Camp Rahmah Tikvah

KAITLYN FINCHLER kfinchler@cjn.org Posted Oct 23, 2024 at 8: 30 AM

You can view the original article here at Columbus Jewish News

Maddy Katz, 27, packs food for low-income residents at Pantry Packers in Israel. Submitted photo

In an effort to encourage people with disabilities to go on Birthright trips to Israel, residents across the United States traveled with Camp Ramah to volunteer, sightsee and engage in Jewish traditions in the country.

Maddy Katz, a 27-year-old Columbus resident, took part in one of these trips from Sept. 16 to Sept. 24.

Some of the highlights of the trip for Katz were watching and trying wheelchair paralympic basketball, picking olives on a farm, packing food for low-income people, making tzitzit for soldiers, seeing friends and family, watching sunsets, celebrating Shabbat and trying new foods, she told the Columbus Jewish News.

“I have ADD/ADHD,” she said in an email. “So, visuals are very helpful and we had a lot of people who were like that on this trip. We had one person who was missing a limb and a couple people with food allergies – also me. It was a lot of (fun) learning about everyone and everyone’s special talents.”

Howard Blas, senior adviser at the National Ramah Tikvah Network, organized the trip with Birthright Israel.

PHOTOS: Columbus resident reflects on Camp Ramah, Birthright Israel trip

Maddy Katz, a Columbus resident, does a double thumbs-up outside of the Harmony Hotel Jerusalem.
Emily, left, Ben, Maddy Katz and Rachel – all friends from camp – at the Anu Museum in Tel Aviv
Maddy Katz, a congregant of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, holds up a zeet zeet she made for soldiers
Maddy Katz wearing her grandfather’s talliet and tafflin at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
Maddy Katz wears a sweatshirt reading, “always your neighbor” to represent the food bank, Neighborhood Services, Inc., that she volunteers for, while in Israel.
A sign in Hostages Square that reads, “TIKVAH,” in Tel Aviv.

“A lot of people started getting the idea that volunteering in Israel was a nice way to pitch in and show support and help out,” Blas, a New Haven, Conn., resident, told the CJN. “I got the idea that maybe people with disabilities would also have something to contribute.”

Blas said he approached Birthright since he had organized trips for people with disabilities for the organization before, and they were “very supportive” and said “let’s do it.”

The group unexpectedly had to relocate to Jerusalem on the last night of the trip due to safety concerns, but organizers tried to minimize unpredictable occurrences, Blas, a congregant of The Westville Synagogue in Westville, Conn., said. Traveling with people with disabilities comes at a higher cost than a typical trip to Israel.

“Our population needs more support and we need staff,” he said. “We need to fly with them. We need to have extra activities and hotels will be better, meals will be better. So, (Birthright) basically picked up the cost of all those accommodations for our group.”

Katz said this trip was geared towards everyone’s individual needs at a “much slower pace” and more her speed.

“We’re flexible,” Blas said. “Even though it’s very structured, if we see that people are really tired and we’ve overestimated how much we can get done in a day, we can reevaluate. We were very impressed with the group’s flexibility.”

It was “extraordinary” to see the realization in the participants that they were able to do everything their families had done on other Birthright trips, Blas said.

Planning for trips with neurodivergent participants means more structure, Blas said. Free time is “not usually the best” for these trips, so off-time was filled with activities and excursions.

Katz, who volunteers “a lot” with Neighborhood Services Inc., a food bank in Columbus, said the participants prayed “the Camp Ramah ways” with tunes from camp, and saw Jewish sites such as Hostage Square, Old Jerusalem, food markets and more.

Hoping more Jewish leaders will recognize the importance of these specialized trips, people with disabilities need to be considered as the same priority as neurotypical people and people without disabilities for Birthright trips, Blas said.

The next trip akin to this with Birthright will be in December for individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Katz, a congregant of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, previously went to Israel on a Birthright trip with Blas in December 2017. She wanted to go again because Blas was “very organized” and a “great leader,” and wanted to be with people like her, she said.

“The first trip was much more fast-paced and moving around a lot,” Katz, who works part-time at the Grandview Yard Giant Eagle in Columbus, said. “This trip was one – a different city for the last night for safety, not planned – hotel and it was much more volunteering, which is what I love.”

Read more

Original Article Published On The Covenant Foundation

In the late 1960’s, Herb and Barbara Greenberg, two teachers working in the field of special education, approached several Jewish summer camps with a novel idea: why not include children with disabilities at camp?

At the time, this was an unheard-of idea, and the Greenbergs encountered a lot of pushback and opposition.

“People worried it would cost too much, disrupt the order of camp, lower the level of Hebrew, and that the [neuro] typical children would leave,” they reflected, years later.

But Donny Adelman z”l, the camp director who was running a Camp Ramahprogram in Glen Spey, New York (the camp later moved to a New England site), responded enthusiastically. As Barbara Greenberg explained in The Jerusalem Post last year, Ramah recognized the Jewish moral imperative that this initiative signified.

It was that recognition, and a willingness to move the needle on Jewish camping, which ultimately led to the establishment of the first Ramah Tikvah program in 1970.

Identifying and recruiting campers that first summer wasn’t easy. Jewish communal professionals were not yet engaged in or thinking much about how to include Jewish children with disabilities in Jewish camping life, and it would be many years before inclusion became a buzzword. But that summer, Herb and Barbara managed to recruit eight campers, and the first Tikvah program was born.

It wasn’t smooth sailing at first. In fact, that inaugural summer, the Greenbergs spent a great deal of time serving as diplomats within the camp community, advocating for their ideal of inclusive camping, and reassuring people at camp who didn’t understand at first how a model like this could work.

But their dedication paid off. Over several years, Tikvah programs began to spring up in Ramah overnight camps across North America, and in dozens of other Jewish summer camps as well (Today, all Ramah overnight camps and day camps serve campers with disabilities, with offerings including camping and vocational training experiences, salaried employment for adults with disabilities, Israel programs, weekly video meetings, and occasional reunions and get-togethers for participants and alumni.)

This model of inclusion was so successful, in fact, that it has begun to serve as an “industry standard” for how Jewish communal spaces welcome children with disabilities into their programming.

While summer programs for campers with disabilities were much needed, there was more to be done. Families still felt there were not enough opportunities for their children to experience Jewish learning during the calendar year and for programming that included the whole family. In addition, accommodations for children with disabilities still weren’t quite meeting the standards necessary for true inclusion (which include, among other things, accommodating for sensory and behavioral needs during prayer services and community-wide events).

Families longed for a place where they could attend a Shabbat service with their child, knowing that a child’s different behavior (loud noises, or an outburst) wouldn’t be deemed a disruption. They desired an environment of acceptance as well as camaraderie with other families.

Rabbi Loren Sykes, a veteran Camp Ramah director and a 2006 Covenant Award recipient, was listening. In 2004, he launched Camp Yofi, a Jewish family camp experience for children with autism, their parents, and their siblings. (Camp Yofi received a Signature Grant from The Covenant Foundation in 2005.)

“We created Camp Yofi out of a desire to establish sacred space for and warmly welcome back Jewish families who were being excluded, actively and passively, from the Jewish community,” Rabbi Sykes shared.

Family camps for children with disabilities take place at Camp Ramah sites once or twice per year in California, the Poconos, and New England.

While inclusive camping clearly benefits people with disabilities and is praised by their parents, the impact on the rest of the camp community is also worth noting. For nearly 50 years, Ramah campers and staff members have been returning home to their synagogues and Jewish communities with a greater awareness of and comfort with people with disabilities. Each camper, staff member, mishlachat (Israeli delegation) member—the entire Ramah community—interacts with people with disabilities in a very natural way—through Shabbat programming, camp-wide field trips, meals in the chadar ochel, special events, free swim, barbecues, and special buddy and peer mentoring programs for campers and staff.

And this bears out in reflections from campers who experience the enrichment of Tikvah firsthand.

“Inclusion has taught me many lessons including patience, tolerance, and acceptance,” said Julia Wolf, a 21-year-old veteran Ramah camper. “These are qualities I take with me in my life, everyday.”

Campers at Ramah who are between the ages of 13-16 also have opportunities across the camp sites to be peer mentors, and often chose to work as inclusion or Tikvah counselors when they return as staff members at age 18. This helps assure a steady pipeline of sensitive, qualified staff.

The Jewish camping community has come a long way since the days of Herb and Barbara Greenberg’s foundational work. Today, many Jewish summer camps offer inclusive programs and the Jewish community as a whole has become far more attentive to the needs of people with disabilities.

But it’s the effect that Tikvah has had on families that is the most resonant of all.

“The Tikvah program at Camp Ramah in New England is Molly’s happy place,” said Hannah Jacobs, the parent of a long-time Tikvah camper.

“It’s more than just a second [summer] home for Molly,” Hannah continued. “It’s also the only place that allows her the freedom to be her true self.”

Read more

Original Article

The American Camping Association (ACA), which employs more than 320,000 camp staff and serves over 7.2 million children in its 2,400 ACA accredited camps report in a 2017 study that 44% of camps offer specialized programs for individuals with disabilities. They proudly note, “For 120 years, the organized camp experience has been serving individuals with special needs.” These camps began by serving campers with physical challenges and this “was the beginning of a pattern of the camp community’s response to societal issues affecting campers with a wide variety of diagnoses, including polio, intellectual and physical disabilities, childhood diabetes, cancer, and HIV/AIDS.”

In the Jewish camping world, Herb and Barbara Greenberg, two special education teachers, started the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah in New England in 1970 for campers with intellectual and developmental disabilities. There has been tremendous growth in the area of inclusion of people with disabilities in Jewish summer camps since that time. According to Jeremy Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 3,744 campers with disabilities participated in FJC overnight camps in 2019 and 4,145 in day camps.

While many camps did not operate in person in the summer of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, it is the norm around the world for children with disabilities to participate in summer day and overnight camps and respite camps. These camps differ in affiliation and structure: they may be public or private, faith based or nondenominational (communal), and they may feature various models of camping including fully inclusive, camp within a camp, and separate camps for people with disabilities.

In the United States, overnight camps typically take place during the summer months, and last from several days to 8-weeks. Campers often travel many hours by plan, bus or car to arrive at camp.

In Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey, overnight camps are a relatively new phenomena and tend to last from 5 days to 14 days. The recently established Summer Camps Israel organization aims to promote greater involvement in 30 summer camps throughout Israel. Several camps and organizations in Israel currently meet the needs of participants with disabilities and their families.

Programs Serving Special Populations

Shutaf, a year-round Jerusalem-based program, serves 300 participants, ages 6-30, with and without disabilities. They employ a reverse-inclusion model which brings together participants with diverse developmental, physical, and learning disabilities (75% of participants), alongside participants without disabilities (25% of participants).

Co-founder Beth Steinberg reports, “When we moved to Israel in 2006, the camp world here was underdeveloped. The ideas of an American style camp with values to grow and become was unheard of. We wanted summers to be the best time for our kids and we wanted to serve all kinds of needs.” Summers in Israel are usually very hot. Without camp programs, children often stay home alone or with siblings while parents work. Steinberg’s program offers a three-week day camp program each August, with arts and crafts, science, music and movement, sports, archery and a ropes course. Steinberg and her Shutaf team quickly responded to the Covid crisis by offering “Camp in a Box,” carefully planned “boxes” containing arts and crafts projects, sports equipment and gardening projects which were delivered and to over 150 participants. “It felt like a happy gift,” reports Steinberg proudly. Similar boxes are provided to participants and families during the Jewish holidays of Passover (April) and Chanukah (December) when children are on break from school. Steinberg, a veteran of the camp scene in Israel, reports, “There has been some changes recently in camping, with more choices now and some programs offering short term sleepaway programs.

The Jordan River Village Camp

Camp housed on 245 acres in the Lower Galilee of Northern Israel (near Givat Avni), was established in 2006 and is the 16th a network of 30 camps worldwide, part of the Paul Newman “The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.” They offer three unique types of camp programs which take place over approximately 40 sessions per year. One program serves children and adolescents ages of 9 and 18 who present with a wide range of medical conditions and genetic diseases, including cancer, seizure disorders, transplants, and neurological disorders. Director Yakir Sternin proudly reports, “We are the only camp in our organization which offers sessions for participants who or deaf or have hearing impairments, and for children who are blind or have visual impairments.” Sessions are generally 5-6 days and are for children who do not need parental assistance with self-care or medical care.

Three-day family sessions are offered for parents, siblings and children ages 5-18 who require self-care or medical support. Participants are oftenwheelchair users, present with seizure disorders which are not well-controlled, or are user of ventilators. The camp has also established a relationship with the Ministry of Education where campers with intellectual and developmental disabilities and autism attend 3-4 day sessions with their school staff. Sternin is pleased and excited that the camp’s sessions bring together participants from very diverse walks of life in Israel, including Jews who are secular, religious and Ultra Orthodox, as well as Christians, Druze, Bedouins and Circassians. In addition, there are two sessions per year for children who come from the Palestinian Authority and Gaza. “We are on the way to fulfilling a dream,” reports Sternin. “It is one of the most beautiful things when they meet and see eye to eye – when you are fighting for life, it doesn’t matter who your father is and who you pray to! Disability and medical situations create bridges!” Sternin also sees equally strong relationships formed among the over 1000 volunteers who come each year, from very diverse backgrounds.

My Piece Of The Puzzle

Is a camp program which integrates children and teenagers at risk and with disabilities, in to five day overnight camping sessions. The two sessions per season take place on the grounds of the Jordan River Valley camp, but is not affiliated with that camp. My Piece of the Puzzle was inspired by the United States based program, Camp Ramapo, in Rhinebeck, New York. According to director Jenna Albaz, half of the participants have such disabilities as autism, Down Syndrome and intellectual disabilities, and half come from “broken homes, dysfunctional families, have no friends, or have a police record.” Elbaz is pleased with how the participants integrate and form friendships. “For the at risk children, it is their first time they have felt loved, unconditionally. For the participants with special needs, it may be the first time they have friends without special needs and they can just be themselves.” Elbaz adds, “It is win/win—it brings out the best in both populations.” Elbaz is in the process of expanding to also offer school year programs, and a mechina, a pre-army preparatory program. Other organizations in Israel offering camps for participants with disabilities include:

The Israel Scouts, include and integrate 3000 participants with disabilities including visual and hearing impairments and behavioral disorders. They often host overnight camping trips.

Yachad Sleepaway Camp at Camp Dror

on the Golan Heights, a twoand-a-half-week Orthodox Jewish sleepaway camp which includes children with disabilities ages 9-16.

Beit HaGalgalim(“House of Wheels”)

strives to attain full social inclusion of people with physical disabilities. One way to achieve this is through weekend groups and summer camps. Each summer, hundreds of participants and volunteers attend 24 overnight summer camps throughout the country. Sessions last for 5 days and include such activities as kayaking in the north, abseiling (descending rock formations with ropes) in the south, hikes, and the performing of community service.

Krembo Wings

Is a youth movement for children and youth with and without disabilities. They also run a summer camp in the northern Israel coastal city of Nahariya. It is held over 3 sessions each August and is open to family members as well. Activities include swimming, sports, yoga, plays, magicians and more.


Read more