NJY Camps flourish during an unusual summer
This summer at camp is a paradox.
On the one hand, it’s an unusual summer, full of new challenges, as all the recent camp summers have been.
On the other hand, it’s a regular summer, with campers and counselors in a bubble of warmth and love and care, able to laugh and play and let go.
It’s a kind of comfort that takes hard work to arrange, but allows campers, counselors, other staff members, administrators, and parents to take the glow with them when the summer’s over.
That’s true of Jewish camps in general, as the example of the NJY Camps illustrates.
In early June, Michael Schlank, the CEO of NJY Camps, was preparing for a bustling summer. (NJY Camps grew out of the New Jersey Federation of Young Men’s Hebrew Associations and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations, which opened its first bunks in 1920, and now includes camps for younger and older Jewish children and teenagers, Jewish children and teenagers with special needs, and children and teens who want specifically Orthodox settings.)
More than double the number of new campers had enrolled, he said, and a large contingent of Israeli kids who had been displaced from their homes as a result of the ongoing war in Gaza, as well as other Israeli kids who needed a respite from the tension, were about to fill the camps until they’d come close to bursting.
The camps were so full, Mr. Schlank said, that they had to turn away some 130 would-be counselors without interviewing them, because there were no more openings. Summers aren’t usually like that, he said. Hiring counselors is rarely that easy.
But antisemitism is rising, and parents want their kids somewhere safe. And also, Mr. Schlank said, parents have bought into the idea of Jewish summer camp.
“I’ve been thinking about the idea of renting ideas versus owning them,” he said. “Sometimes you come up with an idea, play with it, and then move on.” That idea is rented. When you own, you don’t move on so quickly. “In some ways, at first maybe camp was a rented idea for parents, when their children are here for one year. Maybe they’re here for two years, maybe the plan is one year here and one year at a sports camp.” Or a music camp or a theater camp or a science camp.
“But now people are beginning to realize that Jewish summer camp is something they have to own.”
That’s wonderful for camps and for campers; it’s a challenge for the people who do the logistics.
Mr. Schlank talked about the Israelis who come to camp. “We have about 100 or so on our staff,” he said. In the middle of the summer, Machane B’yachad — Camp Together — offers 14 days of all-Hebrew programming, for all kids who speak it. Many of those campers are Israeli, or the children of Israelis. This summer, about 350 Israeli children were going to be there.
Although that conversation was less than six weeks ago, that was then, and this isn’t.
On the night of June 12, Israel bombed some of Iran’s nuclear facilities and picked off most of its military leaders and top scientists. That war lasted for 12 days; its effect on the region is not yet clear but is sure to be significant.
Its impact on travelers was clear from the beginning, however. It was very hard to get into or out of Israel. The airport was closed for some time; even after it reopened, most airlines canceled their flights. Some resourceful travelers sailed from Israel to Cyprus or other fairly close places with airports, and got home that way. Airport closures also made it hard for Israelis to return home.
“At the beginning of the summer, no one expected that what seemed like an existential threat to Israel’s survival would be hanging over our heads,” Mr. Schlank said. “To a place like camp, that’s so deeply connected to Israel, both from an operational point of view and through our campers, it was a real shock to the system.”
The staff was supposed to arrive at camp on Monday, June 16, Mr. Schlank said. The Israelis couldn’t get there. “All together, between all our camps, probably almost 10 percent is Israeli.”
“Rabbi Tzvi Wohlgelernter — Reb Tzvi to the campers in Nesher — was called back into miluim” — the reserves — “after October 7. He isn’t even in miluim anymore. He’s a volunteer. But he’s been back in the army at least four times since October 7.
“But he had indicated to the army that he’d be coming here this summer. That he had plans. He, his wife, Talia, and their four children were going to come.”
Then the airports closed.
“We didn’t know what we’d do without him. We were scrambling to figure out how to get him here.
“And then, the day before the kids, the campers, got here, they got onto a flight. They got here right before Shabbes; they were able to be here for the staff Shabbat.
“They just went to the airport, with no reservations. All six of them. There were thousands of people trying to get where they were going, but when they got to the El Al counter, the person there said, ‘You come with us.’ And they got on the plane.
“We have another staff member, Rafaela Gaia Penkin, who has another passport, British or South African, and she went through Jordan to come here before the war had finished. She’s the head of theater at Cedar Lake.” That’s a very important job.
“You plan a program, and there are some people who are going to run the show,” he explained. Nobody is replaceable and everybody is replaceable — another paradox! — but the ones who fill very specific functions are hard to replace quickly.
“Then there are the kids,” Mr. Schlank continued. “There were 160-some-odd kids we wanted to bring here. They’d been in maamads.” Those are the bomb shelters, some inside homes, some public, to which people have had to run often over the last year and a half, and very often, generally in the middle of the night, during the war with Iran.
“So all of us, on both sides of the ocean, we here and our partners in Israel, worked every angle we possibly could to get them here.”
It worked.
“They got here eight days late, but they got here. When they arrived, it was like a ticker-tape parade, driving up the spine of the camp, in four buses, about an hour and a half apart because we couldn’t get them all on the same flight.
“The children got off, people cried, there was Israeli music playing. It was just one of the most uplifting experiences in the world.
“It was all so natural.” And so very joyous.
“Some of the adults have been here for 18, 20, 30 years. Many of the kids are returners. Many of the staff are returners. And here they were, the whole community, laughing and dancing and singing and crying. Lots of crying. Tears of joy. Because it had been far from guaranteed that these young people would be able to get here.”
Ofer Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, was immensely helpful, Mr. Schlank said, and so was El Al. “A lot of people did a lot of amazing work to ensure that they were able to get on a flight early enough so that they could get to camp and still have an amazing experience.
“They were here eight days late — but they got here.”
In the d’var Torah that he puts in the camp newsletter every week, Mr. Schlank said, he focused on the story of the well, and how the Israelites thirsted for the water that at first they could not get. “This was a community that was thirsting for connection,” he said. “When they saw what camp looked like without the Israelis, it was really hard.” But just as the well eventually gushed water, the Israelis eventually made it to camp.
He keeps in mind that “both the adults and the children bear the emotional scars of what happened in Israel,” he said. “It would be impossible not to.”
First, everyone got used to living with a baseline level of constant threat. “I hear over and over again how they got used to the rockets and the missiles coming from Yemen,” Mr. Schlank said. “That was less dangerous. They got used to 20 months of war. They hated it and they were tired of it, but they got used to it.
“The 12 days of this war were much more dangerous.
“One of the adults, who has three children, talked about going to the maamad clutching her child, her cellphone, and a bottle of water. She said she wondered how she’d get them out of the rubble if they were hit. She said she hadn’t thought about that for those 20 months.” But since June 12, she had to.
“Over the last 20 years, the Israelis have developed calluses,” Mr. Schlank said. But now, fear has started to penetrate the calluses.
“And the hostages weigh on society,” he added. “This is the level of existential threat.
“And I think that we in America don’t know how bad some of the rocket attacks from Iran were. That was on purpose. There is a feeling that the government believes that it’s not necessary to give Iran intelligence about how successful they were in hitting their targets.
“When I was in Tel Aviv, I heard an ear-shattering explosion that shook me to my core. It would be surprising to me if people who lived through that didn’t bear any scars.
So is it a regular summer? “I don’t know what a regular summer feels like anymore,” Mr. Schlank says. “But when the campers complain about how it’s too hot or too rainy or the activities aren’t as much fun as they want them to be, we’re glad to hear them complaining about normal stuff.
“My office looks out on a lake. When I walk around, I hear Hebrew and English together. I went to an Israeli cooking class today and had delicious shakshuka for lunch. It is normal. We are inside a gate with cameras. It is the new normal.
“And there’s a lot of hope. I feel it. I hear it when I listen to the Israelis — I hear hope and a desire for a better future. There’s a tremendous desire to get back to normal.”
But there still are the hostages, who still are held underground in Gaza. The Israeli government has said that 20 of them are still alive; Hamas is also holding onto dead bodies, denying families any semblance of closure. “Every conversation about the future is punctuated at some level with a mention of the hostages. I still have a picture of Omer Nutra that hangs in my office.” Omer Nutra was a young Israeli-American from Long Island who was killed on October 7, although his family and friends were led to believe that he remained alive in captivity. His body still is in Gaza.
“We need to get those folks back,” Mr. Schlank said.
“But I think that the idea that there’s the existential threat of a nuclear Holocaust coming from Iran has diminished at some level. It lets people breathe a little more easily.”
But the thing that is making Israeli campers and staffers breathe a lot more easily is the freedom that comes from being at camp, enclosed in a bubble of sun, play, and bug bites, and also Jewish peoplehood, hope, and love.
And for everybody not in camp now, there’s always next summer.
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