In a hollowed-out basement under a shul in Sydney, Australia, a New York rabbi and his Aussie wife have built a community-run, nondenominational kitchen gathering others to cook for a cause,Heaven’s Kitchen,In a hollowed-out basement under a shul in Sydney, Australia, a New York rabbi and his Aussie wife have built a community-run, nondenominational kitchen gathering others to cook for a cause
B’ZCHUS NASHIM “If not for my wife’s astonishing generosity and love of chesed I would be in business or politics” admits Rabbi Slavin. “She just has this absolute passion to help people and feed them” (Photos: Nadine Saacks)
H ow did a New York rabbinical student with no secular education wind up with a PhD and create one of largest charitable kitchens in Australia? Actually if you’d asked Rabbi Dr. Dovid Slavin 25 years ago if he could imagine himself one day running a multimillion-dollar food operation Down Under and becoming a recognized academic to boot he probably wouldn’t have flinched.
“If you want to make G-d laugh tell Him your plans ” he says today. “I take every day and every challenge and every opportunity as it comes.”
That’s how Rabbi Slavin together with his wife Laya wound up transforming the basement of Sydney’s Yeshiva Centre — the Chabad headquarters of New South Wales — into a massive multicultural kitchen that would be used to benefit anyone in the region Jew and gentile alike.
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