When Ally Amernick was young, she attended summer camps at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore.
Today, she serves as the assistant director of the same camps that she used to look forward to as a kid.
“It’s a very unique and special feeling,” Amernick said. “I remember being like 5 years old, and walking into the building for the first time and thinking that it was so big and tall. Being able to experience that myself is just really cool, and I have such a positive experience at the JCC every single summer.”
While many Jewish kids and their families opt for sleepaway camp in the summer, the JCC offers day camps. Amernick said that she was a “day camp kid from the start,” never attending sleepaway camp. There is value in both versions of Jewish summer camp, with Amernick saying that day camp is great for certain families.
“Jewish camp in general is so valuable, whether it is the [overnight] camp or it is day camp. I think every camper has different needs, and so do families. I think day camps can be really valuable because you get to go home at the end of the day, which can be nice for a lot of campers to be able to see their parents every day and check in with them,” she said.
And while Amernick may have attended day camp and works professionally on one, she emphasized that, regardless of what works for a given family, Jewish summer camp is worth exploring.
“Camp is just a really great place in general, because you get to see your friends that you might not normally see every day at school, and it’s really like a unique environment where we bring together such a strong community, and so many campers from different schools and counties and places that might all have different values, but we’re all here for like the same purpose, which is to have an amazing summer,” she said.
At the JCC, it’s not just summer camp that Amernick works on. There is a Saturday night kids program year-round, as well as a spring break camp and winter break camp.
“During the offseason, [we have programs] a couple of times a month, and then during the on-season it’s every day,” Amernick said.
Each year, the staff at the JCC works around the clock and calendar to make sure that its offerings are expansive and run smoothly. There are four full-time camp staff members.
Each fall, they debrief on how camp went the summer before and prepare for the coming year. Winter is full of planning. Amernick and the rest of the team create programming, book events, schedule field trips and more. In the spring, they focus on onboarding staff, conducting camp orientation and making sure that everything is ready for the kickoff in early June.
While the camp’s programming and trips change, there is one event each summer that the staff and the kids look forward to — the trip to Hersheypark.
“They get to spend the day there, and our kids just absolutely love it,” Amernick said. “They’ll sign up for those weeks where we go to Hersheypark.”
There are plenty of highlights in the every-day mundane, too. Amernick said that, as a former art camper, she especially loves lunch at camp each day.
“I run lunch every day, and it’s a big party. Each day has a different theme, and I take song requests. We’re playing music, and I think something that’s really cool is we have a little stage and campers are allowed to actually get on stage and perform if they want to. It’s something that makes them feel really special — doing this little dance that they probably made up at home, but they’re doing it in front of all these other kids.”
For Amernick, helping create a wonderful camp experience at the same place that she attended as a child makes going to work each day special. She said she plans to continue to work hard to welcome new faces and retain old ones as the camp grows and changes.
“We’re always trying to make sure that we’re keeping our programming as fresh as possible and keeping it up with the times. Just progression and programming, making sure that we’re always evolving and bringing in new things over the summer is something that we’re always thinking about, and also just increasing our enrollment in general,” Amernick said.
“We want to welcome as many families to a positive Jewish summer camp experience as possible.”
