By: Ava Lipschitz
June 2026
Ever since I was a small child, I have always loved reading books. I love how they always brought me into a new world of imagination and took me away to far off places. I couldn’t imagine a world without books. When it was time for me to decide on a Bat Mitzvah project, I wanted to share my love of reading with those who don’t have their own books.
After discovering the Bridge of Books Foundation, I decided that it was going to be what I wanted to do to help make New Jersey a better place for all. I jumped into action. I went to the store to buy some posters and science boards and decorated them with pictures of kids with books, and a description of my project.
I then placed bins with the science boards at my Temple and a bin and poster outside my house, so that everyone in the community could start collecting. Supplies were also sent home with my grandparents in Florida to set up a station at their home. My cousins in Pennsylvania collected books, as well. And just like that, I had books being collected across the East Coast.
My Temple later asked me to make a flyer for their website. I worked to make one that was visually appealing and would catch the eye of everyone looking at it. I summed up the information, so that it wouldn’t be too much to look at, and added a bunch of pictures. Even though it was a lot of work, it was fun to do, and the advertising was a success.
The books started to pile up in all of the bins. It was incredible because I had never seen so many books in one room before. However, that place was my living room, which we couldn’t see because it was full of books! My family used to always say that there is never such a thing as too many books in our house, but I think that we were all proven wrong. Weekly, I had people coming up to ask me about books or tell me what a wonderful project this is to be doing. Every day I felt so grateful that everyone was helping to contribute as I otherwise wouldn’t have collected as many books as I did.
I started to organize all of the books and then put them into boxes by age group, and my family helped lift the extremely heavy book boxes into the car very carefully. The exact number we fit into the car was 1,100. We drove 45 minutes to the Foundation office to meet Lisa and opened the trunk. She was shocked to see that we had a full trunk load of books that I collected and it felt good to know that I had impacted the community in a positive way. After we left, I knew that we would be back again soon with even more books.
Throughout the next month we collected even more books. My grandparents drove back up from Florida bringing over 500 books with them. After receiving, organizing, and counting the total number of books we had collected throughout the entire project, the total came to 1,800! I feel very proud of the work that I have done for this project, and I have learned so much as well. I turned from a little girl with a love of books into a young woman who organized a book drive and collected 1,800 books.