JERUSALEM — For most of the year, Jerusalem’s dead letter office is a run-of-the-mill place, the depot for mail that cannot be sent anywhere else.

The office’s only distinction, manager Avi Yaniv said last week, is that it has permission to open letters that could not otherwise be returned to their senders.

But every year, as Chanukah and Christmas approach, Yaniv’s small warehouse in the Givat Shaul neighborhood is transformed into the address for wishes and prayers from around the world.

Letters to G-d, or Jesus, or Heaven, come pouring into the holy city — and Yaniv and his crew are tasked with sorting the special letters and delivering them to the Western Wall.

In December, a ceremony was held, widely covered in the international press, in which rabbis scooped up handfuls of letters from boxes marked “Letters to G-d,” and stuffed them into crack in the Wall. The photographs from the event are sure to warm hearts around the world.

WASHINGTON — As a close friend of George W. Bush and a top Republican Party fundraiser, Fred Zeidman knew that his appointment as chairman of the US Holocaust Memorial Council nearly seven years ago looked like a gift from the new president to a political crony.

So Zeidman stood up at his first meeting and told the board, “There are no elephants on my tie. This is a totally nonpartisan position. We are here for the future of this museum and we need to keep politics out of the museum.”

A group of Democratic women on the board, including law professor and Democratic pundit Susan Estrich, encouraged others to give Zeidman, a Houston-area businessman and local Jewish communal leader, a chance.

“I think at the outset there was concern that President Bush was appointing his best Jewish friend, a major supporter and donor, rather than a ‘Holocaust person,’” Estrich wrote in a recent e-mail to JTA, “but I always thought the fact that the museum was the job that Fred — who could have had his choice of plum spots in the administration — wanted was a clear sign of his commitment, and his values.”