When I found out that the Wisconsin leg of the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure breast cancer walk was being held on Rosh Hashanah, I was really disappointed. Soon, the girls in my local BBYO chapter and I learned that other people in the Jewish community were also upset by this. We took it upon ourselves to organize a walk for breast cancer that the whole community could participate in, especially the Jewish community, who missed out on the first walk. So, the Eden B'nai Brith Girls of Wisconsin Region BBYO organized a Jewish Walk for Breast Cancer on October 22, 2006.
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The situation in the Darfur region of the Sudan is desperate. The Sudanese government unleashed the Janjaweed militia in February 2003 and, since then, at least 400,000 people have been killed; more than 2 million were forced from their homes and now live in camps in Sudan or in neighboring Chad; and more than 3.5 million men, women, and children rely on international aid for survival. During attacks, the men are killed, the women are raped and villages are burned to the ground.
This spring, the Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) chapter at Amherst Regional High School (ARHS) in Amherst, Mass. was looking for a fundraiser that would pack a punch. The STAND club sold T-shirts and held bake sales, but none of these events seemed to hold the students' interest.
It's a new year, and my bat mitzvah is just around the corner. Like many synagogues, mine requires that all bar/bat mitzvah students do a mitzvah project. For inspiration, I went to a fair called Mitzvah Mania hosted by the JCC in Irvine, Calif. every year to help students like me choose their mitzvah projects.
One night in July, I was hanging out around the CIT (counselor in training) lodge, a.k.a. ha bayit, at Camp Harlam. For the past couple of days, we had been hearing about the situation with Israel and Lebanon, and my Israeli friends were desperately trying to get in touch with their friends and family. Anyway, my cell phone rang, and it was my friend Rachel Gerber. She wanted to know what we could do to help out even though we couldn't go to Israel, so, we put our heads together and came up with the idea of having a benefit concert.