On a recent Tuesday morning, 50-some Jewish and Catholic kids from Milkan Community High School in Bel-Air and Santa Margarita High School in Orange County sat inside a white rectangular tent with a bamboo-slat roof, balancing notebooks and royal blue folders on their laps.

"It's a temporary tent in the style of what our ancestors lived in the desert for 40 years," explained a Milkan girl. "You live in the Sukkah. You're supposed to be able to sleep in here and see the stars. It's a harvest holiday."

Then David Gist, the California regional organizer for Bread for the World, standing in the middle of the room pointed out that one-out-of-eight people in Los Angeles often goes hungry. "That is an amazing statistic, an amazing reality," he said matter-of-factly. "So that means there's someone in your grocery market, someone on the street - and I'm not just talking about someone living on the street, but people in our apartment buildings and neighborhood - who are really vulnerable to hunger. They don't know where their next meal is coming from."

More than one girl jotted down notes, while half a dozen boys sat up straighter.

"One of the questions we're here to ask today is why the typical family in the developing world spends 80 percent of its income on food, "explained Allison Lee, associate director of the western region of the American Jewish World Service. "Why are 850 million of our fellow human beings undernourished? And why since we just started sitting here today in this Sukkah, this symbol of the fragile nature of the world in which we live, have 25 children died of starvation?"

There wasn't a sound inside the tent as Lee went on: "Hunger is political. It's not just about the work we do on the ground to fill people's stomachs. It's about asking the big important questions as to why people are starving. Why, in this day and age, when there is enough food in this world to feed every human being on this planet, are people in our communities and surrounding us in the developing world still hungry?"

The students then broke into small groups to role play. One was an elected official, with the others pretending to be grass-roots lobbyists against hunger. A few even pretended to be addressing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will represent the U.S. next month at an international world summit on food security.

"We're all human, we're all on the earth," a brown-haired girl in a group outside the tent at the Jewish Federation on Wilshire Blvd. declared. "It doesn't seem right that somebody in a poor country doesn't have the right to have food, when here we can go to the nearest McDonald's and have a Big Mac."

'Fed Up with Hunger'
The high school students were part of an October 6 Interfaith Hunger Summit hosted by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California as part of the Jewish Federation's "Fed Up with Hunger" initiative. The campaign seeks to involve faith leaders, civic leaders and community activists from diverse traditions in eradicating hunger and its causes in Los Angeles.

The conclave of adults and youths coincided with the fourth day of the Jewish festival of Sukkah, a sacred holiday celebrating the fall harvest as well as the precariousness of life. Assemblyman John A. Pérez, representing California's 46th district, gave the opening keynote speech on addressing hunger in Los Angeles, while former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and former Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Eric M. Bost delivered the lunchtime keynote on how people of faith can end the moral tragedy of hunger.

Breakout sessions during the daylong summit included "Translating our Sacred Texts into Action," "Feeding the Need: How Caring Communities Address Hunger" and "Hunger 101: Advocacy and Action."

"Hunger is a key issue for us as people of faith, and Los Angeles has been called the hunger capital of the nation, which is shocking and disturbing when you think of all the resources that we have here," Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, told The Tidings.

"We're blessed with so many natural resources, people resources - and to think that in this community there are tens of thousands of people who go hungry every day. We have a Jewish word, we call it 'shanda.' It is an outrage, it is an offense to God and an offense that should bother us to no end as people of faith."

Rabbi Diamond said today was about sharing the best practices of churches, synagogues and mosques to combat local and global hunger. He pointed out that the interfaith forum was really an effort to expand the Fed Up with Hunger initiative beyond the Jewish Federation.

"This is not just, obviously, a Jewish problem," he said. "This is a deep issue for all of us in Los Angeles. The long tradition of charity and outreach to the poor is something we share especially with our Catholic friends. There's no question about that. It's something I think we as people of faith share in common - a notion that we must be God's partners in repairing our world.

"I think we're already doing a lot, but we can do more," he added. "And today's summit is an effort to try to raise the bar, if you will, and to think creatively about new programs."

The challenge
Father Alexei Smith, director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, was taken by an e-mail passed onto him from a Santa Margarita High School student after the Interfaith Hunger Summit: "I never really believed that the Catholic Church was inclusive even after we read Nostra Aetate [Vatican II's 1965 foundation document on interfaith relations]. I mean, I just know too many people who are so intolerant. So it was a big deal seeing Father Alexei and how he spoke about other faiths and with other faith leaders. It was like, wow! It's not just a document. The church really means this stuff."

The long-time pastor of St. Anthony (Russian-Greek) Church in El Segundo stressed that lobbying city hall or Sacramento about increasing funds for hunger programs was much more effective when it involved leaders and members of many religious traditions. But he also acknowledged that any new government-sponsored efforts to combat poverty and hunger are a "tough sell" in today's stagnating economic climate.

"It was a wonderful day, but let's translate into action now," Father Smith said. "This is always the challenge."

Summit participant Mary Agnes Erlandson, who directs Catholic Charities of Los Angeles' St. Margaret's Center in Lennox, agreed no single faith group in Southern California has the resources to effectively tackle hardcore hunger. "All of these issues - hunger, housing, employment - they're so big that it's easy just to say: 'Well, it's beyond me and my congregation and faith to deal with that,'" she pointed out.

"So I think it's really remarkable that the Jewish Federation is taking this on and going full throttle by reaching out to other faiths. They're trying to really stop hunger, so I definitely applaud their efforts."

Erlandson liked the fact that Jewish and Catholic teenagers were invited along with adults from diverse faith traditions. Being on the front lines of running a food pantry for two decades, she also lauded the summit's wider emphasis on changing food public policy.

For example: Prohibiting restaurants, supermarkets and vendors from throwing away excess prepared foods. Another: Streamlining the bureaucracy and removing the stigma associated with food stamps so more eligible individuals and families would actually receive them.

During the last five years, reported Erlandson, more and more destitute people are signing up to receive food staples every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at St. Margaret's Center. Currently, the center's food pantry distributes bags of food to more than 100 families every day it's open.

"To address hunger better, we need a strong emphasis on public policy," Erlandson said. "It's not just more food pantries popping up all over the place that's going to take care of the problem. It's got to be a combination of food stamps and food pantries and different government and private entities working together that really provide a better safety net."