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MANHATTAN • $1.00
MAY 29, 2020 • 6 SIVAN 5780
Coronavirus Crisis Testing Masbia Food Pantry
With surge in need from the newly unemployed, nonprofit pivoting from soup kitchen origins.
Seniors meeting up virtually to take a history class. The Selfhelp service is helping to create a sense of community. COU RTESY OF SELF H ELP
‘It’s Like Having a Whole New Family’ Seniors flocking to Selfhelp’s online center in bid to beat isolation and depression. Stewart Ain Staff Writer
A
nne Bertolino, 96, of Rego Park, Queens, lives by herself. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, she was forced to stay in her apartment — alone. “I was very depressed,” she said. “I have an aide who comes for only a few hours. But then someone at the senior center called.” Before she knew it, Selfhelp Community Services had provided her with a new computer and helped her set up
a Zoom service that connected her to other seniors. “Now, if someone would say I have to give it up, I would kill,” Bertolino said. Called the Virtual Senior Center (VSC), the service started about eight years ago. But its membership has nearly doubled since March after the state ordered nearly everyone to remain at home to stop the spread of the virus. “It was created with Microsoft, which was interested in programming for seniors who were isolated in their
Editorial Opinions Arts Guide
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The line at Masbia’s Rego Park location has grown as people have lost jobs in the coronavirus outbreak and the need for food has spiked. COU RTESY OF MASB IA
Steve Lipman Staff Writer
T
he distribution of free food from a small storefront on a side street of Rego Park didn’t begin until 2 p.m., but the line began forming two hours earlier. By noon, down the block from Masbia, the soup-kitchen-turned-foodpantry, more than a dozen men and women, some with kids in tow, stood or sat alongside a length of metal NYPD barricades. Pieces of yellow tape on the sidewalk, spaced six feet apart, marked their territory as they spoke on their cell phones, waiting to get their meals for that day — or for the week ahead. Masbia, which has other locations in Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Borough Park and Flatbush neighborhoods, is under Jewish auspices, but the people lined up last week were a cross-section of Queens, the city’s most ethnically
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36 UNDER 36 M A Y 2 9 TH 2 0 2 0
Staying connected while we’re apart Young Jewish changemakers in a time of crisis.
Plus: First Responders
36 UNDER 36 Young Jewish changemakers in a time of crisis.
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