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.