By Ruth Weissmann
When Darren Ornitz got an urgent text message calling for volunteers to bring supplies to Holocaust survivors trapped at home by the coronavirus crisis, he sprang into action.
“Imagine being 85-years-old, stuck in an apartment and scared?” Ornitz, a freelance photographer, told The Post.
The selfless shutterbug works with a program called In It Together, a nonprofit that matches people willing to aid 26 different emergency food banks struggling to feed the needy in the wake of the pandemic.
Last week, Ornitz was assigned to the Met Council, a charity that needed assistance feeding homebound Holocaust survivors.
Darren Ornitz delivers food from the Met Council.
Ornitz had a car, he had the time and had been struggling with a sense of “helplessness” since the outbreak took over the Big Apple, so he decided to answer the call.
“I think we all need to try our best in all the little ways we can to help the older population of people get through this,” Ornitz, 34, said.
Darren Ornitz has volunteered to deliver food to citizens who are in need.
He jumped in his car and drove to the kosher food warehouse in East Flatbush from his home in Williamsburg and headed to Coney Island to meet an elderly woman who was living alone.
“She said she didn’t know what she was going to do, and she was really relieved that she would have food,” Ornitz recounted of the delivery.
“She thought that there would just be food for a day or two, but she was surprised when we showed up — there was food for at least a week or so.”
Ornitz left “the basics” of cooking oil, onions, crackers, rice and “things like that” on the woman’s doorstep to ensure a safe delivery and headed off to another survivor.
“This is an opportunity for New Yorkers to step up,” said In It Together’s founder, Alex Godin, who connected Ornitz to the Met Council.
“We’ve heard from a bunch of our partners that this is really key. This is the difference for them between being able to serve food and not being able to serve food.”
Ornitz ended up making two deliveries last week for the charity — zig-zagging from Coney Island to Staten Island, where he dropped off groceries for another needy survivor who was fearful they’d run out of food.
“There were at least six boxes filled with lettuce, potatoes, rice and oil, and onions and tomatoes. There was a lot of produce,” he recalled.
He said the decision to step up and lend a hand was an easy one — even as he battled his own anxieties about the oft-deadly virus.
“We’re all scared, even those of us that are young,” Ornitz admitted.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like for elderly people who either feel vulnerable because they’re older, or who don’t have family or friends to help them.”
He said he was grateful for the opportunity to give back and was already back at it Thursday afternoon, this time on a different mission: helping low-income seniors in Brooklyn.
“I thought that if there was a way to responsibly volunteer and make sure I’m not going to add to the problem, that it would be an important thing to try and provide help to those who needed it,” Ornitz said.
“Just being able to go and help even one person, this older woman who was obviously terrified and scared and uncertain, made me feel good about the effort.”
Additional reporting by Gabrielle Fonrouge
