Turning gently used clothing into magic
Yad Leah and its volunteers collect garments for a second showing in Israel
Growing up in Teaneck in the 1990s, Lauren Turk understood that she didn’t always have the same type of clothing as some of her classmates. Ms. Turk, who attended the Moriah School in Englewood and then went to high school at Frisch in Paramus, often lacked clothes that were “current or modern or pricey or designer,” she said.
That’s one of the reasons Ms. Turk, who still lives in Teaneck, opened “The Hangout NJ,” a designer consignment boutique in Englewood, six years ago. “If there’s a mom who can buy her daughter a dress from my store that is a trendy designer item but it’s half the price, it’s so important for me to be a part of that,” she said.
As a teen, she also had known a little about Yad Leah, the Passaic-based organization that collects gently used clothing and distributes it to communities in Israel. But she didn’t know much about the organization’s work until she attended a volunteer event at its Passaic warehouse a couple of years ago.
Yad Leah hosts a variety of gatherings at which volunteers sort and pack donated clothes. Jessica Katz, the organization’s director and co-founder, sees these events as a win-win. They not only help prepare items to be shipped to Israel, she said, but they also “really give people an opportunity to see what we’re doing and to see that they can make an impact.”
Ms. Katz finds that the events can be particularly powerful for younger volunteers. “They see that they can open up their closets and that items that they don’t wear don’t have to sit in the closet, that ‘I can do something good with it, and someone else, another child, another person could wear it and enjoy it, and I can feel good about it.’
“So we like the fact that it’s providing people in the community with an opportunity to really help, and to understand what it means to help, and to understand what it means to feel part of the Jewish people.”
Yad Leah grew out of a 2003 conversation, Ms. Katz said. Karen Thaler, who grew up in Teaneck with Ms. Katz (she was Karen Milch at the time and Ms. Katz was Jessica Sosland) and now lives in Israel, was in the area for a visit when another friend offered her some clothing that her own children, who were a little older than Ms. Thaler’s children, had outgrown. Ms. Thaler was happy to accept some of the items but did not need all of them. Her friend said, “you might not need it, but I’m sure you know someone who does.”
Ms. Thaler took the clothing back to Israel, Ms. Katz continued. “When she started giving it out, she saw a depth of need, a depth of poverty she hadn’t anticipated.” Ms. Katz, who now lives in Clifton, started collecting more clothing locally and Ms. Thaler started distributing it, and “it snowballed from there.” The organization is named in memory of Ms. Thaler’s grandmother, Lea Polk, who immigrated to the United States from Europe “with very little but lived by a simple, powerful philosophy — whatever you have, you share.” Yad — that’s the Hebrew work for hand — “reflects this mission, extending a hand to help those in need.”
Yad Leah hosts volunteer events for schools, shuls, bar and bat mitzvah chesed projects, and a variety of other groups. “We had an extended family volunteer together, before their family Chanukah party, and we’ve hosted birthday celebration volunteer events for family and friends marking 40th, 70th, and 80th birthdays,” Ms. Katz said. The organization also hosts open packing events throughout the year. Its next one will be on Sunday, May 10. (See box.)
Sometimes families participate in the organization’s packing events together, Ms. Katz said. She often sees three generations working to prepare a box of donated clothes for shipping. She finds that meaningful. “The experience of having a multigenerational group working together with the same goal — you’re at the same table, opening the same bags, packing the same box. You have grandparents working with their children, their grandchildren; there’s a joint bonding experience that I think is very, very special, very unique, and very empowering.”
Yad Leah ships clothing to approximately 25 communities in Israel. Each one has a store similar to a thrift shop that’s set up “very nicely, with racks and shelves,” Ms. Katz said. “It’s warm and it’s inviting, and people from the community can come and get everything they need for their entire family — boys’, girls’, men’s and women’s clothing — in an inviting atmosphere that they feel good about.” Customers tend to be individuals and families who “can’t go to the mall like everybody else, who don’t necessarily have that luxury.” The store is set up like a regular store so it’s “as if they’re going to the mall, and they can feel good about it.
“In almost all of our branches there is a nominal charge so people can feel that they are buying something — that it’s not just a handout,” she added.
One of the stores, based in Jerusalem, is operated by a nonprofit organization as a vocational training space for people with mental health challenges. It’s a “therapeutic environment for them,” Ms. Katz said. “They learn how to interact with people, they learn how to run the store, they learn the different skills you need to be able to function, to work in a normative work environment. And then, when they reach their therapeutic goals, they move on to a regular work environment.”
The feedback Yad Leah receives from people who buy the clothes makes it clear that the stores are meeting a real need, Ms. Katz said. One customer wrote that she was “navigating a difficult divorce” and “buying new clothes was the last thing on her mind.” She went to one of the stores at a friend’s urging and now has “beautiful new Shabbat clothes, which make me feel so good, and which I never would have been able to purchase” without Yad Leah. Another explained in a video message that her husband had been called up as a reservist and that “there was no way that she could have gone shopping” because she had also lost her own job as a result of the war. She was extremely appreciative that she and her daughters were able to get new clothes for the holidays.
When Ms. Turk went to the volunteer event at the Yad Leah warehouse, “I learned about what they do with the clothing, where it goes, how it gets to those people, and how those people feel like people, and customers, and consumers, instead of like a charity case,” she said. That resonated for her. “The dignity aspect of Yad Leah, giving people all around Israel clothing that they can wear and feel good about.”
She also enjoyed participating. “When you’re volunteering your time there, it’s always a blast,” she said. She found the other volunteers and “all the people that run the programs” to be “the kindest, warmest people in the world.”
Ms. Turk had such a good experience that when the Hangout turned five years old last year, she worked with Yad Leah to coordinate a volunteer event at the warehouse to celebrate. “It was such a beautiful event,” she said. “We sorted clothing and we packed boxes, and it was such a nice way to highlight Yad Leah’s work. It was a feel-good event, a really magical experience.”
Stefanie Donath lives in Manhattan. After her son Arie organized a clothing drive for Yad Leah as his bar mitzvah project, the family visited the Passaic warehouse and later, during a trip to Israel, the Jerusalem storefront.
Arie chose to work with Yad Leah because the family felt strongly about helping people in Israel after October 7, Ms. Donath said. She found it special to see “the big picture — all the work that goes into managing the collection and distribution center” and how the donated items make their way to the “well organized, well curated” Jerusalem store. “And it was just really nice to see that we were also empowering these young adults who are part of the store to continue developing their self-worth.”
The family plans to stay involved with Yad Leah’s work. “I love the nexus that has been created between our stuff and those in Israel,” Ms. Donath said.
Diane Rieger, who has donated clothing to Yad Leah and participated in a number of its volunteer events, also found it meaningful to work with an organization that is helping people in Israel. Her late husband was Israeli, she said. “We had gone to visit his family many times, and over the years I developed a very strong attachment to Israel and the people there.”
After seeing Yad Leah’s work firsthand, “it felt like my clothing had a second life,” Ms. Rieger, who lives in a retirement community in Pompton Plains, continued. She appreciates that the clothing goes “to help people have things that perhaps they couldn’t afford to buy for themselves” and that the stores are designed to allow people to get items they like “with dignity.” Ms. Rieger also finds Yad Leah’s work to be particularly important “in communities that are far away from downtown Tel Aviv, where things are more readily available.”
Bonnie Fair lives in Los Angeles and volunteered at the warehouse while visiting relatives who live in the area. She was “extremely impressed with all of the merchandise that had been donated by the local communities,” Ms. Fair wrote in an email. “There was a literal mountain of clothing which needed to be sorted, folded, and boxed.” She was also struck by how well the warehouse operates. “The organization of how they instructed and made use of the volunteers to do these tasks was as smoothly run as it could have been. It was like a factory assembly line. The amount of boxes readied for shipping at the end of our shift was truly amazing.”
She found it to be “a very gratifying experience for me and I’m sure for everyone else who volunteered that day.”
Who: Yad Leah
What: Offers the chance to pack boxes of clothing bound for Israel
When: On Sunday, May 10, from either 10:30 to noon or 1 to 2:30.
Where: At Yad Leah’s warehouse, 2 Brighton Avenue in Passaic
For whom: Everyone from 6 years old and up
What else: Registration is necessary; go to yadleah.org/momsday26
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