Celebrate Jewish American
Heritage Month
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Some technical difficulties set us back a bit today, but we hope you enjoy today's entry, even if it is a bit late. We are celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month with a fact-a-day program. Every day we will be posting a new fact that can also be found on our
Facebook Page and Twitter (@JCRCAtlanta). We will also be sharing other links and sources of information as we go, so please share! We would love to have your suggestions to add to our resources!
You can also sign up for a daily email through the month of May.
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May 9
Jewish Summer Camps
Even though many Jewish summer camps have been cancelled this summer, the institution will live on. Jewish summer camping was brought to the United States in the late 19th-century, led by social reformers looking to give children a break from the city environment, as well as help immigrant children assimilate into American society. Originally, Jewish camps were Jewish because of their demographics, not their programming. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing through to the 1950s the camps grew into institutions that held Jewish cultural and educational missions. Jewish camps began in New York and then opened up across the Eastern seaboard and began to move West with the establishment of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin.
According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s 2019 camp census, there are
164 nonprofit Jewish overnight camps in North America. A total of
80,718 campers attended Jewish sleep-away camp in the summer of 2019. There are twelve movements operating a majority (153) of the camps. The affiliated movements include: Orthodox, Ramah, The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), Zionist,
The Jewish Community Center Association of North America (JCCA), Chabad, Young Judea,
Association of Independent Jewish Camps (AIJC), as well as Traditional, Secular, Sephardic, and Reconstructing, categorized as “Other” in the census. As a movement, the JCCA operates the most camps, twenty-eight, serving twenty-nine percent of campers. The AIJC operates the second most camps, nineteen, attended by fourteen percent of total campers. Of the 153 total camps, sixty-six are in the Northeast, thirty are in the West, twenty-three in Canada, twenty-two in the Midwest, and
twelve in the South.
Sources:
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A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping
, edited by Michael M. Lorge and Gary P. Zola (University of Alabama Press), is a new book of scholarly essays that raises the questions: Where did Jewish camping come from? And where is it going? The book is a history featuring twists, turns, asides, footnotes, and cool trivia, like the fact that the first known Jewish camp was, of all things, a girl’s camp, founded in 1893 by the Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society, located in New York.
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We look forward to conncting with our Jewish peoplehood and through our shared heritage. Feel free to share with the links below! Contact Leslie Anderson at
info@jcrcatlanta.org or 770-366-7686 with questions, concerns or ideas.
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