Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of the Lubavitcher movement, announced today a record enrollment of 5,000 Jewish youngsters in the more than a dozen Lubavitcher summer camps located on six continents. A spokesman for the Hassidic organization reported that the youngsters in the boys camps, called Gan Israel, come from a variety of backgrounds, observant and non-observant.
The spokesman said, “we encourage the mixture of Yeshiva students and children of other backgrounds. While one enjoys an intellectual rest and a period of physical development, the non Yeshiva child is given the opportunity for spiritual growth. The effect on the latter remains with him long after he leaves camp,” he asserted.
The vacation retreats are located in Parksville, New York, in Michigan, in Canada’s Laurentian Mountains, at Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv, in Brazil, in Morocco, England, Australia, in Italy’s resort of Rimini on the Adriatic Sea and on France’s Cote d’Azur overlooking the Mediterranean. The first Gan Israel, in the Catskills. was established 17 years ago. Lubavitch also has a number of summer camps for girls.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.