There’s a popular hashtag on Twitter called #FirstWorldProblems. People vent about issues lacking true urgency then toss the words #FirstWorldProblems at the end to acknowledge that their problems are the “problems” of the fortunate. The most blatant #FirstWorldProblem of the summer arrives in the form of parents worrying about the details of overnight camp. What…
It’s billed as “a friendly message to camp summer staff.” But the six-minute video, targeting Orthodox summer camps, is far from amicable. “This is your first and final warning,” Meyer Seewald threatens camp counselors. “If you touch a child even once you have destroyed him for the rest of his life.” “We will make sure…
Immigration reform is more than legislating a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and enhancing border security. For the Jewish community, it also has to do with a timely issue: making sure Israeli counselors can keep on coming to Jewish summer camps. The proposed bill that is working its way through the Senate…
At a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, they’re giving kids digital filmmaking classes and telling them to leave their Nintendo Game Boys at home. In Georgia, a camp is encouraging face time with video pen pals rather than time on iPods. In Wisconsin, a camp has traded snail mail for scanned mail. As…
‘Please can we go to this camp?” my older son asked me after a parlor meeting in my town with the director of an overnight camp. “I really want to go!” my younger son said. I wasn’t ready for this. Sure, one could argue that when you go to a parlor meeting about an overnight…
Eons ago, it seems, when Boychik was in elementary school and not the towering young man he is today, we went to a Camp Ramah parlor meeting to get a feel for the camp where we expected to send him for his first overnight summer experience. It seemed like an obvious fit. We belong to…
If there is one thing I regret on my journey to Jewish adulthood, it’s that I passed up the opportunity to go to sleep away camp. Why do I lament this more than forgetting to fast on Tisha B’av? More than not spending a year in a yeshiva? Because while I was taking ceramic classes…
In addition to the kosher canteens and morning prayers, there’s another activity unlisted in any brochure but no less synonymous with Jewish sleepaway camps: hooking up. Ask any alumnus of the dozens of non-Orthodox Jewish overnight camps in North America, and you’ll get stories straight from an episode of “Glee,” with softball fields and squash…
דאָס איז אַן אויסצוג פֿון אַ בוך זכרונות אָנגעשריבן פֿון מאיר יעלין, וואָס איז געשטאָרבן אין ישׂראל אין יאָר 2000
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