Timeless Good Works

Toni Kipnis remembers feeling despondent every time she walked outside and faced her house’s peeling, “obnoxious green” exterior, which hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since 1974. But the 68-year-old San Francisco resident lacked the money to have it painted.

Last year, a group of volunteers who lent their time to “Sukkot in April,” an all-day volunteer event coordinated by Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco, changed all that. The volunteers descended on Ms. Kipnis’s house, dressed in special suits to prevent contamination from the home’s old, lead-based paint, and stripped off the green and replaced it with classic gray.

Ms. Kipnis is thrilled with the work and even more touched by the helpers. “All my friends and neighbors have commented on what a beautiful job they did,” she says. “And I look at it and think how lucky I am that these people are so nice and considerate because it was a big job.”

“Sukkot in April” is an extension of “San Francisco Christmas in April,” an annual volunteer event scheduled on a Saturday each year. “Sukkot in April,” entering its second year, takes place on the following Sunday, which this year will be April 26.

Organizers expect about 1,000 volunteers from two dozen Jewish groups in the San Francisco Bay area to participate. Like the volunteers who participated in last year’s event, they will paint, clean, and weed at local parks, schools, and homes of the needy.

Sukkot — pronounced “soo-koht” — is the annual Jewish harvest festival in the fall that commemorates the biblical time when Jews were banished from Egypt and wandered for years in the wilderness, living in temporary thatched huts called sukkot.