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July 16, 2009
It’s never hard to get Jews talking, but there are three topics guaranteed to open the floodgates: summer camp, bungalow colonies, and the Old Neighborhood. The subject of my column last week was a twofer — camp and bungalows — so my mail box filled up pretty quickly. (Credit also goes to the Union for Reform Judaism, which sent the column to subscribers of its “Ten Minutes of Torah” e-mail.)
My reminiscing about my family’s old place in upstate New York sparked nostalgic summertime reveries among the writers.
“My childhood was in the ’40s,” wrote Edward J. Gutman of Baltimore. “My family didn’t go to camp in the Catskills; we piled into the family Chevy, drove five hours to Atlantic City, and stayed in a small hotel — not on the beach — where, as you say, ‘Jewish was the default.’ All the guests and the owners were Jewish, we had three kosher meals a day, and there was a camaraderie that cannot be experienced today at the Four Seasons or even the Ritz Carlton. They are memories that I cherish.”
Marc Sternbaum of Miami wrote: “I grew up in the Midwest and the South and didn’t have the bungalow colony camp experience as a youngster…. But I married a girl from Brooklyn whose parents had taken her and her sister to a cabin community just like you describe on the shores of Lake George when they were growing up in the ’50s and ’60s. We had the chance in the late ’70s and early ’80s to take our kids there for three or four summers, a week or 10 days each year. The accommodations were a little ‘basic’ but the community feeling among these folks who had spent the same weeks there for 20 or more years — some of them civil servants or teachers, some artists, a few professionals — was truly enriching. Thanks for evoking those memories.”
And apparently it’s not just an American thing. “I grew up in Winnipeg and every summer, as a child, we along with our ‘beach friends’ relocated to Lake Winnipeg Beach,” wrote Paula Globerman of Edmonton, Alberta. “The kids biked and swam and played, and the moms played bridge and the dads drove back and forth to the City in the morning for work and the beach at night for barbecue and that delicious late evening swim…. The Jewish camp was close by on the lake. In the morning we could hear the ramkol saying ‘boker tov’ to the camp, and I spent many a magical summer there sneaking out at night…for a quick hello and a snack. The thoughts of those hot summer days and those magical camp sessions make me smile to this day.”
Other readers agreed that there must be some way to revive the communitarian spirit of the bungalows for a younger generation of Jews.
“I went to Ramah and also non-religious but Jewish camps as a kid. I loved camp,” wrote Ricki Hurwitz of Harrisburg, Pa. “When I had a young family, I discovered a family camp in western Pennsylvania run by the Pittsburgh YMCA. It was a wonderful, reasonably priced yearly experience for us for 12 years — we always went week two and became close with the other ‘week two’ families from western Pennsylvania and beyond. This sort of low-key, fun, engaging Jewish experience would benefit the Jewish community and the families themselves. Thanks for boosting the idea.”
Steven Weiner of Katonah, NY, actually spent a summer at the bungalow colony I wrote about. He was there in the early 1960s, after his father retired as a summer camp/social director in the Catskills. “I used to say, summarizing my ‘Jewish journey’ in various contexts, that, while I attended a Conservative three-day-a-week Hebrew school, and had a mother who grew up in an Orthodox home, I never saw my parents attend any service other than a wedding or the various family b’nei mitzva. Then I remembered, at Champlain Colony, my dad would always go to the minyan, because there would not have been enough adult Jews without him, and he felt the responsibility to his community in that Jewishly isolated place.”
But there are limits to the summer place’s ability to foster a Jewish identity, as Richard M. Plotzker of Wilmington, Del., wrote. For him, even intense Jewish summer experiences cannot guarantee a year-round commitment to Jewish life and community. “Trying to compartmentalize one’s Jewish life from other alluring experiences usually shortchanges the Jewish component,” he wrote. “We can live and breathe Jewish at the synagogue’s adult weekend retreat or our kids can take a summer on USY tour, but unless these experiences fundamentally alter our perspective, provoking us to make that lifestyle our norm for the rest of our discretionary time, we will not have advanced ourselves Jewishly in a material way, either personally or as a community.”
Of course, not every activity has to assure “Jewish continuity” to be considered worthwhile. Maybe Jews need a space for spontaneous invention, far away from the work of demographers and community planners. No one has ever written, “The thoughts of those hot conference rooms and those magical task forces make me smile to this day.”
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