Kathy Goldman, who devoted her profession as a civic chief to establishing meals banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch packages in public faculties to maintain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.
The reason for loss of life, in a hospital, was congestive coronary heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, stated.
Combating malnourishment, Ms. Goldman was decided to confront collective indifference, which she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over 5 many years she labored with many collaborators to efficiently foyer for federal subsidies like meals stamps and diet help for ladies, kids and infants; create partnerships between native communities and company suppliers of provisions; and broaden the mandate of anti-hunger packages to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, schooling and different wants.
In 1980, she based the Group Meals Useful resource Heart, a meals pantry, as a buffer towards stricter eligibility necessities for welfare. Three years later, she helped arrange what’s now the Meals Financial institution for New York Metropolis, which has served scores of soup kitchens and meals pantries across the metropolis from the Hunts Level market within the Bronx. She was the middle’s govt director till she retired in 2003.
In 1984, she began the Group Kitchen of West Harlem, an progressive program that not solely provided meals but additionally helped the hungry with different wants, together with housing and well being care. After renovations to the eating space, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s identical to McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘thought-about it the best praise of all time coming from a child,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Motion for Meals Justice” (2019).
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, Ms. Goldman persuaded town to open college cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the one most essential voice preventing starvation in New York for 50 years,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, stated by e mail, “and the primary to concentrate on meals in faculties, which resulted in actually 1000’s of youngsters really consuming the meals versus throwing it out.”
In creating federal college breakfast and summer time meals packages in New York, Ms. Goldman “employed individuals who had experience and acquired out of their approach,” stated Ms. Barrett, who had been one in all her collaborators (together with Liz Krueger, who would develop into a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the Fund for the Metropolis of New York).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to hold the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York, and, in 2012, she was honored by President Barack Obama on the White Home as a “champion of change” for serving to to cut back starvation in America.
After she retired from the meals middle, she and Agnes Molnar based Group Meals Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common college lunch and different authorities methods to satisfy the dietary wants of Individuals.
As Ms. Goldman usually stated: “Tomorrow morning, if the need have been there, we’d not should have any starvation. There’s no dearth of meals.”
In 2022, she moved to a retirement neighborhood in Sleepy Hole, N.Y.
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later modified her title to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on Jan. 15, 1932, within the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Japanese Europe. Her mom, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a author who based a Hungarian ladies’s journal. Her father, Samuel, was a cupboard maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating among the many first group of ladies admitted to the Bronx Excessive College of Science, three blocks from her residence, she grew to become the primary in her household to go to varsity, learning movie at New York College then briefly attending Metropolis Faculty and Hunter Faculty. In 1986, she earned a grasp’s diploma in city research from Queens Faculty of the Metropolis College of New York.
In 1949, Ms. Goldman traveled to Budapest, the place she labored as a translator on the World Youth Competition; in school she joined the Labor Youth League, which had been established by the Communist Social gathering (though she later stated she balked on the purple flag-wavers’ self-importance, dogmatism and denigration of girls); and took programs in Marxism and Black historical past on the Jefferson College of Social Science, as soon as described in The Occasions as “the principal coaching middle for Communists and Communist sympathizers on this metropolis.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, have been lively within the City League’s marketing campaign towards racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a gaggle of white middle-class mother and father who supported college desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and one other activist, Ellen Lurie, in contrast the studying take a look at scores of each college within the metropolis and publicized them as proof that Black college students have been receiving an inferior schooling.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to enhance South Bronx public faculties, growing a bilingual coaching initiative for adults by way of United Bronx Mother and father and introducing a federally financed free summer time meals program for kids in 1971; she helped draft rules when this system was expanded nationally in 1979.
Ms. Goldman and her husband divorced in 1974. Along with her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; 5 grandsons; and two great-grandsons. Most of her family members who remained in Europe after her mother and father emigrated — her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary — have been killed within the Holocaust.
“I used to be actually raised to consider that if extra folks had stated one thing, then the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying. “If there would have been a battle again, it will have been mitigated. I consider that until at the present time. You are able to do one thing. You can also make a distinction, you can also make a change.”
