Focus on Issues: Bunks and Bug Juice; Boosting the Camp Trail to Jewish Identity

Annie Tucker keeps kosher. She tries to go to services regularly. And she wants to be a Jewish educator.

The University of Pennsylvania senior attributes much of her Jewish commitment to summers spent at Camp Ramah New England, one of seven overnight camps run by the Conservative movement.

“Camp was this place to try on new behaviors,” such as keeping Shabbat and observing kashrut everyday, “to put into practice the things you learn at Hebrew school,” she said.

At camp she met “educators you could connect to,” such as the male rabbinical student with an earring and an appreciation for the music of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged her to “bring Judaism home with you.”

Tucker is not alone in her experience.

An estimated 30,000 children — or 4 percent of the Jewish camp-age population — attend the roughly 100 overnight camps in North America run by Jewish religious or Zionist movements and communal organizations.

Three of those campers are the children of Robert and Elisa Spungen Bildner. (Their fourth and youngest child is a day camper.)

“Jewish camping has clearly enhanced their identity as Jews and has given them lots of joy,” said Robert Bildner, who credits his children, aged 5 to 14, with fostering an atmosphere of Jewish practice and learning in their New Jersey home.

Inspired by the positive influence of camp on their children, the Bildners provided the $2 million in seed money for the Foundation for Jewish Camping, which opened its doors in August.

In a new study of Jewish summer resident camping to be published jointly by the foundation and the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, demographer Gary Tobin calls the initiative “a vehicle to champion the Jewish camping experience.”

Its mission is to provide networking and partnership-building services to Jewish camps and to advance Jewish camping across the continent.

Major donors have already rallied around Jewish day schools and Israel experiences as effective cornerstones of Jewish identity-building.

Last fall, two prominent philanthropists, Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman, joined forces and funding sources to create Birthright Israel, a $300 million initiative that will offer 10 days in Israel to every Jewish teen-ager and young adult beginning next year.

And in 1997 Steinhardt and 11 Jewish philanthropists and foundations created the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education to strengthen Jewish day school education in North America by establishing more schools, promoting Jewish education and attracting philanthropic leaders devoted to its future.

“We’ve seen Birthright and the initiative for Jewish day schools, but camping has fallen off the radar screen,” said Elisa Spungen Bildner, herself an alumna of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin and a Jewish Community Center camp in Chicago.

The camping foundation’s director, Rabbi Ramie Arian, concurred.

“Camp, which does the same kind of work, which is at least as powerful and reaches at least as many kids, was getting very little comparable attention,” he said, backing up his assertion with a handful of recent Jewish demographic studies — and 15 years of experience working for the Reform movement’s youth division.

Arian and the Bildners aim to raise the profile of Jewish camping so that it equals day schools and Israel experiences as a pillar of Jewish identity- building.

Now the foundation is on the trail of what Arian calls “philanthropists of vision” to contribute to its $20 million goal.

The funds will be used to increase publicity about the value of Jewish camps, to upgrade camp facilities and build new ones, to develop new programs to compete with non-Jewish camps and camps without overt Jewish missions, and to devote greater resources to attracting qualified staff.

During its first five months in operation, the foundation has raised nearly $200,000 — through “good old-fashioned networking,” said Arian, adding that plans are under way to begin dispersing grants of up to $15,000 based on proposals submitted by Jewish camps.

“We’ve just completed a survey of the camps to ask them what their needs are,” explained Arian.

One of the most immediate needs: recruiting and retaining quality counselors.

“It gets harder each year to find good staff,” said Seth Schwartz, the director of Camp Tel Yehudah in Barryville, N.Y., the national senior camp of Young Judaea, the youth movement of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which runs six camps nationwide.

These days, many potential counselors — mostly of college age — make use of summer breaks to pursue professional internships or working in well-paying jobs.

“We have to come up with a way to convince college-age kids why, working at a summer camp, you’ll get more out of it in the long run,” Schwartz said.

Tucker, who worked as a counselor at Ramah for five years, suggests raising staff salaries, which average $1,200 for nine weeks of work, as “a basic way to get at it.”

Moreover, she said, “in terms of creating a resume, it’s difficult to keep going back to camp.”

Responding to the need for developing greater professionalism among camp counselors, the foundation plans to create national recruitment incentives that include ways to raise salaries.

Those might include joint internship-counseling programs with the help of well- placed camp alumni or parent contacts — or establishing counselor fellowships that would provide higher salaries and nominal prestige.

As a national clearinghouse, the foundation could also research and share successful strategies for fine-tuning the image of camp counseling for the outside world.

“You learn more that’s valuable in real life and in business being a counselor at camp than by being an intern in most offices,” Arian said. “That’s not generally perceived to be the case, and it’s a hard sell to make.”

Looking beyond the immediate staffing challenge, the foundation eventually plans to provide funds for building and updating facilities to accommodate the overflow from existing camps and to make room for even more campers.

“We’re busting at the seams right now,” said Rabbi Allen Smith, the director of the Reform movement’s youth division, which runs 11 national summer camps, serving about 10,000 kids a year.

Similarly, other Jewish camping groups have waiting lists for bunk space.

Arian and the Bildners, hoping to triple the number of campers, foresee the need to build 100 new camps around the country at a “bare-bones” minimum of $3 million each.

In addition, camp offerings must be revamped in order to compete with university programs, trips to Israel, family vacations and specialty camps.

“The nut that we have to crack,” said Spungen Bildner, “is a very big nut.”