Paramus—When Goldie Goldberg milled around the mitzvah fair with her fifth grade classmates at Yeshivat Noam, she could not find any mitzvah or organization that intrigued her for her bat mitzvah project. Right then and there, Goldie decided she’d create her own mitzvah project: quilting.

And when the quilts would be complete, the 11-year-old figured she would donate the handcrafted project to children undergoing chemotherapy. In fact, as she checked out the various booths, the idea percolating in her head, she approached the Chai Lifeline booth, an organization that supports children with cancer, asking the woman manning it what she thought.

“She loved the idea right away,” Goldie said on a recent Sunday at home in Passaic with her mom, Rahel, at her side.

That was last year. Fast forward to this past summer, when her mom and her dad, Scott, started planning Goldie’s bat mitzvah. Instead of focusing on dresses, menu, or color scheme, Goldie chose to invest herself in her mitzvah.

The Goldbergs would need a lot of supplies to make 12 quilts, corresponding to the age of celebration. The goal was to have all the girls and women invited to the simcha to actually make the quilts at the party—a bit of a gargantuan task for women and girls who had never quilted before, especially since crafting a quilt can take an expert quilter many weeks to complete one.

But, in truth, Goldie had already had a “dress rehearsal” for this mitzvah project.

As a young child, when she was 4, Goldie’s friend was diagnosed with cancer. At that time, Rahel had taken on quilting as a hobby and quickly worked on a quilt for the little friend so she could have it while undergoing chemotherapy. As the years passed, Goldie became a rapt audience for her mom’s quilting hobby, slowly learning the craft—and even becoming a quilting contest winner—all the while, observing her little friend getting better. When Goldie’s childhood friend was finally declared cancer-free, it seemed like a good idea to bring together the two things Goldie loved: quilts and her healthy friend.

So for Goldie’s 8th birthday, she gathered her friends, along with her newly-healthy one, and had them all work on a quilt. When it was finished, she offered Chai Lifeline the quilt as a donation, and the organization said it had someone in mind to give it to.

Little did Goldie know that she had already planted the seeds for her bat mitzvah.

Three years later, with her bat mitzvah approaching, quilting for kids with cancer has only become closer to Goldie’s heart, as one of her classmates’ siblings had passed away and another friend had been diagnosed with cancer. It had become the obvious bat mitzvah choice, except, this time, on a much larger scale. With both of her parents’ full support, Goldie started from ground up.

“We wrote a script that she would use to speak to the customer service departments of large fabric and quilting companies, asking them if they would donate products for her mitzvah project,” explained Rahel.

They were surprised and inspired by the responses. Almost all of the eight companies Goldie called—like Moda and Hobbs—were more than happy to donate fabric, filling—or batting, as it is called in quilting parlance—and other equipment. But it was when the management of companies called back themselves, inspired by the “do good” bat mitzvah, and recalled their own bnai mitzvah on the phone with Goldie, that the Goldbergs realized they were onto something.

“The fact that she called herself, she was so cute and so polite, how could you not (donate)?” said Daryl Cohen, brand manager at Andover Fabrics. Cohen said that what pushed her to donate 50 pounds of fabric was the fact that Goldie was willing to forgo the usual party and do something for other children.

Another vice president was so inspired by their contribution to this girl’s bat mitzvah, that they posted a picture of her on their Facebook page and mentioned her mitzvah in their industry-related blogs.

“I was surprised by how they thought it was such a big deal,” Goldie recalled, still not fully comprehending what an impact she was having, but enjoying the excitement nonetheless.

The generosity landed the Goldbergs over 200 pounds of fabric to work with, along with free batting and free rotary cutters.

In order for her bat mitzvah day to run efficiently, mom and daughter chose simple designs that would be easy for beginners to follow. “That alone took over 50 hours,” Rahel said, playing down the effort, adding that a number of expert quilters from New Jersey and New York helped her peruse the Internet, design magazines, and many books, once they heard about the project.

Guests at the simcha would need to sew the little pieces of fabric to create a pattern, like a series of trees or flowers, called “piecing,” and then sew those designs onto larger pieces of fabric that would create the top and bottom layers of the quilt. Like a sandwich, the batting rests between the top and bottom layers. Additionally, what makes quilting different from an average blanket is the way it is sewn together. It isn’t simply sewn at the edges, to bring the three layers together, but rather it is sewn all over the top and bottom layers in a design, say of butterflies or clover leaves. For this stage of the craft—called long arm quilting and requiring certain equipment—Rahel decided to outsource to an expert, at a hefty $800 for the 12 quilts.

For the big day, both mom and dad galvanized friends and even strangers to donate sewing machines and their time to work the machines. They set up “teams” of three adult women with three girls who would each tackle a quilt. The large party room was set up with twelve stations, each supplied with a sewing machine, a seamstress, iron and large board onto which each person could tack on their fabric and see how it was progressing in the larger context of her group’s quilt. They also prepared a zip-lock bag for each guest that held the individual pieces she would need to make her part of the quilt.

“When you walked into the room,” said Leslie Morrison, a friend, “and saw what she had to do, from cutting all the fabric to getting the manpower, it was overwhelming.”

Morrison, whose 10-year-old son Daniel—also a Noam student—was diagnosed with lymphoma this past summer, added that it was beautiful to see a young girl who is so compassionate.

“I know how meaningful it is to receive. It carries you through the difficult road you’re walking,” Morrison said.

After two hours of 35 girls and 50 adults quilting, the Goldbergs had 12 quilts still in their raw form. Rahel needed to finish the piecing in order to get them to the long arm quilter within a few days so that the quilts could be donated to Chai Lifeline on time for the first day of Chanukah.

On the Tuesday before Chanukah, Rahel brought the quilts to Yeshivat Noam, where all the girls who had participated in the bat mitzvah got to sign the back label, which is how quilts are remembered for posterity. Goldie’s quilt labels read, “This quilt was made especially for you at Goldie Goldberg’s bat mitzvah, November 10, 2013.”

“Everyone was so excited to see that the quilt had actually come together,” Goldie recalls of the morning her bat mitzvah was celebrated at Yeshivat Noam.

Alissa Horn, the Chai Lifeline case manager who had come to pick up the quilts from Goldie’s bat mitzvah celebration, said that when she got back to her office, she announced to the NY-NJ case managers that she had “these really special gifts and that they would need to give the quilts to someone who’d really appreciate it.” Horn explained that the quilts are not on loan and that each child who received a quilt keeps it as their own gift. Chai Lifeline has never gotten a handcrafted gift of this kind on such a large scale, and the organization sees Goldie’s gift as a one-time only event.

“Goldie is a professional quilter. You’re not going to find that many kids doing this, devoting this kind of work and talent,” Horn said.

Who are some of the quilt recipients? Goldie will never know. But that’s not the point, mom Rahel said. “Even though Goldie and the girls won’t ever know or see the children who will be wrapped in these quilts while undergoing chemo, she is satisfied in knowing that they will have this beautiful thing.”

And to underscore the point, only now, during this interview, Goldie notices that she didn’t sign the quilt labels. In turn, the cancer patients will not know that she worked on each quilt.

“Oh well,” she said, still beaming over her accomplishment.

By Temima G. Shulman