Biggest Rosh Hashana card in the world
By Melissa Radler

Browsing through a discount bookstore in Baltimore, 24-year-old Tobey Herzog was suddenly inspired to express her solidarity with Israel's youth by building the biggest Rosh Hashana card in the world.

"I was trying to think of a way for kids here to do something meaningful for kids in Israel, and I picked up a book about how to make the world a better place in 15 minutes or less," says Herzog.

"I thought that if we can get people together to do 15 minutes of acts of kindness in one project, it's that much more powerful." With more than 40,000 cards gathered so far, to be glued together for a total of 975 square meters of card - the size of two football fields - Herzog hopes to set a record for building the biggest Rosh Hashana card on Earth.

Born in Korea and adopted when she was three months old by a Jewish woman stationed at a United States Air Force base there, Herzog began thinking of ways to bring Jewish youth together when attending Baltimore's Bais Ya'akov high school. Her Jewish studies continued with a year in Israel, jobs at synagogues, Jewish youth movements and Hillel, and a degree in Russian and Hebrew languages from the University of Maryland.

On a Web site dedicated to the Rosh Hashana card project at www.card4israel.org, Herzog writes that the idea of the card "grew out of pain, frustration and a dream. Pain over what is happening to so many of our fellow Jews in Israel, frustration from feeling so helpless about not being able to do anything and a dream that perhaps, just perhaps, something meaningful could be done.

"If young Jews like myself work together, we actually can do something truly amazing for Israel, and most especially, for the children," she writes. Herzog developed the project during her day job at the Jewish Literacy Foundation, where her boss, author and rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, encouraged her to pursue her dream.

According to the rules of the project, people aged one through 21 are invited to send in a Rosh Hashana card to Herzog. Many children have added personal messages for children and families who are being targeted by the current violence.

"Frankly, I think what Tobey's doing is heroic," says Apisdorf. "I think it is an incredibly important message for us to send to Jews in Israel, and it contains a very important message for Americans and Jews in the Diaspora by reminding us of the deep connection we have to one another." During the Pessah holiday, Herzog began sending out e-mails to Jewish organizations and posting notices in chat rooms with the hope of finding children to participate in the project and financial sponsorship to build the card.

"During Pessah, I was in Israel meeting with families struck by terrorism when I received an e-mail from Tobey," says Neil Thalheim, who founded the Long Island-based Israel Emergency Fund to help families of terror victims. "It really struck a note in my heart," says Thalheim, who offered to take over the role of cosponsoring the project, contacting Jewish organizations on Herzog's behalf and marketing the card to an estimated 3,000 synagogues, schools and community centers across the country.

"I think the message is that children united together in one common goal can be a lot more powerful than any terrorist bomb," he says.

After 700 institutions responded to Thalheim's request for Rosh Hashana cards, a local printer donated 100,000 blank cards to be sent to participants. More than 40,000 have been sent back to Herzog, all digitally scanned onto her Web site. Thalheim says he expects up to 10,000 additional cards to be sent to him this week from children completing their first week of school. Herzog says that her original goal was 5,000 cards.

"It's not even just the numbers, it's the idea that it's really reached the spectrum from the Reform movement to an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva and everybody in between," says Thalheim. "I can't remember being involved in a project that everyone agreed was the right thing to do." Herzog found sponsorship from Jewish groups and private donors. A company donated 60 panels for the cards to be glued onto. Hinges and lamination were sold to Herzog at cost, and a Baltimore synagogue donated space for Herzog and a troop of volunteers to glue the cards onto the panels over a two-week period.

Calling the card a "tangible statement of solidarity," Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said, "I think there's nothing stronger than kids sending a message and the next generation being committed." When Hoenlein heard about the card, he immediately began plans for a star-studded send-off at New York's City Hall, hosted by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on September 5. A dedication ceremony took place on Wednesday at Jerusalem's City Hall plaza with President Moshe Katsav and Mayor Ehud Olmert. Among the first guests invited were children whose families have been hit by terrorism, and individual panels are to be placed in schools around Israel with the aim of fostering better understanding and greater contact between Jewish children around the world.

A world record, however, may have to wait. In July, Herzog found out that the Guinness Book of World Records accepts only cards that are made out of one piece, rather than the multiple panels she is using to build her card. Guinness's record for the biggest card is 365 square meters.

With participants from schools, synagogues and summer camps in the US, Canada, Mexico, France, England, Norway, Sweden, Australia, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, Thalheim says that the children "will be part of something that will go down in history: being the world's biggest message of unity at a time of crisis."

Herzog, however, is already planning future projects to show solidarity with Israel and asking herself whether she could have done more during Israel's time of need. "I feel really badly that I could only send 100 panels of cards and not 40,000 kids," she says.