Ramah at 60: Summer Camps Make Jewish Lives
It was 1947, World War II was over and Israel was about to be born, and Jews were firmly situated in the American mainstream.
American children were used to enjoying at least a short stay at a summer camp. Jewish kids began going to camp before the turn of the 20th century, when the settlement houses that helped acculturate them to the New World shipped them off to the country for a few weeks. Those camps became increasingly middle class, as did the Jews they served, but the culture they taught was far more American than Jewish. Camps had Indian names (or at least names the campers fondly believed to be Indian, although no Native American would ever recognize them) but very little ifany Jewish content.
It was time for the Conservative movement to create a camp in its own image.
Sixty years ago this summer, Ramah in Wisconsin, the first in the Conservative movement’s official camping organization, opened for business. A group of Chicago-area Jewish educators, rabbis, and lay leaders, working with the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the United Synagogue’s Chicago region, realized they had to strengthen the education offered to their most promising students, most of whom went to public school and learned what they knew about Judaism at home and in afternoon religious schools. A summer camp offering a full immersion in Jewish life seemed to be an innovative way to expand both students’ Jewish education and their commitment to Jewish life, all the while creating knowledgeable leaders for the next generation.
“Jewish educational camping was a specific response to what was called the time shortage,” said Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s List College, who has researched the Ramah camps. “Jews had opted to support public school education, and that necessarily cut down on the time they could devote to Jewish education. This was a way to capture the summer months.”
The organizers of that first Ramah were specific about who their campers were to be and what they were to do at camp. This was a place for serious students who had potential as Jewish leaders. (A formidable number of them did turn out to be great Jewish scholars and communal leaders.) Camp was to be conducted in Hebrew and life was to be lived Jewishly. But because they also wanted the campers to be normal American kids, with regular interests and appropriate social skills, they also had to have fun. Sports, swimming, music, friendship, davening, and study all were to be part of camp life.
Now, 60 years later, the Ramah system includes seven overnight and three day camps in North America, other camps across the globe, and a thriving set of programs in Israel. Its alumni and parents include such luminaries as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve; Commander Joel Newman, a U.S. Navy chaplain serving in Iraq; John Ruskay, executive vice president of UJA Federation of New York; United States Inspector General Glenn Fine; at least two members of Congress, Jerrold Nadler and Henry Waxman; Dallas Mayor Laura Miller; Broadway producer Marc Platt; all the deans of JTS’s five schools and of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies; and most of this magazine’s professional and volunteer staff, not to mention Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s Minister of Welfare and Social Services. Even to the casual observer, it is clear that a broad segment of the North American Jewish population has had a Ramah experience.
Rabbi Burton Cohen, who retired in 2004 as associate professor of Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, moved all the way through the Ramah system, beginning as a camper in 1947. He went on to be a counselor and division head, camp director, and then director of the National Ramah Commission. He joined JTS’s education faculty in 1973. Rabbi Cohen remembers that Camp Ramah was an old fishing lodge in Wisconsin’s North Woods, not luxurious even by summer-camp standards. “There was no baseball diamond, so that first week we had to pick stones off the field so we could use it to play on.”
That first summer, the 90 campers came from across the country. The session was all summer long, and campers ranged in age from 10 through 17. The 16-year-olds, Rabbi Cohen’s group, worked as waiters. Their parents paid 250 for the summer; the younger kids, who did not work, had higher tuition. “The camp wasn’t financially sound for its first decade,” Rabbi Cohen said. “It was subsidized.” The Federation of Jewish Men’s Club’s Midwest region was among its most active supporters, he added. “Until I went to Camp Ramah, I had never seen a young rabbi,” Rabbi Cohen said. “It influenced my decision to go to rabbinical school because it made becoming a rabbi seem a reachable goal.”
If continuity is a goal – and it is one among many – then Ramah is succeeding there, too. Rabbi Cohen’s children went to Ramah, and his grandson will go next summer. “There have been many third-generation children already,” Rabbi Cohen said. “He’s far from the first.” When Ramah camps started they followed the American model of competition, running such activities as color war. That stopped after the first few years, Dr. Schwartz said, as the educators behind the camps moved toward a more collaborative, more traditionally Jewish model.
Another Jewish tradition in which many Ramah campers engaged was debate, arguing often with each other and with the camp administrators. One issue that campers raised in 1950 in the Poconos was whether it was appropriate to raise the Israeli flag along with the American standard. Flag-raising had been a daily activity, and since 1948 both the Israeli and American flags had gone up the pole. “Some of the older campers raised the specter of dual loyalty, so someone devised a flag that had a silhouette of the Ten Commandments superimposed on the Israeli flag and called it the Jewish people’s flag,” Dr. Schwartz said. Then, according to Ramah lore, campers from another nearby Hebrew-speaking camp leafleted the camp by air to protest the change. The problem eventually was solved when the camp gave up on flag-raising in general.
Continuity is also seen in the hundreds, if not thousands, of Ramahniks who have fallen in love and married someone they met at camp. Many of the 200 or so couples who have registered at www.ramahmarriages.org since 2005 attribute their love of Jewish life and practice to their camp experiences. Of meeting her husband, Bill, at Ramah Wisconsin in 1957, Lisa Spertus Gross said, “The encounter with religion at camp helped form our personalities and was life-enriching.” Sanford Remz and Arlene Rosenkrantz Remz wrote the same of their meeting exactly 20 years later in New England: “Ramah was a place that opened both of us to the joys of immersion in a Jewish life. That special setting led us to discover the joys of a life together.” Or as Andrew Barnett and Vivian Matusow Barnett, a Ramah Poconos couple who married in 1989, wrote, “Ramah laid the groundwork for our relationship as we shared the same hopes and dreams for ourselves and for our children. We send our children to day school because of Ramah and our strong desire for Jewish continuity.”
It is no surprise, therefore, that leaders in the Jewish camping field regret that Ramah has not been able to serve even more children. “If Ramah had doubled or tripled its beds,” said Jerry Silverman, president of the Foundation for Jewish Camping and a former president ofRamah New England, “perhaps the Conservative movement would not be facing so many challenges today. Ramah is a powerful tool, and by galvanizing the alumni with a vision that encompasses the future, the possibilities would be spectacular.” Rabbi Mitchell Cohen, director of the National Ramah Commission, adds, “Camp Ramah is still pursuing its vision of creating passionate, intensely Jewish communities, now more than ever.”
In fact, a new camp, Ramah in the Rockies, will open near Denver in 2010.
In 1971 Rabbi Stephen C. Lerner, writing about Ramah in Conservative Judaism, concluded, “Ramah is alive, alive with study, with questioning, with exploration, with deeply felt prayer. A Shabbat at Ramah can well be a taste of olam haba (the world to come), and can change the life of any youth fortunate enough to experience it. Rabbis and teachers return to camp because at Ramah Judaism works, and sloganizing gives way to education of the most rewarding kind. People learn and are changed – and that is what Judaism is all about… Ramah tries to nourish sensitive Jewish souls. Very frequently, Ramah succeeds.”
Special Needs Camping
In the 1970s, there were few residential summer programs for children with special needs and none with a Jewish educational component. Concerned that it was not serving an often-ignored segment of the population, Ramah initiated a network of programs beginning with the Tikvah program in 1970 at Camp Ramah in New England, a joint venture with United Synagogue. Wisconsin followed suit with a Tikvah program in 1973, California in the 1980s, and Canada in 1993.
When first introduced, Tikvah served 13- to 17-year-olds who had mild developmental disabilities. Today, Wisconsin’s program consists mostly of teens with Asperger’s Syndrome; others have been expanded to serve young adults 18 and older through a variety of vocational and pre-vocational programs. Both Berkshires and New England have established inclusion programs for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, and autistic-spectrum disorders. This year, 17 high functioning autistic young adults went to Israel thanks to the cooperation of Ramah Wisconsin, United Synagogue’s Koach program, Taglit-birthright israel, and the Hillel Foundation. As one of the participants said, “This was the best program I ever went to. No one made me feel stupid and I even got to put on tefillin for the first time.”
Families of special needs children, who have their own needs and concerns, have been drawn closer to Jewish life thanks to Darom’s Camp Yofi, a five-day camp for families of children with autism, and Ramah California’s weekends for Tikvah families. In all, hundreds of young people and scores of families have participated in some type of special needs experience over the past 30 years.
