WAYNESBORO (PA)
The Washington Post
July 15, 2018
By Julie Zauzmer
When Reilly met Melanie, they were 13-year-olds at summer camp who spent the long walk from archery to their bunks talking every day. Reilly wanted to ask Melanie to an end-of-camp dance – but his friend went ahead and asked Melanie on his behalf, before he could get up the nerve to ask her himself.
That was that. Now they’re 16, and the teenagers’ summer fling is still going strong in a fourth summer together as boyfriend and girlfriend at Capital Camps, a Jewish camp just over the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
Their youthful love story is just the sort of Jewish relationship many parents hope their children will find when they send them to Jewish camps.
The Foundation for Jewish Camp, with its motto “Jewish summers, Jewish futures,” promotes research showing that camp leads to more religiously engaged adults. Compared with demographically similar Jewish peers, adults who grew up going to camp are measurably more likely to attend synagogues, celebrate Shabbat and holidays in their homes and donate to Jewish charities.
Another statistic the foundation touts: Jews who attended camp as children were found to be significantly more likely to marry other Jews.
In a 2010 study, 74 percent of former campers were in Jewish marriages, at a time when such marriages have been becoming much less common.
For many parents and camp leaders, one goal of sending a child to Jewish overnight camp is the hope that the child will someday marry within the faith, perhaps even under a chuppah, or canopy, at the very camp where the pair first met.
But some Jewish adults recall that in years past the pressure to date at camp occasionally took an inappropriate turn when poorly trained counselors – typically in their early 20s – nudged young teens into becoming close not just romantically, but physically as well.
This summer, in the #MeToo era, the Foundation for Jewish Camp is conducting a nationwide training program to prevent sexual harassment at Jewish overnight camps, which about 70,000 children attend each summer.
“There is an encouragement to build Jewish relationships. A lot of people met their spouses,” said Marina Lewin, the foundation’s chief operating officer. But she added: “There’s a difference between appropriate ways to interact and inappropriate.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.