Mitzvah Day: 37,000 people expected to take part in UK's biggest day of religious volunteering

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On Sunday, two unlikely chefs will collaborate to make a special Sunday lunch. Not only will it be vegetarian, it will be cooked by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, and Imam Ibrahim Mogra at Edgware United synagogue in north-west London and served to people living at a homeless shelter nearby.

They'll be among the 37,000 people taking part in Mitzvah Day, the country's biggest day of religious volunteering. More than 500 organisations, including synagogues, schools, baby groups, offices and universities, help more than 150 charities.

Mitzvah Day started 10 years ago with a group of 120 volunteers in Belsize Park, London. Laura Marks, who was recently appointed OBE for her work promoting interfaith relations, had just returned to London from Los Angeles, where she'd been living with her husband and children. There, she'd joined the Temple Israel of Hollywood synagogue, and taken part in its Mitzvah Day, being given the job of going to an old people's home in downtown LA.

“We brought children – and noise,” she remembers. “Sunday afternoons in a care home tend to have no activities. Families sometimes run out of conversation. It's not an easy time.” She says that she and other volunteers played different music, trying to find something that would click. “When we played The Beatles, with the children trotting round with tambourines, people started tapping their feet. My children, who were three, five and seven, knew they were getting through. Staff started clapping along, too – their Sunday was brightened. It was then that I decided to take Mitzvah Day to the UK.”

From its tiny start, the day has become an international event, with more than 30 countries taking part.

This year, primary-school children will be making cards for refugees, given by the Separated Child Foundation, which makes welcome packs for young children. At Parliament, MPs will also join the card-making, while at the JW3 Jewish Centre in north-west London, Rabbi Leah Jordan, of Liberal Judaism, will be cooking with Father Andrew Cain, to share food with a homeless shelter.

There will be more than 70 interfaith events. “There's a lot of tension between faith groups,” she says. “[Yet] we have lots of similarities with Muslims. We need to hold on to the similarities – we have so much to share and offer each other. Mitzvah Day gives the licence to do something, gives the permission and impetus to do something – the licence to open doors.”

Laura extends her beliefs in the importance of interfaith events into her new project, Nisa-Nashim – meaning “women” in Arabic and in Hebrew – in which Jewish and Muslim women come together for walks, cinema trips, business networking and mentoring. Three hundred women are already involved.

Today, offices will get involved with the volunteering, twinning up with refuges and care homes and cooking and sharing lunch. Last year, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, cooked lunch for the Samaritans' homeless shelter in Westminster. “It's your friends, your peers, the person who you sit next to in the office or synagogue who'll get you out,” Laura says.

MPs and leaders from across the political spectrum support the volunteering, and last year saw the Conservative MP Eric Pickles planting trees in St Albans. “There's an anxiety among Jews about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and normally MPs hear from us with a problem,” Laura says. “Here, we're not here to moan, but to contribute.”

The Mitzvah Day that originally inspired Laura has now become Big Sunday, and has folded into the mayor's office in Los Angeles.

“There are a lot of problems on the religious spectrum,” Laura says. “Sometimes people hijack religion and do something terrible in the name of religion. But we have to remember faith groups are a force for good.”

For more information, go to mitzvahday.org.uk