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Joseph Gitler moved from New York to Israel in 2000, ten days before the Second Intifada, with no plan to start a charity. He was a lawyer with a young family.
What got under his skin was a contradiction he couldn't unsee: a country full of people in poverty, and hotel breakfasts and wedding buffets that ended the night as full as they began.
Everyone noticed it; nobody was doing anything. So he started phoning caterers, asking for their leftovers and driving the food around in the back of his own car. His advice on that last part, delivered with a straight face: don't.
Twenty-three years later, that one-man operation is Leket Israel, the national food bank, with 180 employees, more than 100,000 volunteers a year, refrigerated vans, and 400 partner agencies feeding Israelis across every community in the country.
The conversation keeps complicating what you think you know about hunger. Gitler talks about "startup nation poverty," the people left out of the tech boom, and a working family he once visited who had a big TV and kids with phones, until someone explained that the TV was the only entertainment those kids would ever get.
He drops a number that's hard to shake: 40 to 50 percent of the food grown in the West is thrown out. And he admits his American accent may have been his best asset early on, because caterers figured a guy crazy enough to call from New York probably meant it.
October 7th upended everything: the farms near Gaza they could no longer reach and the hotels emptied of tourists, and Leket pivoted to keep farmers afloat with volunteer buses, an emergency loan fund, and a cash gift to every farmer they'd ever worked with. The ending is the part that stays with you: leket is the biblical word for the gleanings a farmer leaves at the edge of his field for the poor.