Kathy Goldman, who devoted her profession as a civic chief to establishing meals banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch applications in public faculties to maintain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.
The reason for dying, in a hospital, was congestive coronary heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, stated.
Ms. Goldman was decided to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over 5 a long time she labored with many collaborators to efficiently foyer for federal subsidies like meals stamps and vitamin help for girls, kids and infants; create partnerships between company suppliers of provisions and native communities; and increase the mandate of anti-hunger applications to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, training and different wants.
In 1980, she based the Neighborhood Meals Useful resource Middle, a meals pantry, as a buffer in opposition to stricter eligibility necessities for welfare. Three years later she helped arrange what’s now the Meals Financial institution for New York Metropolis, which served scores of soup kitchens and meals pantries across the metropolis from the Hunts Level market within the Bronx. She was the middle’s government director till she retired in 2003.
In 1984 she began the Neighborhood Kitchen of West Harlem, an progressive program that not solely provided meals, but in addition 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 similar 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 Nineties, she persuaded the town to open college cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the only most vital voice combating starvation in New York for 50 years and the primary to concentrate on meals in faculties, which resulted in actually 1000’s of youngsters truly consuming the meals versus throwing it out,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, stated by e mail.
In creating federal college breakfast and summer time meals applications in New York, Ms. Goldman “employed individuals who had experience and acquired out of their method,” stated Ms. Barrett, who had been one in all her collaborators (together with Liz Krueger, who would change into a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Neighborhood Belief).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to hold the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York and in 2012 was honored by President Barack Obama on the White Home as a “champion of change” for serving to to scale back starvation in America.
After she retired from the meals heart, she and Agnes Molnar based Neighborhood Meals Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common college lunch and different authorities methods to satisfy the dietary wants of Individuals.
As Ms. Goldman typically stated: “Tomorrow morning, if the desire have been there, we’d not need to have any starvation. There’s no dearth of meals.”
In 2022, she moved to a retirement group in Sleepy Hole, N.Y.
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later modified her identify 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 girls’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, she traveled to Budapest, the place she labored as a translator on the World Youth Pageant; at school she joined the Labor Youth League, which had been established by the Communist Celebration (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 heart for Communists and Communist sympathizers on this metropolis.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, have been energetic within the City League’s marketing campaign in opposition to racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a bunch of white middle-class dad and mom 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 training.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to enhance South Bronx public faculties, creating a bilingual coaching initiative for adults by United Bronx Dad and mom and introducing a federally financed free summer time meals program for youngsters in 1971; she helped draft laws when this system was expanded nationally in 1979.
She 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 kin who remained in Europe after her dad and mom immigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary) have been killed within the Holocaust.
“I used to be actually raised to imagine that if extra individuals 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 combat again, it will have been mitigated. I imagine that ’til this present day. You are able to do one thing. You may make a distinction, you can also make a change.”
