, a popular local musician known by his stage name Raiz, performed. della Volpe, who converted to Judaism in 2009, is a frontman for the Italian group Almamegretta. He garnered media attention when he declined to perform on Shabbat at the Sanremo Music Festival in February.

According to Rabbi Yigal Hazan, director of the school, the soup kitchen has received widespread community support.

“It’s beautiful that this project is uniting the entire community,” Hazan says. “We’ve seen that Jews of all backgrounds, secular and religious, see no barriers when it comes to kindness.”