Hundreds in Spokane turn out for Temple Beth Shalom’s 75th Kosher Dinner

Feeding a group of 2,000 people isn’t easy. What’s even harder is feeding them a kosher meal, complete with a main meat dish, three sides and several choices for dessert.

“For as much stress as this gives me, I really like doing it,” said Mike May, the man in charge of cooking at the 75th Kosher Dinner, held Sunday at Temple Beth Shalom on Spokane’s South Hill.

May, along with a staff of about 200 volunteers, had it down to a science: While one guy cooked away at the stove, mixing carrots and nursing several pans of beef brisket, another stood behind him, opening packages of produce. Still another mixed together brown sugar and other spices with apples, giving them their signature aroma.

All of these items eventually made their way to an assembly line of sorts, where another group of volunteers carefully portioned and plated the food. Then, it was off to even more volunteers who ran the plates out to hungry guests, all the while filling up their water glasses and coffee cups or sneaking them an extra piece of cake.

Behind the scenes Sunday, temple members worked together to prepare a fresh, dairy-free kosher meal for about 2,000 diners. The event, the temple’s largest outreach, is open to the community.

It doesn’t mark a particular Jewish holiday. But the dinner itself has become a special occasion.

“When we started this dinner, it was to do outreach and meet people who don’t know what’s happening in the Jewish community,” said Dana Levitt, who sits on the temple’s board of trustees.

The menu consists of traditional Jewish staples, and it has been more or less the same since the dinner first began in 1940, said Rabbi Tamar Malino.

While the menu has remained fixed in time, the people who eat it each year haven’t. Levitt said while she’s used to seeing many of the same faces each year, there are also plenty of people who are virgins to kosher cooking.

They include people like Ken and Kathy Eickerman, who read about the dinner in the newspaper and, when friends asked them if they’d like to go, they obliged.

“I was surprised how many people they feed,” Ken Eickerman said. “It was also interesting reading what kosher was.”

Kosher, as it pertained to Sunday’s dinner, meant no mixing dairy and meat, and no eating the “lifeblood,” or blood, of an animal, though it can be much more complicated depending on the Jewish holiday and category of food in question.

Since Sunday’s meal contained meat, there was no dairy in any of the dishes – no butter for the bread, no cream for the coffee.

And, in terms of preparation, it also meant ordering some items from faraway places. The brisket, for instance, was delivered by a kosher slaughterer in Seattle at $13 a pound, May said.

It used to be ordered from a company on the East Coast. But, after last year’s dinner was canceled due to spoiled meat, the temple switched slaughterers. The move came with a higher cost.

“I know that when I go to the store and buy brisket, it’s about $6 or $7 retail,” May said. “So that gives you an idea.”

But it’s not about the price, he said. It’s about the process of meeting new people and spending time with the other volunteers, whom he lovingly refers to as his “crew,” although he himself detests the title of “chef,” since he admittedly isn’t a cook at his day job. (He’s a security guard at the Spokane Arena, a job he was excited to go to Sunday evening so he could catch Elton John live.)

Of the Kosher Dinner, he said, “I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to sit down and bond.”

Bonding is exactly what brought 27-year-old Admir Rasic, his wife and 3-year-old daughter to the dinner for their first time. The Bosnian-American Muslim family living in Spokane wanted to meet more of their Jewish neighbors and connect with others.

And, also, the food looked promising.

“It was amazing,” Rasic said. “Some of it reminded us of Bosnia – the knishes.”