At one point last week the camp director had to tell a group of teens their hometown was under a barrage of rockets from Gaza. They had no other way of knowing. Inside a hot summer initiative spreading in Israel
Amid the lush green foliage of a pastoral youth village, a group of 14-year-old girls lounged on benches, flushed from the August heat. They were laughing and chatting, excited about their morning activities.
To those familiar with Israeli teenagers in 2022 – or teenagers anywhere for that matter – the scene featured a glaring absence: None of the five girls was glancing at, tapping on or even holding a cellphone.
The five girls – Hadar Manor, April Savion, Michelle Spitzer, Emily Makayov and Emily Nadler – are all from the city of Rishon Letzion southeast of Tel Aviv. They were in the midst of their first 10-day sleepaway-camp experience an hour to the north, at the well-equipped Gesher camp in the Neve Hadassah youth village near Netanya.
A condition of the heavily subsidized experience – which cost their families a fraction of the typical camp price tag – was surrendering their phones, allowing them to fully focus on activities like swimming, yoga, juggling, outdoor cooking, and arts and crafts. But most of all, they could focus on each other.
So removed from the outside world were the ninth graders and their fellow 80 campers that the camp’s director, 29-year-old Noga Shitrit, had to tell them two days earlier that sirens had gone off in their hometown. Hostilities had begun between Israel and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and their families had been running to shelters.
For those who know the summer-camp drill, the fact that phones were off-limits isn’t surprising. What has come as a surprise, even to the girls, is that not only do they not miss carrying a computer in their pocket, they feel better without it.
“I don’t miss it at all! I don’t really want it back,” Manor says, then laughs at herself. “I can’t believe I’m saying that.”
Manor had been hesitant when her mother signed her up for camp. She admits that on the first day it was very hard to be among girls she didn’t know while lacking her technological tie to home.
Now, smiling after quickly bonding with new friends and enjoying camp life, she says: “I don’t want to go home. None of us do.” Her friends nod vigorously in agreement, as Shitrit, standing nearby, smiles with satisfaction.
If she could hear them, their words would be music to the ears of Shawna Goodman Sone, founder of Summer Camps Israel and a Canadian-Israeli immigrant who has spent four years investing money, time and energy. Her personal mission: Get as many young Israelis away from their screens and into an immersive summer-camp experience.
Goodman Sone and her husband are like many North American immigrants whose decision to move to Israel began with the connection to the country they developed at summer camp. Ironically, once they have kids of their own, they discover that there’s no Israeli equivalent of the transformative months they spent bonding with their bunkmates. The disappointed immigrants who can afford it, along with wealthy Israelis, pack their kids on a plane to North America to experience the Young Judea or Camp Ramah life they grew up enjoying.
But the vast majority shrug and, along with most Israelis, cope with the local reality. After kids grow too old for most day camps at around age 11 or 12, summers can easily become a two-month slog in front of the television or computer, video games included. This doesn’t spare the families that can take a week or two off for a vacation.
Goodman Sone, one of the lucky few who could send her three sons back to North America for camp summers, felt the disparity.
“My kid comes back from summer camp brighter – glowing,” she says. “He experiences things I had nothing to do with – memories that are entirely his. I feel like Israeli kids are really missing that kind of immersive experience.”
It concerned her deeply that so few in Israel’s extensive landscape of formal and informal education took summer vacation seriously.
“No one in charge seems to think programmatically or thoughtfully of what happens in the summer months. It’s such a stressful time for parents. Everything is intense: The weather’s intense, people’s work schedules are intense. Often – like this year – wars happen in the summer. And nobody is thinking about the kids,” Goodman Sone says.
“And as I did research, I learned that Israel ranks at the top of countries where kids are addicted to devices, that there’s a high incidence of latchkey kids because their parents are working. And so the kids are fiercely alone in the summer, isolated, eating microwaved frozen schnitzels, and on their devices for an average of eight hours a day. That’s a vacation?”
So the seeds were planted for Summer Camps Israel. Goodman Sone was already board chair of the Morris and Rosalind Goodman Foundation, which backs causes that “enrich civil society in North America and Israel.” She was talking to the head of an Israeli group that promotes social entrepreneurship and new initiatives; the foundation was considering offering a grant.
In their conversation, she shared her concerns about kids and summertime, and the potential grantee encouraged her to move beyond the donor role. She could become a social entrepreneur herself, pursuing her vision of bringing the summer camp experience to Israeli youth.
So Goodman Sone set out to find Israeli partners, knowing that while there was no way she could cut-and-paste the American Jewish summer camp experience onto Israel, there should be a way to buoy camps that include the “sticky and formative” camp elements that encourage independence and growth.
Anat Ben-Dror, Summer Camp Israel’s co-director who previously held senior positions in the Israeli Scouts, the country’s largest youth movement, came on board. She agreed with Goodman Sone’s diagnosis.
“The summers are particularly long and horrible for kids in Israel,” Ben-Dror says. “The goal of putting as many of them as possible into sleepaway camps where they would get off their phones, meet kids from other places, develop independence and make new friends? I loved that idea.”
Moreover, “Shawna’s enthusiasm was kind of like a drug – she gets people addicted to her vision and idea – I definitely got hooked right away.”
Like most Israelis, Ben-Dror was familiar with American-style sleepaway camps from movies and television. She knew that a handful were operating in Israel, most are far too dear for the typical Israeli pocketbook.
In the Israeli imagination, the concept of summer camp is merged with that of high-end summer schools abroad: only for the wealthy. Youth movements like the Scouts offer summer-camping experiences, but they’re four- or five-day trips, with the kids usually sleeping in tents and focusing on survival skills and hiking. The idea of a camp that includes bunks and cabin mates, a daily schedule of activities and swimming was alien.
“Our campers had no idea what to expect and were thrilled to be sleeping in a bed and have access to a swimming pool every day,” says Shitrit, who has been running the Gesher camp single-handedly for seven years. Like other young Israelis, she was bitten by the summer-camp bug after an experience in North America when after the army she was sent to work at a camp by the Jewish Agency. She returned every summer during university.
“It’s always hard to explain camp to outsiders,” she says. “How do you describe exactly what color war is like? It’s something you have to experience.”
A key concept of Summer Camps Israel is a commitment to support groups already running camps. The first step was to create a forum for the existing 30 camp operators to share best practices and connect. Today the group regularly meets in person and is in constant communication online, with the forum offering support in areas such as staff training and marketing, targeting a larger number of sessions for a larger number of campers.
But Goodman Sone also aims to “scale up by bringing new operators and players into the summer camp arena.”
In 2019, she and her team drew up a list of organizations focusing on informal education. After intense screening, a hackathon and boot camp, a handful of groups were offered subsidies for three summers of operation. Other organizations that had camp experiences already in place received grants to expand their capacity, along with scholarships to increase the number of campers and camps.
For example, the girls from Rishon Letzion attended Gesher, a program operating for nine years as a summer camp where religious and secular Jewish Israelis from across the country bond. Using the Summer Camps Israel subsidy in cooperation with the Rishon Letzion municipality, the Gesher facility remained open for an extra 10-day summer session, introducing 80 Israeli ninth graders to camp life.
Shitrit says she’s excited by the idea of the summer camp experience becoming a mainstay of Israeli culture. “I would love to think that by the time I have kids and they’re old enough, going away to camp will be a normal part of life here,” she says.
The list of requirements Summer Camps Israel funding is short but emphatic. To qualify for support, the camps must last at least 10 days, including a weekend featuring a Shabbat experience. They must also mix communities that don’t usually interact. Finally, they must include a volunteer element – and they greatly limit, if not totally ban, electronic devices.
When the initiative was born, there were 16 camps with an estimated 8,000 participants. By this summer, these numbers had risen to 27 and 15,000, the organization says.
The five-year goal is 35 camps and at least 32,000 kids, with 5,000 of them subsidized by full or near-full scholarships provided by Goodman Sone’s foundation, along with additional funding partners she’s working to bring in.
Those numbers might have been higher by now, but as the organization’s camps were poised to make their first big push in the summer of 2020, COVID hit. Despite the pandemic, the camps were up and running again last year, but this summer they finally feel they’re hitting their stride.
While the experience was trying, Goodman Sone notes the silver lining. “COVID definitely slowed us down in many ways, but it also accelerated the level of cooperation and support in our forum of camps and helped us find our purpose,” she says.
“We really stood together and advocated for our camps when it came to government policy, and we were there for them. … Trust is the hardest thing to develop. I don’t care how much money you have, people want to see you aren’t a fly-by-night operation. After what we went through in the pandemic and continued on, they know we’re in it for the long game.”
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