30 Years of Building Sukkahs. Now We’re Giving Them Away.
In the late 1980s, Rabbi Steve Sager of Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina asked my uncle, Steve Herman, for a favor: could he design a simple sukkah kit for members of the community who wanted a sukkah but had no experience building things?
That favor became The Sukkah Project®. Thirty years later, our kits have helped thousands of families, schools, and congregations across North America build their sukkahs—but the part of the story we’re proudest of has never been the business itself. It’s the impulse that started it: someone in the community needed help celebrating Sukkot, and someone else figured out how to provide it.
That impulse never went away. Over three decades, people have reached out to us in every kind of circumstance—families going through hard times, congregations rebuilding, communities that lost everything. Most recently, a synagogue that burned in the Los Angeles wildfires lost its building, its sukkah, and nearly everything else. Whenever we could, we helped—quietly, out of pocket, one situation at a time.
But we’re a small family business, and there was always more need than we could meet on our own.
So for our 30th anniversary, we’re changing that!
Introducing The Sukkah Foundation
The Sukkah Foundation is the charitable wing of The Sukkah Project®—a way to formalize what we’ve been doing ad hoc for thirty years and make it something the whole community can be part of. The Foundation raises funds to provide sukkahs, free of charge, to individuals, families, and congregations who couldn’t otherwise have one.
The Foundation operates under the fiscal sponsorship of UpStart, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means every donation is tax-deductible. And because the Foundation works hand-in-hand with The Sukkah Project®, every dollar goes further—built on the same manufacturing and shipping infrastructure we’ve spent thirty years refining.
Why This Matters
Here’s the thing about Sukkot: it’s the most communal holiday Judaism has. A sukkah isn’t just a structure—it’s an open invitation. It’s friends and family around a table outside, neighbors wandering over, kids hanging decorations. For a lot of our customers, it’s the highlight of the Jewish year.
Which is exactly why not having one stings. A family that can’t afford a sukkah isn’t just missing a steel frame and fabric walls—they’re missing the gathering, the tradition, the sense of belonging that comes with it. The Sukkah Foundation isn’t really about giving away free sukkahs. It’s about making sure cost is never the reason a family sits out the most joyful, communal week on the Jewish calendar.
How You Can Help
If The Sukkah Project® has been part of your family’s Sukkot—whether you bought a kit from us twenty years ago or last fall—you already know what a sukkah brings to a home. The Sukkah Foundation is your chance to bring that to someone else’s.
- Donate. Every contribution, at any level, goes toward putting sukkahs up for families and congregations in need. Donations are tax-deductible.
→ sukkahfoundation.org - Spread the word. Know a family or congregation that could use a sukkah? Send them our way. Know someone who’d want to support this? Send them this post.
- Stay tuned. As the Foundation grows, we’ll share specific needs and stories here on the blog—real families, real congregations, real sukkahs going up.
Thirty years ago, this business started because one community member helped another celebrate Sukkot. The Sukkah Foundation is that same idea, finally built to scale: the community helping the community.
We hope you’ll be part of it.
— Abram Herman, The Sukkah Project® & The Sukkah Foundation
