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June 15, 2001/Sivan 24, 5761, Vol. 53, No.37
Mountains of paper clips in the hills of Tennessee
DAVID TWERSKY
New Jersey Jewish News
WHITWELL, Tenn. - If you build it, they will come.
That might be the motto for the eighth graders in the middle school of this small Tennessee town - population 1,600 - situated in a valley west of the Smoky Mountains.
These students have done a remarkable thing: As part of a two-year educational project, they've collected more than 15 million paper clips to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. They have far exceeded their original goal of six million, one for every Jewish victim of the Nazis.
Some of the youngsters have now set a new goal: 18 million, for chai, the Hebrew symbol of life. Every day, the school receives boxes of mail, letters and cards and more paper clips.
With each new delivery, the clips are counted and transferred into boxes and barrels that are placed in every available space on the school grounds. Every letter is responded to and filed in a loose-leaf binder. A record is kept of each sender's address, phone number and e-mail address.
Students respond to e-mails received through their Web site, www.Marionschools.org. Social sciences and English teacher Sandra Roberts, whose subject matter includes the Holocaust, often takes letters home on the weekend, reading and answering them with the help of a niece and her 90-year-old grandmother.
Approximately 10,000 letters have reached the school from all over the world - Germany, Austria, Israel, Australia, Canada. The Boston Red Sox sent a box of paper clips. Clips were also sent by President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore (a native Tennessean) and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Actors Tom Bosley and Henry "the Fonz" Winkler (of Happy Days), Tom Hanks, Elie Wiesel, the Tennessee Titans, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Indianapolis Colts and the Dallas Cowboys - all have sent paper clips.
"I feel like Noah and the ark," says school principal Linda Hooper. "On Monday, we had nine tubs of mail."
The biggest single paper clip received was made for the students by an iron forger in West Virginia. The largest donation, one million paper clips, came from a group of people in Atlanta.
The clips keep pouring in because of all the attention Whitwell has received.
So what do you do with millions of paper clips? The original idea - to melt them down to make a sculpture/memorial - was scrapped. Now, "we'd like to purchase a cattle car from Germany and glass it in at both ends," explained Sandra Roberts. "People will be able to walk through the cattle car and see the paper clips on both sides."
What makes the students' accomplishment extraordinary is that the people of Whitwell are a homogenous population of white Protestants - Baptists and Methodists, mostly. The town has only a handful of African-American and Roman Catholic families. The middle school's 425 students include just six blacks and one Hispanic. Needless to say, before the students began their Holocaust education project, most folks in Whitwell had never met a Jew, let alone thought about the Holocaust.
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