CAMPS SUMMER GETS A DOSE OF
VIRTUAL CAMP
Say hello to Camp Yalla, which will bring entertainment and connections to kids in the most modern of ways BY HOWARD BLAS | jns.org Mariel Falk, co-founder and co-director, showing off her painting skills and Camp Yalla enthusiasm.
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his past March, when the reality of no school and parents working from home began to set in, a few young Jewish summer-camp lovers began to raise the next inevitable question: What if camps are unable to open this summer? Mariel Falk and Avi Goldstein, veteran campers and staff members at Camp Modin in Maine, and a few friends with years of experience at other Jewish summer camps, created Camp Yalla — a virtual Jewish summer-camp experience for 8- to 12-year-olds. “My heart was breaking over the loss of physical summer camps,” reports Miriam Lichtenberg, a veteran of both Camp Nesher in New Jersey and Camp Ramah, a network of camps affiliated with the Conservative movement. “I wanted to help rectify that and perhaps
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L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • JULY 2020
fill in the gaps that so many children would be missing — namely, community, friendship and a place to be your full self.” Lichtenberg, will serve as Camp Yalla’s director of Jewish programming, says summer camp is “where I found myself.” “It is where I made some of my closest friends, developed some of my fondest memories and have always been able to be my truest and best self,” she explains. “Camp Yalla gives me hope. At our camp, we will bring some of the best things about physical camp to our experience — the friendships, the laughs, the deepening of the self and the mind, the ability to be silly and free. Camp Yalla will have all of that, and I am immensely grateful and excited to be a part of that experience!”
