It can be stated with veracity and sincerity that there is virtually no one reading this article that has not been directly impacted by cancer. Whether you have battle cancer yourself, or someone you know, and love has had to take on the disease. It is easily one of the most dreaded words in medicine. Over the years, we have developed many ways to celebrate survivors and memorialize those who succumb to the disease, but what I am about to share with you is likely a first.
There is no good way to lose a loved one, but watching them succumb to cancer can take a lot of you. However, there are certain people whose fight with cancer, even after that lose the battle, is so inspiring that you are forced to find a way to memorialize and celebrate their tenacity and courage. The residents in Tel-Aviv took on the monumental tasks of celebrating a beloved victim of cancer by building a whopping 118-foot toward that was built completely with LEGO bricks.
If you are like me, you have had an endless amount of fun building all types of things with LEGO bricks, as a child and as a parent, but I never came close to anything of this magnitude. The tower was erected next to the City Hall in Tel Aviv. A multitude of city worker, city residents and volunteers all came together to help to build this memorial towers. The tower has been rightfully named Omar Tower in the memory of a young eight-year-old cancer patient named Omar Sayag who passed away in 2014.
The idea for the LEGO came from the fact that during his battle with cancer, Omar built all types of LEGO structures. He was enamored by the possibilities of what he could build with those bricks. In fact, the more the illness weakened him the more he became reconciled to find pleasure in those bricks. One of his greatest accomplishments was a scaled down replica of the Taj Mahal.
The young child’s passion for expressing his creativity and imagination with LEGO bricks led his Kindergarten teachers, Shirley Bardugo and Ben Klinger to conceive this project as a way of honoring the memory Omar’s bravery and passion.
As you can imagine, building a structure that tall comes with its own structural challenges, meaning that real-life engineers had to be consulted to ensure the stability of the tower. The tower was erected using modular composition in which different parts of the tower was constructed individually and then added to the massive toward module by module. The goal of the group was not only to memorialize young Omar but to do it in a way that would go down in history – so they decided to go for the Guinness Book of World Records. The previous record was 115 feet which – set in 2015 by the Italian subsidiary of LEGO, meaning that it was a promotional effort.
When viewing this structure, it is nothing short of amazing. One thing that the structural engineers implemented to provide stability was to use stability cables to keep the tower from swaying which would have definitely caused it to come apart. It is not clear how long the structure will remain up, but it is definitely an awesome memorial for such a courageous little boy.
