WASHINGTON – After a year of shutdown in 2020, Jewish summer camps across the US are operating again this summer. But this time, things are a bit different.
“We’re just so thrilled that the camps are open,” Eric Fingerhut, CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, told The Jerusalem Post. “The camps are full this summer. Some of them had to reduce capacity a little bit because of the COVID rules, but they are operating in a very robust way.”
As the Delta variant keeps spreading across the world, and children under 12 are not eligible for the vaccine, many camps in the US had to adapt to the new reality.
Havi Goldscher, Capital Camp & Retreat Center Interim CEO, told the Post that the camp is operating “almost like a bubble.”
The camp is located in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and most of the children are from Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia. This year, there are 773 campers from second grade to high school seniors and 180 staff members. “We have fewer campers this summer [due to] capacity numbers and recommendations,” she said.
Many camps have adopted a policy that significantly restricts the number of people who are coming and going from the camp, Goldscher said.
“It’s not fully a bubble,” she said. “Certainly, we accept food delivery, but who’s going in and out of the kitchen in order to bring that food in? It’s very limited.”
“In a normal year, I would have had some visitors, maybe almost every day for different reasons,” said Goldscher. “This year, we’re not doing that.”
SHE NOTED She noted that the American Camp Association and the CDC made a recommendation to lower the number of campers because of living space.
“Every day, we are continuing to make really hard decisions,” she said, noting that the hardest one was to close the camp in May 2020.
“Pretty much every day since then we’ve been making more minor decisions, but all [of them] impacted our ability to open this summer,” Goldscher said, “and even within the opening of this summer, we’re making daily decisions in order to continue to keep our staff and campers as safe as possible.”
There are numerous hand sanitizing stations across the camp, the interim CEO said, and kids are wearing a mask when meeting with a different group (cohort). “We also purchased an additional tent for outdoor dining because we knew that people would have to spread out,” she said, and “we added additional ventilation systems in living areas in order to help the airflow movements.”
Another significant change is the food service and how the camp distributes food within the dining hall to its campers. “We did so very thoughtfully in order to make sure that everybody wears a mask when they are away from their table and that different cohorts do not mix in the dining area,” Goldscher noted.
For the first two sessions of the camp, no visitors are allowed for COVID safety reasons, but that could change. “As we get closer to the end of our second session, we can see if we feel differently about that. We’re watching the new Delta virus very closely,” she said.
HOW WAS it for the kids to be back in camp?
“The majority of our campers fell pretty quickly into sync with being in a community: with joining in activities and coming together,” Goldscher said.
“In fact, we found that our campers were very ready to put on a mask in order for the full community to be together,” she said. “And they’d rather do that than take off their mask and only be with their age group. We had assumed the opposite and were so pleasantly surprised with how resilient our campers have been.”
There are 160 Jewish overnight camps in North America and, according to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, only 10-12 didn’t open this year. “Attendance-wise, there are usually 80,000 kids in overnight Jewish camps,” said the FJC. “This year, they were planning on operating at 75% capacity, so it’s probably around 65,000 kids or so, but there are no final numbers yet.”
The FJC’s Jeremy Fingerman said that “collectively, federations, foundations and philanthropists, with support from the government, helped mitigate over $150 million in losses to Jewish camps in 2020. In 2021, we’ve seen an additional $50m. in support to the field for Covid-related costs. This level of support has made the reopening of Jewish camping possible.
“With one year lost of camp, the total loss to the camp system was about $150m.,” said Eric Fingerhut. “In order to keep the camp from going out of business, it needed to be funded and maintained. A lot of that money was raised through a lot of sources, but federations played a huge role in providing emergency funds.”
The federations, which in a typical year provide $10m. to Jewish camping, provided an additional $15m. in emergency funding in 2020.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, for example, gave Capital Camps a $500,000 emergency grant to ensure they could cover basic operating expenses. As part of the $1.2m. that the federation allocated for scholarships this year, it granted $51,630 to Capital Camps for families that needed the extra financial support to send their kids to camp this summer.