Jewish summer camps, like Camp Solomon Schechter near Olympia, Wash., aim to give participants a lifelong sense of belonging, leadership, joy and identity. (photo from campschechter.org)
The California-based Shimon Ben Joseph Foundation, commonly known as the Jim Joseph Foundation, has prioritized investment in what it calls “powerful Jewish learning experiences,” in its effort to enable “all Jews, their families, and their friends to lead connected, meaningful, purpose-filled lives and to make positive contributions to their communities and the world.” This commitment is advanced by signature grantees that provide such experiences to young people: BBYO, Foundation for Jewish Camp, Hillel, Birthright Israel, and Moishe House.
Over the last few years, the foundation has partnered with Rosov Consulting to bring a consistent research lens to the experiences provided by these various organizations. The goal of this partnership has been: (1) to identify both the distinct and common contributions made by each organization to participants at different stages of their young lives, and (2) to identify the components of the experiences they provide that make them so powerful.
Rosov’s latest report, Powerful Jewish Learning Experiences, was released in September. Through a series of 10 virtual focus groups, researchers interviewed 48 people, most between the ages of 25 and 35, who had participated in some combination of Jewish camp, youth groups, campus life and post-grad community.
Program alumni remember powerful Jewish learning experiences as having deep personal significance. They learned something new and important about themselves, locating themselves in relation to a larger entity – typically, the Jewish people. They sensed their lives being propelled forward, often in new directions. These experiences didn’t speak to all the alumni in the same ways or with the same force, but all five experiences, without exception, were described in these terms by many. In their own words, alumni recollected:
Youth group: “[feeling] so fulfilled … I had a purpose in some sort of way in that time that wasn’t school or wasn’t what I had to do.”
Camp: “a big sense of independence … getting to do things I personally never had a chance to do.”
College: “[being] taught a lot for my future in terms of, for me personally, building a Jewish life and a Jewish home.”
Israel: “[Gaining a] whole [new] perspective of what it was to be Jewish and to feel accepted. [It was] the first place I felt truly at home.”
Moishe House: “finding my own way in … having a place to be and be Jewish … that completely changed my life.”
The settings in which these powerful Jewish learning experiences occur are not simply substitutes for one another. They take place at different moments in a young person’s life and are infused by the distinct social and educational priorities associated with that developmental moment. At overnight camp, for example, this involved experiencing a model of Jewish community that was either absent or just very different at home. The specialness of the camp community was emphasized by the physical distance of camp from home and the temporal boundedness of the camp experience during specific months of the year.
The experiences provided by the grantees are all highly experiential, involving learning through doing. This outcome was strongly associated with spending time at overnight camp, in large part because the rhythm of camp runs from morning to night, and from Shabbat to Shabbat; it includes mealtimes, prayer times and other opportunities for learning through the performance of ritual.
Participant perspectives included:
• “[I was] pushing boundaries in a very safe environment. That’s something that happened at my camp.”
• “I think for me a lot of [the takeaways from camp] were a big sense of independence.… [Camp] really got very different from school…. It gave us a time to just do all the fun things that you don’t always get to do that I personally never got a chance to do. It was a lot of new things that I saw that I’d never seen before or new experiences.”
Their reflections converged around the many lifelong benefits of the Jewish camp experience, such as:
Jewish learning: “I feel like there’s a lot of prayers that I know in my core because of camp and not necessarily because of Hebrew school and Sunday school.”
L’dor v’dor: “All of the camp songs that you’d sing on Shabbat … you take with you for the rest of your life. And I have a son who goes to Jewish preschool now and he is singing these songs, and we sing them together in the car.…”
Independence, joy and friendship: “I gained the value of joyous Judaism, social connections … having a community of people that you get to just be with, [is] just amazing.”
Connecting to Jewish identity: “Camp really helped me understand the importance of Jewish community and continuing involvement with the Jewish community after my bat mitzvah. If it weren’t for camp, I would not have done Hillel in college. I would not have joined Moishe House.”
Belonging, leadership, joy and identity – four of the core building blocks highlighted in the study – were central themes at Foundation for Jewish Camp’s 2024 Leaders Assembly, which brought together more than 800 Jewish camp leaders and advocates from around the world on Dec. 9-11 in Chicago. At the gathering, Rosov Consulting shared more findings from this study, which can be found at jewishcamp.org.
– from Powerful Jewish Experiences,
compiled by Rosov Consulting (September 2024),
and Foundation for Jewish Camp