My name is Hilary Brandenburg. I live in Washington DC, the capital of the United States of America. Washington DC is the home of the President of the United States. I once visited the White House where the President lives. It is interesting to live in a capital city.

For my Bat Mitzvah project, I organized a book drive for the Dekel Vilani school in Maale Adumi. I chose the Books for Israel Project because I love to read, love Israel and wanted to share that love with others.  My mother, Fani, had originally suggested the idea to me when she found out about B4I. We wrote to Rena Cohen at the Israel Action address posted on the site to get information.
None of my friends had ever done a project like this
before and so we were on new terrain.
I chose to adopt the flagship school in Maale Adumim
because I have cousins who live in that part of Israel
and I've visited Maale Adumim myself. 

As part of my bat mitzvah invitation, I enclosed a
letter to my friends telling about Books For Israel and asking them to bring a book to send to the school I had chosen. The response we received was terrific.
 
After my Bat Mitzvah I working on packaging all the books into sturdy packages and my mother helped to mail them, making sure that the post office used the proper M-bags and everything required so that the packages would arrive safely to Jerusalem.

We mailed the books at the end of January.
We then waited for months to hear if the books arrived.
It was the time of the port strikes in Israel and it was
simply impossible to trace the location of the books.

Weeks passed. We waited and wairted and waited.
After a while, we simply feared that the books were lost!

In early August, two weeks after we returned from visiting Israel, my boxes of books were carefully delivered
-- to our home! The postman said he did not know why they had come back.
The poor books had traveled all the way to Israel and then came back all the way back to me.
Well, I was not going to let this problem stop the children in Maale Adumim from getting
the books they needed for reading. SOooo we repackaged one box of books and tried again.
This time it worked and the books were received. Now we will send the second box again.

I feel really great about my work in this project and I'm delighted to share some information
about myself with all the children in Maale Adumim and throughout Israel. I attend a Jewish Day School in Washington DC and I've been involved in Jewish studies for as long as I can
remember. I love to swim, play volleyball, and sometimes dance.  I am also interested in fashion and politics.

So far, I have visited Israel nine times.
This past summer I had a Bat Mitzvah celebration in Israel.
Since I am interested in fashion,
we had a bat mitzvah party at Shenkar College of Fashion and Technology
in Ramat Gan. I wrote and delivered a speech in Hebrew about my grandmother's
travels to Palestine to find fabrics for her dress designs (an interest in
fashion, you see, runs in the family!). All my Israeli cousins attended this ceremony.

I have a message to everyone involved in B4I, and particularly to all the students
benefiting from this project in Israel: When all else fails pick up a book.

No matter what happens, reading can help tie the world together!