Sunday morning breakfasts with bagels, lox, and eggs prepared by the CBS Men’s Club is a longstanding tradition for years. It’s a time to kibitz, hang out with friends, and provide breakfast for our congregation after morning minyan or to the parents dropping off their kids at Sunday School. Sitting and eating is a good thing, but if you can learn something interesting when doing it, it is even better.

Getting together with friends and fellow congregants was a thing sorely lacking during the COVID-19 pandemic. When synagogues were reopening and we were all establishing a “new normal,” we all needed to come up with new ways to do old things. It wasn’t just about wearing masks and social distancing, but if we were to bring back important and popular events around a meal, we had to think of creative and safe ways to serve our breakfasts.

During the pandemic, our congregation was led by our executive staff, clergy, and our medical committee of which four are CBS Men’s Club members and two have received our highest honor, the Kavod award. They made policies to keep us all safe and healthy during the pandemic and as we reopened according to pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life. We were allowed to bring nack breakfasts and speakers, but our buffets would need to be different.

In the past, we had baskets of bagels, plates with lox rolled on them, cream cheese containers with serving knives, and bowl with pre-cut fruit and veggies. Our VP of programming, Lawrence LeVine, who has a career in food service, and our VP of House, Gary Solomon, came up with a solution for our initial breakfast of the 2021-22 calendar year. We could still have a buffet yet limit the number of people touching serving utensils. This involved making single-serving bags or cups with our usual breakfast favorites.

This first breakfast was a follow-up program from our TORCH award winning Sunday morning breakfast speaker series on health and wellness, entitled To Your Good Health. Dr. Steve Zaacks, a synagogue and Club member and a cardiologist, planned to speak on How to Prevent and Identify a Heart Attack and Its Effect on Our Lives on September 19, 2021. Not all Club and synagogue members were comfortable being in person, so a Zoom option was made available utilizing an audio-visual system (DTEN) that our synagogue had previously purchased. In order to have everything be single-serving, certain items were replaced (individual cream cheese packets and creamer packets) and other items were placed in their own baggies (bagels, tomatoes/cucumber, onions in their own baggies) or cups (fruit and lox in their own cups). It required working with a local food service supply company, Gordon, to find the appropriate sized cups and baggies and a local grocery store, Woodman’s, to get bulk cream cheese packets.

As our house VPs do, a schedule for breakfast crew members was made. The crew that day came up with ideas on the fly while preparing the food, such as not putting the onions in the same baggies and the other veggies since not everyone likes onions. Knowing that this was our first breakfast back since February 2020, everyone steeped up and offered creative suggestions. There amazingly was minimal kvetching.This method of serving continued until the next temporary shutdown due to the Omicron variant in January 2022.

The attendees of our program appreciated that we were paying attention to food safety and hygiene. This is especially since many have certain health conditions. It made all of us revisit how to handle food and serving in the future.

COVID was a time when we all reevaluated hand hygiene and the communal serving of food in general. Now, as we are relatively back to normal, some of these implementations have continued including assigning servers at our buffet table. Our flexibility and creativity with the goal to keep everyone healthy and while continuing a Men’s Club tradition is to be commended. The leadership of our programming and house VPs was outstanding. This clearly showed how the CBS Men’s Club is an innovative club in FJMC and an important arm of our synagogue.