Honey From The Heart is on a Sweet Mission

As Jews across Atlanta get ready to welcome the new year, several are engaged in a tradition that started in the city more than 30 years ago and has now spread across the country. ORT’s Honey From The Heart program, which partners with Jewish non-profit organizations to distribute specially decorated jars of honey for Rosh Hashanah, is getting ready to ship tens of thousands from coast to coast. The money raised will benefit those non-profits directly, as well as raise money for ORT’s larger educational mission.

“We have almost 262 non-profit organizations all over the U.S.,” said Delilah Cohen, a long-time volunteer who is leading the Honey From The Heart fundraiser this year, alongside her husband, Steve Cohen, Honey From The Heart coordinator Marcus Brodzki, and 18 dedicated customer service representative volunteers. “We have synagogues, we have schools, we have JCCs. We have different organizations like Hadassah, and so many others.”

One of the founders, Leslie Berman, discussed how the organization got its start in the late 1980s.

“My ORT chapter at the time had a meeting, and it was around Rosh Hashanah,” said Berman. “One of the gals that was a member brought in a jar of honey that she received from her cousin in Arizona.

“I called her cousin and asked if we could participate somehow in her fundraiser, and she said, ‘No, we’re not doing anything like that. We’re just doing it for our members,’” Berman related. “So, I started thinking, if they could do it, we could do it on our own. I started contacting beekeeper companies in Georgia.”

The rest, as they say, is history. After shipping glass jars to the company (which only had ones shaped like bears), collecting the filled jars, and attaching the greeting, prayer, and festive ribbons, Berman’s chapter sent out the first annual shipment of honey – just 200 jars.

“After that, we were fortunate enough to grow – first to our members, then to other ORT chapters in Atlanta, and then we started sending letters to synagogues in Atlanta to see if they wanted to participate, and so we got bigger and bigger,” said Berman. “Then, the national office said they wanted to send flyers out to other ORT chapters across the country, and it just grew and grew.

“It grew to a point where we are now selling over 60,000 jars yearly all over the United States,” said Cohen, who started working with Honey From The Heart around a decade ago.

“Around that time, Delilah had a great idea,” said Berman, “to incorporate her father-in-law [Joe Cohen] who passed away, to honor him and do a special packing session in their home with their friends and family, and incorporate their children, and their friend’s children.”

“Because he was very, very involved in ORT,” said Cohen, “I decided that we needed to do something to highlight him, and what would be better than something with the kids.”

The “Joe Cohen packing” continues to this day thanks to Cohen, even as the majority of packing has had to be outsourced to a fulfillment center. Cohen is also not the only one for whom this has become a family tradition. Berman discussed one customer, a professor at UCLA, whose parents purchased honey from almost the very beginning.

“Two years ago, the son called and told me they had to put his mother in a nursing home because she was starting to have Alzheimer’s,” as she began to tear up and slightly choke on her words. “It just goes to show you just how important something just like this, in a family, can continue on a tradition. He took his mother’s list, and added some names of his own, and he now sends out the honey.”

Berman also related a story from last year’s event for the retirement of her and Terry Schwartz – Berman’s first co-chair, who established the trademark for Honey From The Heart’s logo, and brought them out of the age of printed labels and into digital ordering. The two of them got to meet a customer they’d spoken on the phone with for almost a decade.

“Terry and I got to meet her face to face,” said Berman. “As soon as she said, ‘Lesley Berman, I’m–’ I recognized her voice, and it was so surreal to put a face to the voice that I’d been talking to for so many years.”

It’s likely there will be many more stories like this, as the program continues in good hands, with Cohen’s clear passion.

“I fell in love with it,” said Cohen, “because you are literally sweetening somebody’s life, and what could be better than that?”

If you or your organization want to partner with Honey From The Heart this year or next, please visit their website at https://www.orthoney.com/