Kitchens of Hope Comfort Displaced Israelis

For many of the Israelis who were evacuated after October 7, who are still living in hotels, not having a kitchen to prepare food for their families has been difficult. After all, the kitchen is the heart of the home.

While some evacuees have been able to return home, others cannot because they have no homes or communities to return to or it is still not safe to do so. That’s where the initiative from Asif Culinary Institute of Israel comes in, reports The Times of Israel. The institute brings evacuees from Israel’s North and South to private homes in Tel Aviv to cook for their families.

After living in hotel rooms, Sigal Chayak, a 55-year-old mother of six, cried the first time she was able to cook again. She told The Times of Israel, “My life is the kitchen.”  The first think she cooked was her mother’s soup.

The Open Kitchen Project
The Open Kitchen Project from the Asif Culinary Institute began a few months after Oct 7, when it became clear that evacuees missed the foods and smells of their homes, according to the organization’s website. Whether it is a Moroccan fish dinner or chicken soup, people living in hotels since the start of the war had no place to make these dishes.

The Open Kitchen was created due to this great need. The organization provides all the ingredients and matches evacuees with willing hosts who have signed up to participate.

“One of the things we have noticed in recent weeks is the intensity of the need and desire of families who were evacuated from their homes to bring to their temporary homes the thing they miss so much: homemade food. For each of us, food symbolizes family, those familiar and cherished anchors, the scents and flavors we left behind,” Chico Menashe, CEO of Asi said on the website.

In the first two months, more than 40 displaced Israelis were paired with host kitchens in Tel Aviv, according to The Times of Israel. But the project has done so much more, it has fostered connections between people from opposite sides of the political landscape in Israel and from the periphery to the city.

The Open Kitchen Exhibit
The initiative has been so successful that an exhibition at Asif called “The Open Kitchen: Memories From a Home Left Behind” is exploring the significance of home for Israelis that were directly impacted by Oct 7, reported The Jewish Chronicle, through personal stories, photographs and kitchen artifacts. The exhibition runs through April, 2025.

One exhibit called Objects shows kitchen utensils that appear ordinary and not remarkable from evacuated homes but these items are far from ordinary. One of the items displayed is a pair of oven gloves from a family evacuated from the north. The family moved between several hotels before they finally landed in a friend’s home in Jerusalem. They brought the gloves with them. It was a family tradition that the person calling the family to the Friday night Shabbat table would wear the gloves.

Other artifacts have darker stories like a cookie tin from the burned house in Nir Oz of one of the hostages Cahim Peri (who was murdered by his captors in Gaza) and a jar of homemade pickles from Kibbutz Reim. “These trivial items transformed into symbols of time, and of what was before,” the exhibit’s curator, Yifat-Sarah Pearl told The Jewish Chronicle.

According to Pearl, the ability of food to preserve memory makes it a way to deal with trauma. “We sought out objects connected to food and the kitchen that provoke memories of the entire home, to ease the separation from that home,” Pearl said. These connections to home and normal life provide comfort and hope to the evacuees.