OK, get out your handkerchiefs, we did, too, after we received this story from our friends at Chabad.org:
Jesse Kaufman was approaching his bar mitzvah this past August at the Chabad Jewish Center of Monroeville, Pa., about 15 miles east of Pittsburgh, and while he was prepared in most ways, he was missing one thing: a meaningful project.
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Rabbi Mendy Schapiro, co-director of the Chabad center in western Pennsylvania, says he “taught Jesse that a bar mitzvah project shouldn’t end—that it’s just the bar mitzvah, just the beginning, and that you should keep doing mitzvot and learning Torah.”
So Jesse decided he was going to give away his bar mitzvah money to a classmate in need, Jasmine McClintock, “Jazzy, ” who is also 13 and suffers from brain cancer that’s so rare, the only hospital in the country that treats it is Massachusetts General in Boston.
“I knew she was going through a hard time, and I really wanted to help her, ” says Jesse. “I told her about the mitzvah I was doing, and she was really grateful for it.”
Jesse didn’t just give Jasmine—his “hero, ” he states—some of his bar mitzvah money. He gave her all $5, 000 of it.
Read the full story here, it’s a good one.
