As camps across Canada prepare for another summer, the leadership at Jewish operations know they can’t treat this year like any other. Most years, the young campers are escaping the stress caused by disagreements with parents or boring schoolwork. But this year, coming up on nine months of ongoing conflict in Israel and rising antisemitism at home in the wake of the Oct.
7 attacks, their retreats are an escape from much more than the usual domestic concerns. But what, exactly, does it mean to be an escape this summer? Does that mean putting all the intense issues on the backburner and creating more space to avoid them? Or, does it mean spending more time delving into the issues, but providing a safe space to do so? “We’re dealing with this tension that we don’t yet officially know how to navigate, which is that you want to both be able to talk about what is happening and for students to have an opportunity to debrief,” said Alexandria Fanjoy Silver, a Jewish History teacher at Toronto’s TanenbaumCHAT high school who’s also running Israel programming at Camp Ramah in Canada. “At the same time, there is a concern about overwhelming them or emotionally traumatizing them without parents, right? Because you’re living in a community.
So it’s trying to figure out how to navigate that temperature.” Although it can be tempting to prescribe a solution ahead of time, Fanjoy Silver said it’s important to maintain flexibility depending on what the campers seem to w.
