Rabbi Eliezer Lazaroff, director of the Chabad Texas Medical Center in Houston, will be spending this Rosh Hashanah, as he has the past eight, making the rounds of bedridden patients, enabling them to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the shofar right in their hospital rooms. This week the roving Chabad emissary is preparing lists of wards to visit, arranging Kosher food and wrapping up holiday packages.

Just because these Jews can't make it to the synagogue to hear shofar this holiday doesn't mean that they shouldn't be starting off the New Year right," says Rabbi Lazaroff. "We simply bring the mitzvah of shofar to them."

Along with his wife and co-director Rochel and their six children, Rabbi Lazaroff established the Chabad Center eight years ago. The facility's compound is comprised of several different hospitals, two medical schools, a nursing school and the United State's premiere cancer treatment clinic. With thousands of patients from all around the world receiving treatment here, Rabbi Lazaroff sees it as his job to keep track of the more than forty ailing Jews from all across the United States, South America, Europe and Israel, who will be checked into the hospital during the holidays. In addition to the mobile shofar services, the Chabad Center will be conducting its own Rosh Hashanah services for the hundreds of Jewish doctors, nurses, staff members and families who spend the holiday at the Lone Star State's facility.

In addition to the respiratory challenge of blowing thousands of notes required for the different minyans and bed bound patients, there is the geographic distances the rabbi will be dashing about to reach individuals across the sprawling medical campus. At one of hospitals Jewish patients will be staying on a wing located on the 25th floor, which means bounding up the stairs, blowing the shofar for them and then making it to 39 other venues before the afternoon services begin in the chapel.

"I am told my work should be included an Olympic event," jokes the Chabad emissary.

"I recently received a letter from a patient I blew shofar for last year, who was being treated for cancer," says Rabbi Lazaroff. "He wrote that the memory of a rabbi caring enough to visit him and blow the shofar in his room when he was so sick, still brings him to tears. He credits his Rosh Hashanah here in Texas as the turning point in his recovery."