Six Reasons to Attend Jewish Summer Camp

Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org

Jewish summer camps fuse the activities, friendships, and communal life of traditional camps with the Jewish values, role models and culture our shared heritage. This uniquely immersive experience provides a confidence-building opportunity in which campers experience joy and discovery in a communal Jewish setting. Read on for the top six reasons parents, bubbes, and zaydes everywhere are sending their kids to Jewish camp.

1. Experiences first, explanations later. Kids are able to ultimately and immediately contribute to their Jewish community at camp. In other realms of Jewish life, they are taught about Jewish communal life and then experience it. At camp, they experience it (at meals, during Shabbat, on the ropes course, in the cabin - everywhere), and the explanations come later. This is a uniquely powerful experience they find nowhere else. Learn more from eJewish Philanthropy.

2. Camp friendships last beyond the summer. After the dirty laundry has been washed and the camp trunk put away, the friendships endure. Camp is one easy entry point into a lifelong Jewish community. As kids grow, opportunities increase to connect with Jewish peers through congregational and national youth group (including NFTY), Israel travel, social justice programs, and much, much more. Many alumni of Jewish camp have found that the friends they make during the summer stick with them through college, young adulthood, and beyond.

3. Immersive Jewish community, 24/7. Campers are exposed to adult Jewish role models, Jewish peers, and Jewish friends from different places. These Jewish connections in every direction are extremely powerful. Campers experience joy in a Jewish community, develop self-confidence as Jews, and forge Jewish connections that stay with them into their lives beyond camp. Nowhere else do campers have the opportunity to experience Judaism infused into daily life and reinforced by a community of exclusively Reform Jewish peers.

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Shalom Sesame: The Website

You may be familiar with the wonderful Shalom Sesame videos. Did you know that Shalom Sesame also has a fun website with games, videos, activities and much, much more. Your kids can have hours of fun learning to read, creating their own stories and videos, learning Hebrew and of course, seeing their favorite Muppets.

Check it out!

 

I Was Embarrassed of My Hebrew Name

By Avital Norman Nathman for Raising Kvell

“How do you pronounce it? Ah-vee-tle? Ah-vie-tle?”

“It’s pronounced Ah-vee-TAHL.”

“Ah-vittle?”

“Ah-vee-TAHL.”

“Oh…yeah. I get it. That’s pretty.”

I always dreaded the first day of class from ninth grade on. Because on that first day you had to sit through roll call–where they ran down the list, calling out students one at a time, checking off attendance and putting faces to names. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. But my name? It always seemed to cause a stumbling block for folks, at least outside the Jewish community. Before entering the public school system, I attended a Schechter elementary and middle school where the name Avital never caused anyone to bat an eye. But once outside that comfortable Jewish space? There was no telling how my name would be butchered. Usually, teachers would mess it up a few times before I had to pipe up to correct them, drawing the stares of everyone in class.

I grew to really hate that first day of class. Sometimes, I would even daydream about changing my name. What was so special about Avital anyway? I didn’t even have a middle name to fall back on, just the first and last name. Visions of being called Agatha floated through my head (what? I was a voracious reader and Agatha Christie was a favorite of mine through much of high school. And it’s kind of cute, no?). Anything to escape the discomfort of somebody bumbling my actual name. When they couldn’t pronounce it I felt a sense of “otherness”–one that reminded me that I was unlike the other kids who drank milk with their meat sandwiches and went to church on Sundays. At some point, I told people to just call me Avi… it was better that way.

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Mitzvah Notes For Mommy

By Ariel Chesler for Kveller

My daughter’s preschool teacher has created a daily task in which we, the parents, write “mitzvah notes” for our children each day. These notes are meant to describe the ways in which our children are helpful, cooperative, or did good deeds. The notes are read in class with the children, who, I am told, are excited to hear and discuss the good things they have done.

I must admit that when I first learned about this task, I considered it a burden. How, I wondered, could we be expected to come up with a good deed that our 3-year-old did each day? Have you ever met a 3-year-old? I knew it would be far easier to rattle off “not so mitzvah notes,” like so:

She refused to brush her teeth.

She refused to get out of the bath.

She refused to get dressed.

She hit Mommy.

She pushed her sister.

She screamed in my face when I tried to comfort her because I was not Mommy.
She did not eat dinner.

She made leaving the house impossible.

She did not clean up her toys.

She threw herself on the floor because I gave her the pink cup instead of the purple cup.

She made me want to cry.

But then, as my wife and I committed ourselves to the daily task of writing these notes, we began to find the good in our 3-year-old, even though this used to feel like an impossible mission.
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