Post Scholar-in-Residence Learning Events
A Wonderful Follow-up to our Scholar-in-Residence Weekend
“The Power of a Summer Camp Experience”
Shabbat Afternoon following Kiddush
April 21, 2012
with our 2012 Smith Family Scholar in Residence
Dr. Riv-Ellen Prell
Jewish summer camping in the United States began at the dawn of the 20th century with these camps reflecting virtually every vision for Jewish life imagined. Only in the last decade have policy makers and scholars understood the remarkable power of the summer camp experience. Yet former campers have been reflecting on the experiences of camp for more than a half-century. Read a number of those reflections about camps Habonim in the 1930s and 1970s, and Ramah since its founding, all available on the table in the lobby of the synagogue. In these memoirs see how campers thought about their Jewishness, their sexuality, their Judaism, their friendships and their families through the lens of the camp experience. In this follow-up to our Scholar-in–Residence weekend, we will now turn the memoir experience back on ourselves for brief reflections by those who were campers, parents of campers, friends of campers and others.
TWO INTRIGUING CAMP REFLECTIONS:
Marion Magid, Habonim Camper
I lived in the Bronx, but the first Habonim meeting I went to was in Manhattan . . . Manhattan seemed much farther away from the Bronx than Palestine did from America . . . A few years later, a sizable portion of my generation was to see the East Side for the first time on the way to psychoanalysis; I discovered it through the Labor Zionist movement.
-Habonim pp. 168
Rabbi Neil Gilman, Ph.D., Ramah Camper
I spent the summers of 1956, 1957, and 1958 in camp. We were bunk counselors, we taught classes, and we planned our campers’ evening and Shabbat programs. I was naïve, but we were made to feel that the overall goal of the camp experience was to change the world.
-Ramah pp 347
Copies of full articles as background for this session can be found on the information table in the lobby.