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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: Formative experiences
Date: 21 Elul 5783
Subject: The camps
Nu, the richness here is not yet understood.
In America after the war, the Jewish camp became something remarkable. I know this from my cousins who came here in the 1950s, who sent their children to these places while we stayed in Hungary and had nothing comparable.
There were Zionist camps and Yiddishist camps. Denominational camps for the Reform and Conservative movements. Socialist camps like Kinderland, where children sang labor songs in Yiddish and debated whether Stalin was good for the Jews. (This was a real debate, my cousin tells me. The counselors disagreed among themselves.) There were camps where you learned Hebrew and camps where Yiddish was the language of instruction. Religious camps where boys and girls were separated and secular camps where they were not.
The ideological battles of European Jewry, transplanted to the Catskills and the Poconos, fought through color wars and campfires and which songs you sang on Shabbat.
A person who went to Ramah is not the same as a person who went to Kinderland. The camp they attended says something about their family, their ideology, their Judaism, their parents' politics, their grandparents' politics. This is real information.
And yet: how do we encode it?
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