Thursday, October 1, 2026
For Lily Davoli, a bat mitzvah isn’t only a milestone marking her coming of age, but also an opportunity to honor lives cut short and confront hatred with remembrance.
The 12-year-old has set out on an ambitious mitzvah project: creating 1.5 million paper chain links, one for each of the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. The effort, inspired by the novel “Linked,” by Gordon Korman, is both a personal commitment and a communitywide initiative that has drawn support from friends, Oceanside Middle School classmates, fellow district schools and her synagogue, Temple Avodah, in Oceanside.
“I wanted to show how big that number is,” Lily said. “Each chain [link] represents a child who never got to grow up, never got to achieve their dreams, just because they were Jewish.”
Her project traces back several years, to when she and her family first read “Linked” before her older sister’s bat mitzvah. The book, which addresses antisemitism and acts of hate in a school setting, left a lasting impression. Last summer, Lily organized a public read-aloud of the novel at the Oceanside Library, planting the seeds for what would become her own mitzvah project.
“This is what I knew I wanted to do,” she said.
With guidance from her mother, Danielle Davoli, and inspiration from real-life Holocaust remembrance efforts such as the Paper Clips Project — a 1998 middle school project in Tennessee that created a monument for Holocaust victims by collecting one paper clip for each person lost — Lily refined her goal.
While the Holocaust claimed 6 million Jewish lives, she chose to focus on the 1.5 million children who were killed — many of whom never had the chance to celebrate milestones like a bar or bat mitzvah.
“She gets the privilege to stand up there and be bat mitzvahed,” her mother said. “Those kids didn’t.”
The scope of the project is staggering. At a pace of about six paper links per minute, completing 1.5 million would take roughly 250,000 minutes, more than 4,000 hours, or nearly six months of nonstop work. In physical terms, the magnitude is equally difficult to grasp: If each link measured only an inch, the chain would stretch roughly 125,000 feet, enough to span the Empire State Building, up and down, more than 40 times.
“That’s part of the point,” Danielle said. “You hear numbers like 6 million, but it’s hard to understand what that really means. This makes it visible.”
The project has grown quickly beyond Lily’s own efforts. Donations of paper, staplers and completed chains have come in from family members, classmates, fellow Temple Avodah congregants and even entire classrooms at the synagogue’s Hebrew school.
At Temple Avodah, tables are often set up for congregants to help assemble links, including during weekly Friday-night gatherings.
“It’s a little bit of everything,” Lily said of people’s reactions. “Some are curious, some are excited, and some say, ‘That’s impossible.’ But then they start helping.”
The chains are already taking over the basement of the Davoli family home on Woods Avenue on the border of Oceanside and Rockville Centre, carefully counted and stored in numbered bags. They will be displayed at Temple Avodah during Lily’s bat mitzvah weekend on June 13, offering a powerful visual representation for the community.
At press time, over 7,000 chains had been made. Even if the final link count falls short of 1.5 million, Lily says, it’s the effort itself that matters.
“It doesn’t matter if I finish right now,” she said. “I’m going to keep going.”
She plans to continue the project beyond her bat mitzvah, potentially incorporating it into her future work with Oceanside Girl Scout Troop 2164 and other community initiatives focused on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism.
That mission has taken on added urgency in recent months. In a draft of her bat mitzvah speech, Lily references a reported rise in antisemitic incidents, noting that “this isn’t just history. It’s happening now.”
“But it also means this is exactly when people need to speak up,” she wrote. “Not just Jewish people — everyone.”
As part of her ceremony, Lily will also honor a Holocaust victim through a “twinning” program with Yad Vashem, the official World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel dedicated to documenting, researching and educating on the Holocaust. She has been paired with a young girl named Lily Singer, who died in the Holocaust at around the same age.
Lily plans to display her “twin’s” photo during the ceremony, symbolically sharing the moment.
“She’s always going to have a place in my mind,” Lily said.
For Danielle, the project reflects not only historical remembrance, but also her daughter’s determination and compassion.
“She doesn’t stop,” she said. “She just keeps going, keeps finding ways to make it bigger and more meaningful. I am so proud of her.”
