It was also an opportunity for those pushing a particular point of view or outlook to influence the younger generations of the community and so engender their support when they became adults.

The potential down side was that there was a considerable level of competition among the groups for membership and there was difficulty in finding leaders and adult supervision to ensure the successful continuity of the groups across years of activity.  

It would be true to say that the better financed the group by its parent association the more likely it was to have annual rebirth, successful recruitment and ongoing management of activities.

Those groups that were not as well supported seemed to start, grow, get weaker and die only to be resurrected at a later time and go through the cycle again.

At the time there were a number of us, including those listed below who wanted try and make a difference and try to remedy this situation:

Michael C, Gabriella C, David F, Suzanne M, Geoff F and Louise N, and Peter G (me).

We were involved in discussions about what if anything could be done to expose young people born into the Jewish faith to the continuum of Judaism that encompassed the non religious through to orthodox, non Zionist to Zionist, culturally unaware to culturally committed etc. In short, the gamut of Jewish experience.

Our discussions were based on the reality that so many Jewish kids simply rejected any buy in to their community and their heritage and left to join the more general society leaving their heritage behind. We all considered that this was a pity and could or at worst would leave the community more and more exposed to such integration and amalgamation into the general Australian community as to diminish the ability of the Jewish community to maintain and nurture its unique contribution to that society.

As our discussions progressed, we gradually formed the view that it would be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if we created a complete Jewish experience for young people in a site which was far removed from any temptations of the outside world – ie at a camp.

Our ideas progressed to notions asking each young person who was accepted into the proposed program to commit up front, before acceptance to the program to a week of trying every activity, every experience, every task and chore that formed the basis of the program.

Then we started to plan seven days of activities from waking to sleeping time which was totally saturated with Jewish experiences. This involved the learning of morning prayers, the laying of tefillin, the maintenance of strict Kashrut, the crafts being taught and practised producing things that would be used in the culmination of the program which was the invitation to the Sabbath bride on the evening of the Friday and the various activities which were permitted on a genuinely observed Shabbat.

All of our sporting activities and our social activities were based on association with the twelve tribes of Israel, our ceremonies were taken each day from a different Jewish tradition ranging from reform through to ultra orthodox to enable the youngsters to experience the full range of HOW things were done in each of the branches or sections of Jewish belief.

Having had the idea and being enthused by it we found a name for the proposal, Pegesha, or meeting, which was as best as we could reconstruct the notion of community from the Hebrew.

We then set about meticulously planning the activities, the funding, the advertising, the catering, the arts, crafts, sports and social activities.

This took over six months of regular activity meetings and learning. Each of us who were involved needed to be ahead of the kids and so we learnt from each other. We involved resources as necessary to teach ourselves skills that we did not have and knowledge that we needed to pull this project off.

As the only 'paid' youth worker I was nominally the project manager. However in all honesty this was a project in which all of the participants contributed equally with full consensual decision making. I believed that unless each one of us was committed fully to the end product, it would not work.   The youngsters we were inviting to participate would sense the disharmony among us and would exploit this to avoid the immersing effects of the whole experience.

To fund the program and subsidise the attendance of young people at what we calculated would otherwise be at a prohibitive cost we engaged in discussions with existing organisations and pointed out to them that such a program was in their interest as it would identify and gather young people who were not already involved in the Jewish community or its activities.

Thus it could produce recruits for their programs or at minimum would at least get some of the kids to explore their Judaism and should result in at least (in our estimation based on our research) a 60% take up rate of at least three explorations of community based organisations so that the halo and ripple effects emerging from the experience could be carried forward. It was also something that could benefit experienced members of existing groups to see.  They could experience and learn new youth leadership techniques through the program and be exposed to professionals who were providing this program.

Our advertising was based on the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words – so we created a cartoon book which represented an imaginary conversation between a radical looking character (ie the young person) and a caricature 'oldie' – ie a parent. The response to our advertising was phenomenal.

Within a week of the promotion we had over two hundred applicants and we then needed to cull these applications down to the numbers we believed we could handle and could take through the experience with safety. We figured on a ratio of five kids to each supervisor so since we had seven worker supervisors we limited the size of the camp to 35 kids and frankly I thought we had bitten off a little more than we could chew, but as it turned out the ratio was about right. One more kid each would have broken our spirits as adults, but one less would not have stretched our ingenuity enough.

The event culminated with the Sabbath. All of the candles had been made by the participants, the clothing in which we dressed the Sabbath Bride; the prayers were learnt during the week, as were the songs and the ceremonial components. 

The challah was baked by the youngsters and all the food preparation was undertaken by them throughout the week under the supervision and control of André V the caterer.  

Karen was our Sabbath bride.  The ceremony in which Karen as the Sabbath Bride was installed followed by her welcoming in the Sabbath, the meal, the ceremonies, the prayers, the songs the sense of family which was born and lingered into the night was an experience that brought tears of joy to the eyes and a feeling of warmth and belonging that was acquired from the common work, and experiential learning that the group enjoyed for the seven days of the camp

All of this experience was written down and stored in archive boxes in the BB Headquarters at Woolloomooloo and I am aware of it being uplifted and moved to the new head office when the organisation moved in the 1970's (or was it eighties?) in Sydney.

So too were all the other records which were meticulously kept by me on how to build, maintain and resource youth groups together with all of the guidelines for activity creation, ice breakers, social activities, camps, benevolent activities, crafts, car rallies, newsletter creation, editing,  publication— indeed all of the activities which we did were recorded, the lessons learned written up and stored and then used as references for the next time we wanted to undertake a given type of activity so that we could have continuous improvement and a more efficient and effective use of scarce resources.

We dared and succeeded in 1974 because we were imbued with the spirit of our commitment to Judaism and to our community and because we wanted to craft our own unique contribution to the Jewish community at the time.