Proponents say Jewish overnight camps strengthen kids’ Jewish identity.
This was certainly true for Tucsonan Nanci Ogur Levy, who spent four summers at Pine Forest Camp in Greeley, Pennsylvania, as a camper, plus a summer as a waitress and another as a counselor-in-training.
“It actually was my first real experience celebrating Shabbat,” says Levy, who grew up on Long Island in a nominally Reform family that “didn’t do very much,” Jewishly speaking.
At camp, “I learned ‘Adon Olam’ and all the fun Shabbat songs. I didn’t have that before,” she says.
For the past nine years, Levy has been the community outreach coordinator at Handmaker, where she works with staff and volunteers to bring Jewish programming to residents, including Shabbat and other Jewish holiday celebrations and intergenerational programming with Tucson Hebrew Academy students and BBYO teens.
A Jewish couple, Hughie and Selma Black, started the camp in 1931. Still run by the Black family, Pine Forest doesn’t market itself as a Jewish camp but continues the traditions of Friday night Shabbat services and reciting the Motzi blessing before meals.
When she went to Pine Forest in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Levy says, 95% or more of the campers were Jewish. She sometimes connects with camp friends on Facebook.
“It was a long time ago and I live far away,” she says. “I think about them.”
Along with the friendships and “the feeling of connectedness” camp gave her, Levy loved playing sports.
Pine Forest “was a very sporty camp and I was a pretty sporty kid. It was a very active camp, very busy,” she says. Her favorites included gymnastics and volleyball.
“I loved summer camp – time of your life,” says another Pine Forest alum in Tucson, Brett Averick, the husband of JPSA Director of Marketing Jennifer Lightman.
Averick spent eight summers as a Pine Forest camper and two as a counselor and a waiter, overlapping with Levy, who remembers him as “one of the older, cool kids.”
Starting at age 8, Averick was in a bunk with mostly the same boys year after year.
“It kind of shapes your life,” he says. “Some of my best friends are people I grew up with at summer camp.”
Camp gave him a unique opportunity to develop his athletic skills. He explains that he played on the camp tennis team but was too small to have played competitively in college.
Playing tennis and other sports including softball and basketball against other camps taught kids conflict resolution and sportsmanship, Averick says.
Conflict resolution also came into play, he says, when it came to girls.
“There’s only a finite number of girls … and you have to navigate that if two guys in the same bunk like the same girl.”
Averick, who grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington, describes himself as “sort of an agnostic, secular kind of guy.”
Shabbat services at Pine Forest weren’t particularly meaningful for him, but camp “made my social sphere, the people that I hung out with and loved, Jewish.”
“And I love the bar mitzvahs and the weddings and all that kind of stuff,” he says.
Since most of Averick’s camp friends lived nearby in New Jersey, they would take the train to visit each other during the school year. Learning to drive made visiting easier, but once they started college the reunions became less frequent.
The guys still maintain a text group, though. “We talk all the time,” he says.
For Tucson native Sarah Artzi, attending Camp Ramah in Ojai, California, was “just the most immersive Jewish experience that I ever had, to this day.”
Artzi was one of many Tucsonans who went to the Ojai camp in the ‘70s and ‘80s, encouraged by the late Rabbi Arthur Oleisky of Congregation Anshei Israel, an alum of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. Ramah is affiliated with the Conservative movement.
Artzi recalls flying to California with 40 or so Ramah-bound Tucsonans. Yet she was unprepared for the power of being among hundreds of Jewish campers.
“Coming from Tucson, being in this community with so many Jewish kids was eye-opening,” she says.
She enjoyed “the whole Shabbat experience, the singing, it was just really so magical,” she says, while Ramah’s casual use of Hebrew for everything from announcements to bunk names reinforced her Jewish learning.
Artzi loved Ramah so much she returned as a staff member in 2022 when the camp needed a parent liaison or yoetzet. She explains that each age group has a liaison to work with campers, staff, and parents, “should the need arise.”
“It was a great opportunity to go back and capture a little bit of that feeling,” she says.
Artzi’s son David went with a large group of Tucson boys to Camp Timberlane in Wisconsin, then owned by Tucsonans. Her younger son, Michael, spent a couple of summers as a Ramah camper and returned as a lifeguard.
But her daughter, Adina, is a Ramah “lifer,” she says, with “easily 12 years” as a camper and staff member.
Adina, who recently became engaged, met her fiancé at camp. So many campers meet their future spouses at Ojai that the camp created a bridge or gesher l’chuppah where couples can get a plaque commemorating their marriage date.
Artzi gets a kick out of the multigenerational connection.
“Some of Adina’s best friends from camp have the exact same last names as my best friends from camp, because they’re their kids. There’s this incredible dor l’dor,” she says, using a Hebrew expression for “generation to generation.”
