Tisha B’Av, “Ghetto Day,” and producing “authentic” Jews at postwar Jewish summer camps

ABSTRACT

The postwar period brought sweeping changes for American Jews. Communal socioeconomic transitions and the aftermath of the Holocaust triggered intense anxieties among Jewish leaders regarding the preservation of so-called Jewish “authenticity,” and to an increased focus on the moulding of American Jewish youth. This article considers how Jewish summer camps used Tisha B’Av and secular, alternative memorial days, to lead campers toward various, ideologically imbued visions of Jewish authenticity. Through fostering an aura of tragedy in what was otherwise a world of play, songs, and enjoyment, Jewish educators used memorial days as transformative educational tools. Though camps’ ceremonies looked remarkably similar, often including a carefully crafted sombre atmosphere, dirges, and responsive readings, the message of the days proved malleable to different ideological perspectives. This article considers how Zionist, Yiddishist, Reform and Conservative camps came to use memorial days to produce “real,” “ideal,” or “authentic” Jews in accordance with their ideological visions in the decades immediately following the Holocaust.

KEYWORDS:

• Tisha B’Av
• summer camp
• Zionism
• Yiddishism
• American Jewry
• postwar America

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Sandra Fox is a doctoral candidate in History and Hebrew Judaic Studies at New York University. Her dissertation, “Here, We’re Real Jews”: Producing Authentic Jews in Postwar American Summer Camps, 1945–1980, considers language, intergenerational tension, and everyday life in Zionist, Yiddishist, and denominational summer camps. Sandra is the founder and producer of Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish, and serves on the editorial board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Notes

1 Each camp director, rabbi, camper or donor who evoked the idea of “real,” “ideal,” or “authentic” Jews had a somewhat different understanding of what they meant. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines authenticity as “either in the strong sense of being ‘of undisputed origin or authorship,’ or in a weaker sense of being ‘faithful to an original’ or a ‘reliable, accurate representation.’” I use the word authenticity as it refers to Jewishness as if in quotes each time it is employed, because it is a malleable, almost indefinable concept. Despite this intangibility, postwar leaders believed Jewish authenticity to be both definable and important for the future of Jewish life in America. For work on the question of Jewish authenticity and affluence in postwar American Jewish life, see Kranson (2012) and Staub (2004).

2 In Erving Goffman’s work Asylums, Goffman defines a “total institution” as “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (xi). Many of Goffman’s examples have a negative connotation (prisons and asylums), yet summer camps fit rather neatly into his definition. Many summer camps referred to themselves as “total environments,” echoing (most likely unknowingly) Goffman’s terminology.

3 Jonathan Krasner explained,

If summer camps in general were “islands of childhood,” designed to cocoon youngsters from the “mainlands of adulthood,” Jewish educational camps were conceived as islands of Judaism, where campers would encounter and practice a vibrant Judaism, a countertype and an antidote to the outworn, lifeless, and mechanical Judaism of the urban ghettos. (284)

4 As Eviatar Zerubavel explained, that organization of time is “one of the principles that can best allow us to establish and organize priority in our lives as well as to symbolically display it” (67).

5 These special events, Leslie Paris wrote, including “large-scale competitions, theatrical performances, award ceremonies and final banquets, raised the emotional pitch to its highest level …  marked the passage of time …  and heightened the sense that camp space and time stood outside the ordinary mundane world” (120).

6 In a phone conversation on June 10, 2017, Daniel Libeskind informed me that he designed the mosaic first, and then the campers who participated in his arts programming collectively placed the tiles in the appropriate places. “That is my first memorial – I’ve become so into memorials to the Holocaust – but this was my first,” he added.

7 As Newman wrote,

A banner above the stage in the hall where we performed plays and had socials implored, “Lomir Trogn Dem Gayst Vos Men Hot Undz Fartroyt” – “Let us carry the spirit that has been entrusted to us.” … Even nature was pressed into the service of memory: Small wooden plaques nailed to trees bore the names …  [of] Bundist activists and resistance organizers … 

8 Newman described how

After “lights out,” the cabins were filled with uncontrollable weeping and sobbing. The camp mother, a lovely woman with a number tattooed on her forearm that we saw every day as she handed out milk and cookies and filled our canteen orders with Nutty Buddies, BB Bats, and Twizzlers, went from bunk to bunk, carrying a flashlight to make her way between cabins to comfort us.

9 As Sam Kazman wrote on the emotional reactions of the campers to the Ghetto Night presentations in a different issue of the camp newspaper, explaining

Watching this year’s Ghetto night programme, I noticed that some people started to cry early. By early, I don’t mean something wrong or improper, only that when I looked up and saw some campers having trouble controlling their faces, I thought “so soon?”

10 Jewish community camps around the United States, unaffiliated with a broader movement, also marked Tisha B’Av in their own unique ways. Camp Sabra of Missouri shows one example of how a Jewish camp unaffiliated with a broader movement approached Tisha B’Av. In 1973, the director of Sabra spoke at the conference National Council for Jewish Camping, explaining that Sabra was “concerned with presenting a programme on Soviet Jewry” on Tisha B’Av. The camp came up with a programme that aimed “to teach children what it means for Jews to escape.” Developing a programme patterned after Fiddler on the Roof, the staff members guided campers through a simulation of escaping “Anatevka,” the fictional shtetl in Fiddler, to the “Promised Land.” “We had darkened trucks waiting which took the younger kids who made their ways to the boats in the dark,” Edward Robbins explained, while at the same time, another group went “by land and through the forest, all the time being quiet as guards were ground. We had a border setup, guards arranged.” While Sabra is only one example of many Jewish community camps around the United States, its programme shows an example of how camps outside the realms of movements and institutions had freedom to shape Tisha B’Av in different ways than their affiliated counterparts. A broad study of Jewish community camps, including their use of Tisha B’Av, would be an enlightening addition to the field. From “The Future of Jewish Camping - Directions and Emphases,” Edward Robbins, in The Proceedings of the NCJC January 10-13, 1973, HUC Library: BM 135.N2.85, 18-19. For further reading on a different communal camp, consider Celia Rothenberg’s Serious Fun at Jewish Community Summer Camp: Family, Judaism, and Israel.

11 Orthodox camps also observed Tisha B’Av, but operating as they do under a very diverse leadership (without an umbrella organization), it is impossible to speak in general terms about their approaches to Tisha B’Av. They left very few sources regarding their Tisha B’Av observances, and many Modern Orthodox camps were established only towards the end of the seventies. Orthodox camps that were Zionist in nature (like camps operated by Bnai Akiva, for example) tended to put on very similar ceremonies to secular and pluralistic Zionist camps, but the participants were more likely to have fasted, sat on the floor, and followed the other religious tenets of the day. At Camp Morasha, a Modern Orthodox camp in Pennsylvania, a report on Tisha B’Av from the 1960s may serve as an indicator that Orthodox camps paid a similar degree of attention to the emotional use of Tisha B’Av, even as it remained a religious holy day: while a staff member reported that Morasha’s ceremony “was impressive,” “it did not have the same impact as previous years” because “the format may have become a little bit too stereotyped.” The author suggested more camper-participation and the inclusion of a “dramatic performance.” Yet the overall silence regarding Tisha B’Av in the archives of Orthodox camps may indicate that the day was relied upon less heavily by Orthodox leadership as an educational tool than by the leaders of other movements.

12 While oral histories with Ramah alumni reveal that they, too, had emotion-probing ceremonies at night, the substance of their commemorations seems more based in history and information than the visceral performances of their Zionist and Yiddishist counterparts, for whom emotion, not education, held the day’s special power.

13 Scholars of the Reform movement note that it was not unusual for the Union Institute to set the tone for the movement writ large rather than the other way around, owing much of the “contemporary tenor” of Reform Judaism, from the movement’s approach to “music, prayer, education, and Hebrew language,” to “the history of experimentation and innovation that characterized the movement’s camping programme” (xxi).

14 The majority of participants on the Pew survey were Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers who were of camp-attending age in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.