Rabbi Alvin Mars, Ph.D., is the senior advisor to the president of JCC Association for educational development. He was both a youth director and educational director in a synagogue setting, headmaster of an elementary day school and of a boarding high school, dean of a graduate school of education, vice-president for academic affairs of a university, founding director of the Mandel Center for Jewish Education, and director of Camp Ramah in California and the Brandeis Bardin Institute.

The JCC Movement for which I work maintains the largest network of Jewish day camps in North America. Eighty thousand Jewish children attend our camps each summer, and about twenty thousand teenagers and college age youth work on staff. Most of our campers spend several summers in a JCC camp, and many return as counselors and specialists. While other day camp networks are much smaller, most Jewish day camps not affiliated with a JCC are maintained by individual Jewish institutions.

Because of their trans-denominational nature and pluralistic approach, most day camps attract children from a broad cross-section of the Jewish community. For those who come from less observant and unaffiliated homes, camps often provide their most extensive and intensive encounters with Jewish life, learning and practices. For older campers and counselors who are no longer enrolled in formal Jewish education programs, day camps are frequently their only current Jewish educational experience. (For more explicit details, see Cohen and Blitzer: JCC Day Camps as Jewish Educational Experiences: Parents, Directors, Staff Make a Difference; The Florence G. Heller JCC Association Research Center, April 2009.) While there is little research into day camping, conventional wisdom is that the same is true for those Jewish day camps in other movements, as well as those which operate independently.

Although day camps have the potential to play an important role in fostering positive identification with Judaism, it is my belief that their potential to foster Jewish identity and provide truly significant informal Jewish education experiences is not being fully realized. This is the case for JCC day camps, and it must certainly be so for many of the individual Jewish day camps across the continent that see themselves as not much more than summer day care providers, albeit for elementary and middle school age children.

The potential for enhancing the Jewish educational components of our people’s day camping programs, an underdeveloped Jewish educational resource if there ever was one, is revolutionary. We can bring about both a culture change and a paradigm shift in day camping. By cultural change, I mean that each day camp must begin to view itself first and foremost as an experience in vibrant Jewish living and not merely as a general summer fun experience for those who attend. The paradigm shift will then be for the day camp to use its power to educate through the vehicle of the Jewish experiences (the informal education) it provides. The camp’s ultimate purpose must become the enhancement and enrichment of the Jewish life, learning and soul of each of its campers and staff members.

The great Jewish and Zionist educator of the last century, Alexander Dushkin, once analogized Jewish Education of the first part of the twentieth century to the Mississippi River, a mile wide and an inch deep. That description is most apt for the nature of Jewish learning and experience in twenty-first century North American Jewish day camps. With eighty thousand children in JCC day camps, how many more Jewish children must be having summer experiences in Jewish day camps either affiliated or stand alone Jewish camps, where the informal Jewish education program is not maximized?

The magnitude of the Jewish day camping enterprise on the North American continent offers potential for teaching and touching tens of thousands of children and teens and college students and their families and impacting the fabric of their Jewish lives in a most substantial way. What those of us who care about the potential of informal education are called upon to do is to create a day camping enterprise for the Jews of North America that is not only as broad as the Mississippi but also as deep as Mount Sinai is high, and embodies the richness of our tradition, people and culture that has developed over millennia.