Shy Student Finds Her Niche as Seamstress for the Homeless

A teacher inspired Shifra Mincer, 16, to start volunteering in a New York soup kitchen,

but it was Shifra who carved her own niche there.

The granddaughter of a seamstress, Shifra went to the soup kitchen to help set the tables for dinner. But when she heard someone express a need for a volunteer to mend clothes and other items, she offered her services.

That was five years ago, when Shifra was in the sixth grade. Every Monday night since then, Shifra has faithfully walked the four blocks from home to the soup kitchen in the basement of Hebrew Union College, in Greenwich Village.

By day, the college uses the basement for its classes, but at night it is transformed into a dining room where the guests are served a sit-down meal at tables with small flower centerpieces.

Right outside the dining room, law students from New York University counsel those who need legal advice, and next to them sits Shifra.

She does all her work by hand — from replacing missing buttons to mending ripped coats and damaged leather goods.

“A lot of times people’s pockets are completely ripped so I put in new ones,” she says.

Some people grow attached to their few belongings and many of the things she fixes would be thrown out if not for Shifra’s work.

“People are really appreciative,” she says.

The hardest jobs, she says, are doing major repairs to large coats, which take so much time, and working with leather, because it’s hard to push the needle through the thick layers.

But Shifra has no plans to stop. Sometimes she brings along friends or other members of her family, such as her father, a physics professor at New York University, who helps serve food.

Each week she sees one or two new people among the diners, she says, but most of the guests are “regulars” who occasionally come up to her and say, “I remember you when you were so little and shy.”

Says Shifra: “I’ve gotten a lot of friendships there from the time I was in the sixth grade.”