Ron Kampeas
My son led Birkat Hamazon, the blessing after a meal, for the first time this summer at the Conservative movement’s Ramah summer camp in Wisconsin. This was a breakthrough — and not because 10 years ago, when he was 15 and knee-deep into Nietzsche, Nathaniel was an adamant atheist.
The camp’s Atzmayim vocational program has guided Nathaniel, who is on the autism spectrum, into a role of public leadership. (Atzmayim is Hebrew for “independent.”) The program is an extension of Ramah’s storied Tikvah inclusion program. It pairs neurodivergent young adults with businesses in the nearby town of Eagle River, Wisconsin. My son has worked in the town’s drugstore, library and supermarket.
The Conservative movement’s strides in inclusion, which began in the 1970s, have been replicated in more recent decades in the Orthodox and Reform movements, as well as in camps belonging to Zionist youth movements, Jewish community centers and independent camps. The Foundation for Jewish Camps has, in recent years, provided $12 million in capital grants to 46 camps to spur accessibility, and Birthright Israel runs trips to the Jewish state for young neurodivergent adults.
Jewish teaching underpins the sacred work. A 200-page disabilities resource guide published by FJC has a chapter citing Jewish sources, including the second-century C.E. scholar, Ben Azzai, named in Pirkei Avot (“Ethics of Our Fathers”): “There is not a person who does not have his hour.”
Howard Blas, who directs the National Ramah Tikvah Network, the disabilities arm of the Conservative movement’s camps, told me he marvels at how profoundly camps have changed since 1970, when Herb and Barbara Greenberg launched Tikvah.
“I’m 60 years old. I say, ‘You grew up in this time where you had kids with disabilities, and they’re included in certain classes in your public high schools. But you know, back in the day, they were the “retarded kids,” downstairs [or] off-site,’” explained Blas, describing the talks he gives to younger generations about the evolution of Jewish camping.
The Greenbergs, who now live in Israel (as does Blas), faced resistance within the Ramah system, Blas said. “People dismissed the idea, and they said, the normal kids are going to leave, the level of Hebrew is going to go down, Ramah is the big Hebrew-speaking camp, it’s going to ruin the structure of the camp, the finances are going to go kaput.”
None of that happened. But there was a substantive change, Blas said, in how staffers treated campers and how campers treated one another. The culture of inclusion was contagious. “Everybody started being nicer — not just to the kids with disabilities, but to everybody else in camp,” he said.
The success of Tikvah soon caught the attention of other Jewish camp movements, which set up their own programs. Today, the folks who direct inclusion at the camps consult frequently and are on a first-name basis with one another.
The same evolution describes the launch of vocational programs for young adults. Atzmayim was launched in 2004, and now the Orthodox and Reform movements have similar programs.
The spur for Camp Harlam, the Reform movement camp in Pennsylvania, was seeing differently abled campers not making the transition to camp employment like some of their peers did, said Lori Zlotoff, a clinical social worker who directs camper inclusion at Harlam.
“What we were starting to find was that as they were aging out of their camper years, they were not all able to join our staff,” she said. “There was not the right lift for them to be successful as staff members. It was really hard to imagine that for so long, they were included and supported and part of the community, and then it just sort of had to abruptly end.”
In 2023, Harlam launched a vocational program, Avodah, and it has grown from four campers that year to 10 this past summer.
Yachad, the Orthodox Union’s inclusion arm, runs summer vocational programs at multiple sites, said Joe Goldfarb, the summer program’s director. The on-camp jobs in sports, kitchens, art rooms and elsewhere help transition the young people into employment, he said. But that’s not the point.
“There’s no question that these are major resume boosters, both in terms of gaining skills, and also, they can then go to a potential future employer and say, ‘Hey, you know, I worked for three, four summers in the canteen or in the dining room,” he said.
“It’s really about impacting the camp community that we’re in,” Goldfarb said. The entire staff is enriched by the program. “It’s about the community and the staff who are gaining these leadership skills. It’s tremendous.”
Ramah’s Wisconsin program takes it to the next level, ferrying the campers to “real-world” jobs in Eagle River.
The experience of working in the real world has had its desired effect: When we visited this summer on family day, we found our son at Trig’s, the local supermarket, assiduously and methodically wiping the freezer section glass doors clean.
But the work experience is not the breadth — or I should say, the depth — of the experience. The program’s staff make a point of knowing the participants, teasing out their limitations and their possibilities, and tailoring each to seven and a half weeks of summer that lingers with them throughout the year.
Vocational training is critical, said Blas, who works to spread the message to other Jewish camp movements. But the next level, he said, is creating opportunities for the neurodivergent to live apart from their families and socialize, a lesson he has brought away from the families he has met.
“Families kind of educated me that, you know, you really can’t get by in this world without having a job. It could be part-time, it could be volunteer, but you can’t get through life without housing and a social network,” he said.
Next steps, the transitioning into adulthood and into the broader community, are what fuel the Foundation for Jewish Camps’ initiatives for campers with disabilities, said Jill Goldstein Smith, FJC’s director of programs.
“We really, truly believe that camps are both a microcosm of the world that we live in, and we want them to become microcosms of the world that we want to be living in,” she told me. “We know that there is a distinct percent of population, of the Jewish population, who are neurodiverse, who have disabilities, who have mental-health diagnoses, who have chronic illness, there are all sorts of different ways that that are our Jewish communities are diverse, and we want to help support camps be able to reflect the communities that they are trying to serve.”
Nathaniel returns from camp each summer motivated to learn more, and he is doing well in his courses at a local community college. Last semester, he delivered a speech on the origins of Indo-European language, a feat we would never have imagined a few years ago.
A lot went into bringing him to this stage: His extended family, our friends, his teachers and other professionals, our religious community at Temple Rodef Shalom in Northern Virginia and a piano teacher who saw in him an emotional understanding of music.
But his six summers at Ramah in Wisconsin have been key to his development. In a setting of tall trees and still lakes, he gets the space and understanding he needs to develop on his own terms. He has come to love Shabbat and the relaxation it affords him, the time he takes to read books as he sits by the lake. (He’s no longer an atheist but still very much a fan of Nietzsche.)
He has found a community and the safety it provides. The kid with the magnificent voice, whom I could never persuade to read the Ma Nishtana, now does so, reading the Hebrew and not the transliteration, something he practices in his spare time at camp. This summer, while pedal-boating on the lake on family day, we talked about Torat Chaim and its meaning.
We watched him sing karaoke, hitting the difficult high notes in “Human” by The Killers.
Caring does not exist in a vacuum: It derives from a commitment to our ancestors and to our children.
It’s not just Nathaniel who draws succor from the camp’s mission. A couple of years ago, mired in perhaps the bleakest story I have ever covered, I got a text: Nathaniel won the “Derech Eretz” award for showing his bunkmates kindness and compassion.
Of course, I knew his kindness. I had seen it expressed a million ways to his friends and family. What bowled me over was that the staff at camp also saw and nurtured it, and rewarded its blossoming.
A longtime Washington bureau chief of JTA, he is an independent journalist based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Read more at ronkampeas.substack.com.
