Dear Friends,

As we begin to enjoy the summer weather, many children are heading off to camp for a season of sports, games, songs, arts and crafts, and more. Fittingly, this month BJPA is highlighting our holdings related to Jewish camping.

In 1914, the Bulletin of the National Conference of Jewish Communal Service (now the Jewish Communal Service Association of North America) reported on the Working Girls' Camp operated by the Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh Section, for poor (mostly immigrant) Jewish women. The organization had begun working with the young women in order to find them jobs, but soon noticed that only "a small per cent of these workers had healthful recreation during the heat of the summer months." The camp was not only recreational, but also instructional: "Rising bell at 7 A. M., breakfast at 7:30, after which the girls returned to their respective tents to make up the beds and put everything in order. Here is always an excellent opportunity to judge the neatness of your girls. Some had difficulty in keeping their corners ready for inspection at any time, and could easily take her bath in a basin of water without a floodtide of irate criticisms and questioning. The unruly girl, despite all remonstrances, sometimes proved unchangeable: sometimes had at least gathered a conception of what things ought to be..."

The same Bulletin published an account of a more familiar type of camp - one for minor children - in 1915. The camp of the Jewish Educational Institute, near Kansas City, served about 200 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 16. Tuition was the princely sum of $1 per week, although children who could not afford this were accepted without charge. "Amongst recreational games, the most popular were baseball, basket-ball, highball, volley-ball, dare-base, run-sheep-run, checkers and dominoes. Other forms of amusements were fishing, Indian wrestling, blind-fold boxing, cross-country hikes, field meets, marshmallow and corn roasts, and camp fires were utilized to add a touch of variety. ..Evening programs included vaudeville, shadowgraphs, plays, parties and selections on a Victrola. Lessons in weaving, sewing, crocheting, basketry, woodcraft, forestry, etc., were given by popular demand." Although the kitchen was kosher, no Jewish ritual or educational activities are mentioned.

By 1938, Jewish summer camps had long since ceased to be novel. Ida Oppenheimer estimated in the journal Jewish Social Services Quarterly (now the Journal of Jewish Communal Service) that 20,000 Jewish children between the ages of 6 and 16 attended summer camp in 1937 in camps affiliated by New York City organizations alone. Oppenheimer noted: "It is estimated that at least 100,000 Jewish children need the kind of care which the subsidized camps can give," she wrote. Camping was not exclusively for children, however; in 1949, the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago helped The Golden Agers Go to Camp. Zionist, Yiddishist and other educational-cultural camps augmented these social service-oriented camps in meeting the growing demand for Jewish-affiliated camp experiences.

As the 20^th century progressed, the stated purposes of Jewish camps continued to shift. In 1957, Dan Morris examined camping for teenagers from a psychological/developmental perspective. By 1981, Asher Melzer reported "an increased emphasis on quality Jewish programming. Many [camps] indicate success with the Israeli schlichim program and use of Jewish cultural specialists. Many indicate that families will pay for camp if they feel they are receiving quality services and that campers participate in programs which are Jewishly oriented."

New purposes, and advancements in academic and professional practice, led to the need for systematic evaluations of the success of Jewish camps. Harold S. Himmelfarb performed an evaluation of Jewish camps as instruments of Jewish education for the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry in 1989. Lisa D. Grant and Frieda D. Robins evaluated a Hebrew immersion program within a camp for CAJE in 1998, finding substantial success, as well as a number of challenges. Two years later, on behalf of the National Ramah Commission, I investigated Camp Ramah and Adult Jewish Identity: Long-Term Influences on Conservative Congregants in North America.

In 2002, the AVI CHAI Foundation published Limud by the Lake, a multi-year study of Jewish summer camps by Leonard Saxe and Amy L. Sales. AVI CHAI commissioned Sales to revisit her earlier work along with Nicole Samuel and Matthew Boxer under the auspices of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies in a new study released just a few months ago, Limud by the Lake Revisited. On behalf of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, Judith Veinstein and I studied the market for Jewish camping in Greater Toronto in 2009, and in the Midwest the following year. A pair of additional studies for the Foundation from 2010 and 2011 by Ron Miller, Ira Sheskin, Berna Torr and myself examine the long-term impact of overnight camp, finding that overnight Jewish camp has a significant impact on adult Jewish practices and commitments. Eitan Melchior and I released a study for the JCC Association this past March, which found that JCC day camps are an important educational and socialization resource for the Jewish community.

Camping holds a central place in American Jewish life today, and is likely to remain a fixture in American Jewish life for the foreseeable future. In a 2009 address to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, Riv-Ellen Prell argued that the camp experience has shaped and reflected the most essential issues and dilemmas posed by Jewish life within the wider culture of America. Ramie Arian, writing for JESNA, pointed to camping as a significant player in creating a Jewish Renaissance. In 2002, Gary A. Tobin argued in Contact: the Journal of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life that camp ought to be a higher priority for Jewish philanthropists (The Future of Jewish Camping).

The resources above, representing the range of BJPA holdings on this topic, only scratch the surface of this important subject. For further reading outside BJPA holdings, start with Jonathan Sarna's "The Crucial Decade in Jewish Camping," and Jonathan B. Krasner's recently-released book, The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education.

Browse more publications on Camp, Youth Engagement, or Informal Education at bjpa.org. And enjoy the summer!

With best wishes,

Steven 

Prof. Steven M. Cohen

Director, Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner