By
Donald H. Harrison
Ask any Jewish communal worker what are the three most effective ways of
guaranteeing that a child will grow up with a strong Jewish identity, and he or
she probably will answer: "Jewish day school, Jewish summer camp and a trip
to Israel."
There are four Jewish day schools in San Diego County, while a variety of
programs to send teenagers to Israel long have been in place. But summer camping
used to be beyond the community's reach — until now, say officials and
volunteers of the United
Jewish Federation.
On Jan. 23, the UJF opened escrow on a 153-acre sleep-over camp in Mountain
Center, Calif., about three miles from Lake Hemet. Purchasing the property
will cost $2.5 million; to develop it into a first-class, 200-bed camp and
retreat center will cost another $5 million to $7.5 million.
The camp will be one of the major new initiatives of the United Jewish
Federation during the coming fiscal year. Other important new programs will
include a pilot transportation project to ferry seniors from their residences to
doctors' offices and activity centers; enhancement of the
Shalom Baby program, which introduces the services of the Jewish community to
expectant parents and to families with newborns, and expansion of co-programming
with the Sha'ar
Hanegev region in Israel.
Ed Samiljan, a UJF volunteer who has been chairing the effort to develop a
sleep-over camp, said he envisions two camp sessions per summer, "which
will mean we will impact 400 kids."
"This is a major community-building activity," he said during an
interview at UJF's Joseph and Lenka Finci Building. "We will be able to
grab ahold of kids, perhaps from the age of 10 on, and involve them in a
community-building process which doesn¹t exist right now. So as these kids
grow up and mature in the San Diego community, it is very likely that they are
going to know each other, and it will be a much tighter community than it ever
was before."
Samiljan said that the camp will be the only such Jewish facility south of Los
Angeles. "There is nothing in Orange County, nothing in Riverside, San
Bernardino, San Diego or Imperial counties, so this will be the first
Jewish-community camp in this particular part of Southern California."
With such a vast area for the camp to draw from, "we don't expect any
trouble filling beds," Samiljan said.
Typically, camps make money during the summer when there are campers, but lose
money when the children they serve are in school. Therefore, Samiljan said he
hopes to incorporate into the camp's design the capability of serving as a
"retreat center for the boards of directors of the various Jewish agencies,
for youth groups, nature study groups" and the like.
Nadine Finkel, the UJF staff member who helps to develop communal programs, said
an Elderhostel site is one of the off-summer uses of the facility that are under
active consideration.
"We are so close to Idyllwild," she said. "One of the things that
we can do is art and music programming. There are great resources up in
Idyllwild, so there are lots of opportunities."
The facility, which will bear the name of a major donor if one steps forward, is
expected to open for business in the summer of 2004, although Samiljan would
like to provide the grounds for a positive Jewish youth experience even before
that.
"I would like to set it up on an experimental basis as a 'kibbutz'-type
activity," he said. "Maybe we could call it 'Kibbutz Diego' and invite
teens to come out and help us prepare the camp, work in the camp, in some modest
fashion for weeks at a time for an extraordinarily modest cost," he said.
"We'd make it very inexpensive just so the kids could get some exposure,
and so that the camp would get some exposure to the community."
Finkel suggested that teens who participate in the kibbutz-style work camp
probably would be able to make meaningful suggestions about how the camp should
be developed prior to its formal opening.
Once the camp does open, Samiljan said, he envisions it would serve 100 boys and
100 girls, ages 8-16, during each four-week session, with two regular sessions
scheduled per summer. If any group wanted to use the fully-kosher facility for
its own programming before or after those eight weeks, such an extension could
be arranged, he said.
Finkel said eventually the camp would become a separate Jewish agency and have
its own executive director and board of governors.
To underscore the importance of Jewish camping, Samiljan related two stories
from his own life:
"I have a granddaughter who lives in Wellesley
(Mass.), with her parents. My son-in-law is secular Jewish and my daughter has
gone along with his ways. My granddaughter was going to a Jewish day camp one
summer, and she came home and complained bitterly that all the kids knew all the
prayers, and she didn't know any of the prayers.
"She is a strong little girl, and the by-product was that they joined the
local Reform temple in Wellesley, and that this little girl has grown up to be a
member of the choir; she had her bat mitzvah there, and is now going through her
confirmation process."
More recently, Samiljan said, he attended services at Temple
Adat Shalom in which there were both a bar mitzvah and a bat mitzvah. The
girl who was becoming a bat mitzvah told the congregation that "she was the
daughter of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. This lovely-looking,
beautiful young girl, with a lot of presence, (also said that) her parents were
divorced, and that her mother wanted her to be raised Catholic and the father
wanted
her to be raised Jewish.
"This became a matter of great conflict in her family," Samiljan
continued. "The deciding moment in her life was attending Camp
Swig in Northern California, where she was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere
that she made a decision that she wanted to be Jewish. From there she proceeded
to Hebrew school and to bat mitzvah and a commitment to remain Jewish.
"At the ceremony, you could see the tears falling, people were dabbing
their eyes, the handkerchiefs were out." Camps have "access to
children at a very moving time of their lives."
A study of the 153-acre site commissioned by UJF notes that the property lies at
an elevation of 5,000 feet and has scenery "almost like New England and is
Alpine in appearance... From the highway (Route 74), there is a well-kept tar
road of about one-quarter mile that leads you to the site. The setback is far
enough so that there is no view or sound from Route 74. The
terrain upon entrance is rolling hills, well-treed with stone walls, parking
areas and buildings in a manicured woody setting.
"The entrance has a security gate that is opened by pressing a button that
signals the office. There are outdoor meeting areas with stone barbecues and
several 'meditation' areas around the site.
"About one-third of the site is hilly and treed and the balance is open
meadow area," the report continued. "The site is enclosed on three
sides by a National Forest and on the fourth by a private party near a stable
that provides horses for rental, training. There are roads (some tarred and some
hard-packed earth) that encircle the complete perimeter of the grounds. At one
far end there are maintenance buildings which are out of sight and quite a
distance from the principal residences."
Currently, the grounds include a 1,500-square foot administration building, four
residences, catteries and kennels, a filled-in swimming pool, and a pool house.
Samiljan said part of the renovation program would include construction of a new
swimming pool and conversion of some of the pasture land into sports fields.
With a lake just five minutes away, boating activities also will be a focus, he
said.
During Heritage's joint interview with Samiljan, Finkel and Jodie Kaplan,
a volunteer who chairs UJF¹s Israel Center committee, Finkel noted that ten
years ago the United Jewish Federation surveyed Jews throughout San Diego County
to determine what were the community's needs.
From information gathered in that survey, Finkel said, UJF developed ten
programs over the next 10 years. These included: 1) Jewish and Single in San
Diego; 2) Community Teen Coalition; 3) Pathways to Judaism for intermarried
families; 4) Community Outreach Program; 5) Israel Center; 6) Melton Adult
Mini-School; 7) college internship for prospective Jewish communal workers; 8)
community chaplain and Jewish Healing Center; 9) scholarship program to
send children to Jewish camps, and 10) Shalom Baby.
Shalom Baby is the newest program. "Right now, what it does is outreach to
expectant parents and to those with newborns," Finkel said. "They get
a volunteer visit and a fabulous resource basket — everything they might want
to know about raising a Jewish baby and about the Jewish community. All the
synagogues have brochures in the basket.
"What we want to do is expand that to a Jewish Lamazeltov program,"
she said, punning on the name of a popular birthing technique and the Hebrew
words for "good luck." Additionally, Shalom Baby could grow into
"play groups, chavurot, grandparent groups
do," she said.
The Israel Center program has been in place longer. One of its major components
is granting scholarships to teenagers interested in visiting Israel on trips
sponsored by the Federation or other synagogues and agencies within the Jewish
community.
"We gave $78,000 in scholarships the year before last for between 40 and 50
kids," Kaplan said. ³Last year, with the situation in Israel, the number
was much smaller, trips were canceled, even some of the university
programs."
With fewer people traveling to Israel, she said, there has been some focus on
bringing Israelis here. Next April, for example, during "Israel Month"
some artists from the city of Safed (Sfat)
will stage an art exhibition at the Lawrence Family JCC. A city associated with
mystical Judaism, Safed normally is a center for Jewish tourism, but now shops
are closing because there is
so little tourist traffic, Kaplan said.
About four years ago, Yaacov Schneider came to San Diego from Israel to serve as
a shaliach, or emissary. Normally, shlichim stay in a community
for a minimum of two years, with an extension possible to three under the rules
of the sponsoring Jewish
Agency for Israel.
Federation was able to get Schneider's contract extended to four years, and then
to five, but agreement to the latter came only after UJF consented to relinquish
his services at the end of the fifth year, Kaplan said. In March, a group of San
Diego officials will begin the process of interviewing someone to replace
Schneider when his fifth year is concluded.
Schneider has become popular in San Diego, not only as someone who encourages
people to visit Israel, but also as the person who was instrumental in creating
the partnership between Federation and the Sha'ar
Hanegev region of Israel, on the border with Gaza.
Under the partnership, Federation contributes $750,000 annually to support the
student village of Ibim,
where newly-arrived students from immigrant families study Hebrew as well as
course work in their own fields while acclimating to life in Israel. As Ibim is
located within the Sha'ar Hanegev
region, this support has a spillover effect on the rest of the area. Now there
are frequent cultural and educational exchanges between the two areas, and
Sha'ar Hanegev's mayor, Shai Hermesh, is a frequent visitor to San Diego.
For many years previously, UJF was a participant along with federations from
other cities of the United States in a program to support Kiryat
Malachi, the development town in the Negev from which Israel's President
Moshe Katsav hails.
Because the money went into a central fund, with limited opportunity for direct
input by San Diegans into how the money was spent, the local Jewish Federation
decided to gradually withdraw from the consortium supporting Kiryat Malachi in
favor of a direct 1:1 relationship with Sha'ar Hanegev, Finkel said.
The interview with Heritage concerning new UJF initiatives had one
additional program to cover: the intended start-up of transportation programs
for seniors.
Finkel said transportation has long been identified as one of the major problems
facing not only Jewish seniors, but seniors of all religions and backgrounds. A
Federation task force met with various agencies dealing with seniors to
determine what needed to be done.
"Right now we are talking about getting them to JFS (Jewish Family Service)
centers, getting them to their doctors," Finkel said. "It is amazing,
the more you get into the subject. We learn there are such things a
'door-to-door' programs for people who are ambulatory and 'door-through-door'
programs, for the ones who need assistance.
"Some people need a large bus; other seniors have special needs," she
added. "We have made a list of what is available now in the Jewish
community. What we need to do is look at the whole picture. What do people need
to go to programs, or get out to lunch, or get to medical services? What we want
to do is develop a model program, a pilot program— perhaps in one or two Zip
code areas — and see if we can get a transportation program going and go from
there."
Finkel said the program probably will involve "a combination of a shuttle
service and volunteer drivers."
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