There I was: 10 years old, tiny, squeaky, with a mediocre haircut and crooked teeth, delivering a Shakespearean monologue on the big stage at the Denver, Colorado JCC. I was playing Nick Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It was a big character, and a big challenge for me, congenitally shy as I was. But…
(JTA) – A last-ditch effort by Orthodox Jews in New York to clear the way for overnight camps this summer fell short Monday as a federal judge declined to intervene against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decision to keep the camps closed. The judge was responding to a lawsuit brought last month by the Association of Jewish…
While we are not the first to compare the challenges of Jewish institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic to the story of Noah’s Ark, the analogy is too apt to be ignored. The world as we’ve known it has been “washed away,” and we navigate strange waters in hopes of finding dry land once more. We…
(JTA) – Fresh off cutting the locks off a closed Brooklyn playground, leaders in New York City’s Orthodox community are turning their attention to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ban on overnight camps, issued last week to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check. A lawsuit filed Thursday by the Association of Jewish Camp Operators, which represents dozens…
Hundreds of Haredi children in Brooklyn gathered in the early evening on Thursday to ask New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and to open sleepaway camps and parks. Videos and photos showed a crowd of children, mostly boys with sidecurls and kippot, walking and biking along Bedford Avenue,…
The first Jewish summer camps were founded at the turn of the 19th century as a youthful escape from squalid urban living. Out in the country, children could grow in little pockets of bliss separated from worldly ill. There was dancing, playing, swimming and very little worry. As time passed, camps of all sorts emerged,…
PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — Jewish camp professionals don’t have much time to mourn the loss of the summers we’d planned. We must switch gears, roll up our sleeves and come up with a new 2020 vision. Luckily there are no better-suited dreamers and designers for this challenge than camp people. For the past three years I…
(JTA) — When Jewish camp directors explained their reasons for canceling camp this summer, state and local prohibitions were typically at the top of the list. We can’t even think about opening camp, they would say, because the government won’t let us. Now that’s changing. States across the country have told day camps, overnight camps…
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