Tag: Foundation for Jewish Camp

Learning to nurture kindness

Foundation for Jewish Camp has been awarded a grant to explore how Jewish overnight camp nurtures and promotes character development. (photo from jewishcamp.org)

Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) has been awarded a three-year expansive research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore how the activities and rituals at Jewish overnight camp nurture and promote character development in adolescent campers and camp staff.

Findings of an earlier landscape survey of current virtue development practices at Jewish camps and a series of interviews with camp professionals identified kindness as the most common virtue camps desire to nurture in their communities. This next phase of in-depth research will focus on understanding how kindness is embedded into the structure of Jewish camp, how character virtues are taught, practised and modeled by camp leadership and staff, and how staff and campers are impacted.

The initial one-year planning grant, awarded in 2021, was used to develop conceptual frameworks and research design and instrumentation. This work included convening thought partners and learning circles to guide the project; conducting a landscape survey of current virtue development practices at Jewish camps; interviewing a select group of 10 camps to learn more about their current practices; and developing the proposal for the three-year study to evaluate the impact of character development practices on the minds, hearts and behaviours of adolescents and young adults who participate in Jewish camp.

According to Rabbi Avi Katz Orlow, FJC’s vice-president for education and innovation and the co-leader for this project, “Jewish camp in North America has a great history of making mensches – a Yiddish term for a person of great character and integrity – but that is not enough. We need to look critically and explore the metrics of character development. With the support of the John Templeton Foundation, we will define where we are headed in this work for the next decade. Surfacing and sharing best practices in character development will ensure we are making our best effort to raise new generations of thoughtful, resilient, caring, community-minded individuals. The world needs mensches now, more than ever before.” 

“We want to surface exemplary practices that support young adult camp staff to model and nurture kindness in themselves and others,” said Nila Rosen, FJC’s director of learning and research. “Our research will allow us to learn with the camps and develop additional resources and practices to elevate emerging and promising character development at camps across North America.”

These resources will expand on FJC’s Making Mensches Periodic Table – the resource bank for camp staff and educators to engage in the work of character development, whose popularity served as the basis for this inquiry.

FJC has selected five camps that are intentional in their construction and cultivation of a culture of kindness in their community. These camps will conduct a thorough exploration of how that shows up in their staff selection and training, relationship building, camp rituals, peer-to-peer support, professional development, branding materials, camp artifacts, signage, or explicit language used by leadership teams.

Dr. Richard Bollinger, senior program officer of character virtue development at the John Templeton Foundation, said, “We are excited about the potential impact of this project because spreading kindness within a community can create ripples of a ‘pay-it-forward’ nature that extend far beyond the initial kind actions. Along with the hundreds of thousands of campers, families and staff who participate in 300+ Jewish camps across North America each year, we are eager to share and learn with FJC and the field.”

– Courtesy Foundation for Jewish Camp

Building of community

Originally, the only focus of Jewish camp was to offer Jewish children an opportunity to spend some time in a woodland environment. (photo from pxfuel.com)

Camping and camps may have been around forever. But Jewish camps, at least those in North America, have a contemporary history.

In 1893, a group called the Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society organized a camp for Jewish children in New York. These women sought to create a place to give their children a break from life in the industrialized city where they worked. The initial focus of Jewish camps was on the children of Eastern European immigrants, and there was a drive to use the camps to Americanize participants. Jews were not the only ones to take an interest in this vehicle for integration. By 1900, there were 100 camps of all kinds and, by 1915, there were more than 1,000.

Originally, the only focus was to offer Jewish children an opportunity to spend some time in a woodland environment, perhaps with access to water. Camps also offered children opportunities to interact with their peers from various backgrounds, without parental oversight, something they might not find in their home environment. Over time, Jewish camp programs expanded to include acculturation into things Jewish, along with athletics, social skills-building, the arts and related activities. Among the Jewish camps, there was the development of those that promoted a particular religious observance, or Zionism, Hebrew usage, socialism and the like. Zionist camps were given a special impetus with the worldwide effort to establish a Jewish state.

What Jewish organizers found over time was that camp experiences were crucial in binding young people to the Jewish community. The relationships forged among young people through camp have played an important role in this area. Anyone who has lived through the camping experience understands the powerful emotional connections this activity can carry with it, particularly when it occurs year after year. Many community leaders believe that sleep-away camps were (and are) an important element in the maintenance of a Jewish identity in the face of all the forces that encourage assimilation into the general population.

The summer camp has become a feature of Jewish life wherever the numbers are available to support this community service. In addition to private ventures, over time, Jewish communities have invested substantial resources into these programs and see them as an important part of Jewish communal activity. Some synagogues have camps as part of their program.

Interest in this aspect of Jewish camp has increased over time. For some parents, Jewish camps are an alternative to expensive primary schooling at Jewish educational institutions.

As a reflection of the growing appreciation of the importance of sleep-away camps in maintaining strong communities, philanthropic groups funded, in 2014, an organization in the United States to assist Jewish camps in carrying out their work. The Foundation for Jewish Camp now works with more than 180 Jewish summer camps, assisting in the training of personnel and providing other services and resources. Among other things, it assists Jewish camps in recruiting professionals, offers grants to first-time campers and helps fund upgrades for camps to accommodate participants with special needs.

An estimate published in January 2019 reported that there were 77,000 attendees at Jewish camps in the United States, and the foundation reports that there are 195 Jewish camps in North America. In Canada, there are Jewish camps in Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.