Local students rally behind captured soldier Gilad Shalit

More than 1,000 students in Bay Area Jewish day schools and congregational schools are sending postcards to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was abducted near the Gaza Strip and has been held hostage by Hamas since June 2006.

Jewish children and adults across the country are writing the postcards as part of an initiative of the Jewish Agency for Israel, whose representatives are meeting with American chapter of the International Red Cross in New York on Tuesday, Sept. 22.

They, in turn, will attempt to deliver the postcards to Shalit in an effort to boost his spirit and let him know U.S. Jews support him.

In the Bay Area, the postcard project was organized by the Israel Education Initiative, a joint project of the Bureau of Jewish Education and the Israel Center of San Francisco.

Ilan Vitemberg, director of the Israel Education Initiative, received so many requests from teachers for postcards that he ran out and had to order more.

“It’s incredible the response we got,” he said.

Five day schools, five synagogues and two youth groups participated in the project locally.

In conjunction, next month the Israel Education Initiative will give teachers a copy of “When the shark and the fish first met,” a story Shalit wrote when he was 11 that was illustrated by 28 Israeli artists and published in 2008.

Teachers will also receive an original in-depth lesson on Israel and the Jewish value of redeeming the captive, or in Hebrew, pidion shvuiym, Vitemberg said.