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, mentioned.
Ms. Goldman was decided to confront the collective indifference that 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 girls, youngsters and infants; create partnerships between company suppliers of provisions and native communities; and broaden the mandate of anti-hunger applications to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, training 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 set up 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 Group Kitchen of West Harlem, an progressive program that not solely supplied 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 of 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 faculty cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the only most necessary 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 really consuming the meals versus throwing it out,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, mentioned by e mail.
In creating federal faculty breakfast and summer time meals applications in New York, Ms. Goldman “employed individuals who had experience and obtained out of their approach,” mentioned Ms. Barrett, who had been one among her collaborators (together with Liz Krueger, who would develop into a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Group 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 cut back starvation in America.
After she retired from the meals heart, she and Agnes Molnar based Group Meals Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common faculty lunch and different authorities methods to fulfill the dietary wants of Individuals.
As Ms. Goldman typically mentioned: “Tomorrow morning, if the desire had been there, we might not should 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 women admitted to the Bronx Excessive Faculty 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 Competition; at school she joined the Labor Youth League, which had been established by the Communist Occasion (though she later mentioned she balked on the crimson flag-wavers’ self-importance, dogmatism and denigration of ladies); and took programs in Marxism and Black historical past on the Jefferson Faculty of Social Science, as soon as described in The Instances as “the principal coaching heart for Communists and Communist sympathizers on this metropolis.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, had been energetic within the City League’s marketing campaign towards racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a gaggle of white middle-class dad and mom who supported faculty desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and one other activist, Ellen Lurie, in contrast the studying check scores of each faculty within the metropolis and publicized them as proof that Black college students had been receiving an inferior training.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to enhance South Bronx public faculties, creating a bilingual coaching initiative for adults by means of United Bronx Mother and father and introducing a federally financed free summer time meals program for kids 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 family members who remained in Europe after her dad and mom immigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary) had been killed within the Holocaust.
“I used to be actually raised to consider that if extra folks had mentioned 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 could have been mitigated. I consider that ’til today. You are able to do one thing. You may make a distinction, you may make a change.”
