YOAV CALLING!
Goodbye sleepaway camps, hello study groups and travel By Nurit Galon Special to Hakol
To all our friends and partners in the Lehigh Valley, happy 2023! Winter has finally made its appearance in Israel and Yoav — and it is cold! But the wonderful spring flowers are peeping out, and a rather lukewarm sun deigns to appear for a few hours a day, so it’s really not too early to begin thinking of summer warmth and vacations. When I was growing up in London, summer vacation meant camping with the youth movements, sleeping in tents and hiking miles with rucksacks on our backs. Theoretically the weather was lovely when not rainy. But guess what? It often poured every day of the three-week camp! We had one big tent for drying clothes (though they never dried!), a small schoolroom for activities, and tents with sleeping bags on wet groundsheets — until some of the beds floated across the fields toward the river. End of what we called “real camping”! Then there were fam-
ily vacation camps at the beach, where fathers joined their families on the weekend. We children watched with embarrassment as our parents wore funny hats and pretended (in our opinion) to be back in their youth. By the time we moved to Canada to work for the Israeli government and institutions, there were many sleep-away camps. But family camping was a rare thing, having given way to staying at family houses in the countryside or taking trips abroad, perhaps signs of a more prosperous community. My husband would talk wistfully about growing up in Jewish Montreal, where the community on the whole was not wealthy but was very big on helping everyone. Bnai Brith, for example, encouraged families who could not afford the very reasonable camp fees to come to camp for free and work in some of the various easier jobs there. My brother-in-law was at the Bnai Brith camp for 10 years and for most of that time was the outstanding camper. In the early years of the
state of Israel, who had the money or the time for camp? Then the young volunteers who came from all over the world to help Israel just before the Six-Day War began a camp revolution that lasted almost 50 years, and members of youth movements started attending work camps in kibbutzim. Why, my students would ask me, when world youth were roaming the globe, could Israeli youths not do the same thing? “Because we still need you all to build our country first,” I answered. Today, the classic sleepaway summer camp has largely vanished in Israel, replaced by all kinds of study groups for all ages, by travel abroad with families or longterm travel with friends. In Yoav, we are fortunate to have a very active and creative staff, so there’s an abundance of activities year round. The summer break is an opportunity to spread out and try new ideas. And even if the sleep-away camp seems to have gone away, opportunities for exploration survive.
Camp JCC to welcome 4 teens from Yoav By Alicia Zahn Partnership2Gether committee member
Yoav teenagers are returning to Camp JCC after a twoyear hiatus due to COVID-19. The camp will welcome four teens from the Yoav region of Israel who will bring Israeli spirit to the summer program. Yoav, the Jewish Federation’s Partnership2Gether counterpart in Israel, chose the best of the best to train and send to the Lehigh Valley for the season. The teens get an enlightening introduction to American culture and, in turn, the valley community gets a summer in-
Noa Li Or Kafri
Ori Shosan
fused with Israeli experience (the valley’s shlicha, Eynav Dahan, will be at camp too). Even if you are not involved with Camp JCC, you can get to know these remarkable teens by hosting them for dinner, inviting them to an event or taking them to visit a local
tourist site. Or you can get even more involved and become a home host, housing two teens for two weeks (they spend their days at camp and come home to their host in the evenings). This is a very meaningful experience that often leads
Shira Morag
Zohar Menashe
to connections that can last a lifetime. For over a decade, I have typically hosted kids for a few weeks each summer, and I have kept in touch with a lot of them over the years. For information on hosting a teen, contact Aaron Gorodzinsky, director of campaign
and security planning at the Jewish Federation, at aaron@ jflv.org or Miriam Zager, Partnership2Gether chair, at swimmir@aol.com.
HAKOL LEHIGH VALLEY | FEBRUARY 2023 19