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"Wear Your Ramah
Shirt to School" Day
November 15, 2007
Ari Magen, who completed his camper years at Ramah Poconos this
summer, decided he would create an event on the Facebook website
dedicated to encouraging all his edah (division) friends to wear
their Ramah Poconos t-shirts to school on November 15, 2007.
When he began this effort, he had no idea how powerful a tool he
was creating for the entire Ramah movement. Over 1,000 students
saw his message and joined the effort. Please see Ari's message
below. This is a great story about the power of internet
networking, pride in Ramah and the foresight and creativity of
one young man.
This whole project started with a different event on
Facebook that an acquaintance created just for Ramah Poconos
Gesherniks. Every Geshernik was going to wear
our edah shirt from this past summer. I saw that and
thought "What a good idea," so I went on Facebook and
created an event called "Wear Your Ramah Shirt to School
Day." When I created it, I was only thinking about the
Poconos campers wearing their shirts. I didn't even think
about the other Ramah camps. The next day, I logged on and
started to see comments. I expected to see a few comments
from my friends, but I realized that these weren't
chanichim (campers) from Poconos, but from all of the
other Ramah camps. Since I intended for the event to be just
for the Poconos, I was very surprised to see other people
joining in. But, when I went back and re-read the title of
the event, I realized that Poconos wasn't in the title.
Then, I thought "Wow, this was a great mistake that I
made!!"
I began receiving questions such as, "I was in Israel this
summer, can I still participate?" or "I work, can I wear my
shirt anyway?", or “I wasn't at camp this summer but I want
to join in. Is that okay?" My favorite question was, “I wear
a uniform to school, what should I do?"
Realizing that people were taking this so seriously, I
changed the description of the event to, "Wear your latest
Ramah shirt to show your Ramah pride!!! This is open to all
Ramah camps, from Poconos to Israel and everywhere in
between!!!
Every couple of days I checked to see how many people were
"Attending." After the third day or so it had reached 100
people. After about 3 weeks, there were over 900! Then I put
out a challenge to try and get to 1,000 people. By the time
I went to bed the night before, there were 1058 people. When
I got to school, I saw a few of my friends wearing their
shirts. Then, I decided to text a camp friend in another
school and asked, "Is anyone wearing their Ramah shirts?"
She texted back, "Yeah, we all did! It was so fun and so
cool."
When I got home from school there were a few messages on my
Facebook account about the event. One said, "I totally
remembered and wore it under my uniform and didn't get
caught!" Another said, "It is amazing that you did this! My
mom was a Ramahnik and we talked about how amazing this idea
was -- she is slightly jealous. We all need Ramah in our
lives and we all need these special days while we are not at
camp. When I woke up this morning I was soooo excited about
today! I am in my fourth year of university and tomorrow my
edah is having a little reunion at the University of
Michigan so this was a great segue into the weekend."
- Ari Magen
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