Older staff members learn at cooperative camp programs

It is both a strength and a weakness that summer camps, especially Jewish ones, function in their own little world with minimal connections to the outside.

The strength is that Jewish camps can give campers a taste of a 24/7 Jewish lifestyle they may not get at home. But a potential weakness lies in not fostering a sense of the wider Jewish world, including other Jewish camps.

“Often camps get hung up on their own traditions,” said Howard Wagan, director of the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken, the residence camp of Milwaukee’s Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.

To promote that sense of the wider Jewish world as well as to promote retention of some of the older staff members in their third or fourth year of college, Wisconsin camps are offering such staff members programs for additional training and for meeting with their contemporaries from other Jewish camps.

This year eight older staff members at Interlaken participated in the Cornerstone Fellowship Seminar, administered by the Foundation for Jewish Camping and supported by the Avi Chai Foundation. The seminar took place May 23-26 at the Hudson Valley Resort and Spa in New York state’s Catskills region.

Most of the Wisconsin-based Jewish camps, however, have their winter offices in the Chicago-area and are run by Illinois-based organizations.

Therefore, they had some of their older staff members participate in the Kivun (Hebrew word for “direction”) program developed by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and the Association of Midwest Jewish Camp Directors.

This program is open only to those senior camp staffers who live or are attending college in Illinois. It involves a seminar in Chicago in May and an additional one-day seminar at one of the participating camps during the summer. This year’s took place last week at Camp Chi, the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago camp in Lake Delton.

Both these programs provide financial incentives to participants, in paid expenses and in additions to their camp paychecks during the summer. And both allow participants to bring significant benefits to the camps.

“They have sessions with experts in becoming good Jewish role models,” said Wagan of the Cornerstone program. They also learn about Jewish culture and religion, acquire or improve such skills as storytelling and responding to bullying, and learn from their peers about such topics as how other camps handle mealtimes and bedtime, Wagan said.

As for the Kivun program, Rabbi David Soloff, director of Camp Ramah Wisconsin (the Conservative movement camp here), emphasized that the program involves camps of many different Jewish religious and cultural movements and outlooks.

“So much of what all Jewish camps do is nurture and foster Jewish community; to understand what it means to do this across agencies and denominations is vitally important,” Soloff said.

Jerry Kaye, director of the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute (the Reform movement camp), agrees. “It gives them a broader sense of what’s going on, things that relate to expanding beyond the community we all work in,” he said. “It brings to us a greater sense of the wider Jewish community.”

And Brad Finkel, assistant director of Camp Chi, said the participants “grow as individuals” and, back at camp, the kids “learn there are partnerships outside with the larger community.”