Camp Massad, pictured in the 1980s, has been operating since 1953. The first Jewish summer camps in Canada were started in the 1920s and 30s by B’nai Brith and several Zionist organizations.Supplied
Allan Levine is a historian and the author of Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience. His most recent book is Details Are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder.
One day during the second week of July, 1968, I was elected president – the president of the Camp Massad camper council, that is. Massad is a Hebrew-speaking Zionist-oriented camp that has been operating since 1953 near Winnipeg Beach, Man., about 80 kilometres north of Winnipeg. I was 12 years old and it was my first political victory. The campaign had been gruelling; I had to make at least two speeches and in Hebrew (or in Massad Hebrew, at any rate – a blending of Hebrew and English phrases). I don’t recall who my competition was, but I’m certain I won the election fairly. I do remember that my opponent accepted the results and did not declare that the election was rigged or start a riot in the chadar ochel (dining hall).
My responsibilities for the next two weeks of the first session was to represent my fellow campers and head the council: representatives from each age group and cabin. As I quickly discovered, however, the power I wielded was illusory.
For my first act, I tried to increase the amount of chocolate and candy that was given out each Saturday as a Shabbat (Sabbath) treat. The council immediately approved my motion.
“Let’s order more candy,” I said.
“Not so fast,” said the then 26-year-old director, Arky Berkal (who later taught me math in junior high school). He vetoed my resolution. I demanded (OK, asked politely) for an explanation. Yet, despite Arky’s friendly and calm demeanour, I got only platitudes. No doubt, the allocation of candy was part of making Shabbat a special day and not wanting to make campers sick by allowing them to gorge on too much chocolate – though I’m certain that did not occur to my 12-year-old self. In any event, so it went.
Not that I did not keep on trying, but if I accomplished anything as camp president, I have no memory of it. Still, it was a point of pride and honour, and it cemented my deep affection for the camp as a camper, counsellor and administrator over the next 12 years. Much later, my two children went to the camp and I have served on its board. It has remained dear to my heart to the present day.
The camp acted as a powerful and enduring bond. Several of my closest friends shared those 1960s and 70s camp experiences with me, and now, more than 50 years later, we still laugh and endlessly reminisce about our various escapades (admittedly, more as counsellors than as campers). Despite the unscenic surroundings (you have to cross a highway to get to the lake), primitive lodgings and outhouses (indoor toilets were eventually installed, but long after my era; the grounds have since been improved and a swimming pool built), living in a Hebrew-speaking environment for three to six weeks each summer, while imbued with a positive attitude about Judaism and Israel and encouraged to flourish creatively, left a lasting impact on our lives. And as a teenager, living away from your parents in a co-ed setting that allowed for close “interactions” with the opposite sex was a definite plus.
This coupling of typical camp activities with a celebration of Jewish culture – a panoply of Israeli dancing, arts and crafts, scouting, sports competitions, “shticky” skits and dramatic productions (The King and I in Hebrew, for example) – is the subject of a recent scholarly book, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America, by Sandra Fox, a visiting assistant professor of Hebrew Judaic Studies and director of the Archive of the Jewish Left Project at New York University. She delves deeply into the ideologies at the heart of Jewish summer camps in the United States, as well as probing the ways in which the campers (and counsellors), in what she terms the “power of youth,” played key roles in making the camps work.
Author Allan Levine is pictured in front of the boy’s outhouse at Camp Massad, a Hebrew-speaking, Zionist-oriented summer camp near Winnipeg Beach, Man., in July, 1969.Supplied
“Jewish children and teenagers were no different from their non-Jewish peers, arriving seeking fun, freedom, play, escape, and romance, and generally prioritizing these other elements over camps’ ideological missions,” she writes. “While leaders formulated their missions in advance of the summer, life at camp proved much more complicated. To make a mark on campers, staff had to endeavour to get their buy-in, answering to their needs, desires, and interests. This dynamic made Jewish camps sites of ongoing intergenerational negotiation, debates, and dialogues that occurred both aloud and in the unspoken space between what adults wanted camps to accomplish and what actually happened on the ground.”
While her impressive study is concerned chiefly with American Jewish camps, much of what she writes is applicable to Camp Massad and other Jewish camps in Canada, not all of which are Hebrew-speaking. Indeed, while my friends and me, along with generations of “Massadniks” – including our children and now grandchildren – have long maintained that Massad was and is unique in its approach and its inventive programming, Dr. Fox shows how mistaken that assumption has been. For that matter, she adds, “Jews were far from alone in recognizing the potential power of sleepaway camps after World War II … Christians similarly expanded their summer camping sector in the postwar years.” Protestant leaders understood, too, the positive educational and religious impact summer camps could have on their youth.
There was no shared blueprint for designing a comprehensive Jewish camp experience, but somehow most camps in the U.S. and Canada, especially those with Hebrew immersion and a Zionist bent, came up with remarkably similar daytime activities and evening programming – a mixture of exercise, sports, daily prayer, education, creativity and fun all designed to promote Zionism and a love of Israel. The singing of Hebrew songs was an integral part of each day and the start of the Sabbath on Friday nights with prayer, music and a Shabbat meal was truly special and moving. All of this generated a contagious ruach, or spirit, that enveloped the camp, and by the end of the session or summer, it left the campers and counsellors counting the days until they could return the following year.
Most camps, including Massad, end each session with a two-day extravaganza called “Maccabia” (named for the Maccabiah Games first held in 1932 in Palestine), in which the campers and counsellors are divided into two teams. At Massad, it was and is an intense affair of sports competitions, high-level arts and crafts, set-building that could rival Broadway, hilarious skits and well-crafted drama and musicals in Hebrew. As a teenager, I was surrounded by an impressive collection of talented individuals who could do just about anything – literally constructing a dungeon, Japanese tea house, pirate village and Anne Frank’s annex, to list only a few of the more memorable ones.
The first Jewish summer camps in Canada were established in the 1920s and 30s by B’nai Brith and several Zionist organizations, some with stronger ideological political philosophies than others. With a goal of supporting a Jewish state in Palestine and preparing young Canadians to make aliyah (literally “to ascend,” but in this case to immigrate to Israel), Zionist groups such as Young Judea and Habonim opened camps in several locales including Camp Kadimah (”Forward”) at Port Mouton on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, which began its summer program in 1943. At a time when Jews were not welcome at social, sports and golf clubs, when they were not hired for jobs and refused admission to university programs, and when racist property covenants and “Gentile Only” signs were still the norm, camps specifically for Jewish children that served kosher food and offered a Jewish-centred program greatly appealed to Jewish parents.
The Camp Massad I attended (there are others in Quebec and the U.S., though not affiliated) grew out of a Habonim camp that had been operating since the early 1940s. Owing to the persistence of among others, the late Israel (Soody) Kleiman, who in the summer of 1952 was 19 years old, the Habonim camp, which was scheduled to close, was transformed into Massad – despite the skepticism of Zionist officials in Winnipeg. The key to Massad’s survival was the leadership of Leona Billinkoff (1920-2014), the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, a teacher and kind soul. In 1953, she agreed to serve as the camp administrator and on-site eemah (or mother), and her devotion and dedication for the next 25 years was the prime reason Massad flourished.
In 1961, Giveret B. (Mrs. B.) as we affectionately called her, and the camp’s board hired 25-year-old Gad Horowitz as the camp’s director, a job he held for the next five years. Now a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, he enhanced Massad’s program and instituted the use of Hebrew as the camp’s official language. At most summer camps, children are confined to their own age groups. At Massad, Dr. Horowitz mixed them up and divided the children into teams and interest groups. The emphasis was on the whole program and the result was the creation of a Massad family. “Everywhere,” Leona told me many years ago, “there are ‘Massadniks’ of different ages drawn together by this common experience.” It was a place, she added, “where every little boy could learn to dance and every little girl to hammer a nail; where everyone could sing and appear on stage.”
For that “common experience,” she probably did not have in mind romance and sexuality between campers, counsellors and even campers and counsellors. Yet as Sandra Fox details, flirting, romance and sexual vibes “permeated the camp atmosphere.” How could it have been any different? Free from the supervision of parents, and in my day influenced by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, it was only natural that older campers and counsellors – at many camps, counsellors are a minimum of 17 years old, while at Massad first-year junior counsellors are 15 and 16 – who were essentially living together (in separate cabins, of course) were attracted to each other. Never underestimate the raging hormones of 13- to 17-year-old boys when slightly older (and developed) girls are emerging from the communal shower area in towels or dressed in bathing suits for swimming. And there was nothing quite like an “older” girl, who would not have given you the time of day in the city, suddenly chatting you up, or better still, inviting you to sit beside her around a campfire. “Cool” counsellors were the role models and I will never forget how one of my definitely cool counsellors (now a friend), who was 16 when I was 12, instructed me how to talk to a girl while holding a cigarette. (Yes, believe it or not, in those days, counsellors could smoke in front of campers, even in the dining hall.) Dr. Fox suggests that camp administrators, concerned with rising intermarriage rates in the U.S., encouraged romance, though it seems to me that was not an issue at Massad. At the same time, some of my friends did “hook up” at camp, and later got married.
There is no denying that Massad and other camps had an ideological agenda; as we got older there were intensive role-playing programs about the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Fifty years ago, Israel had not yet fully transformed from an underdog to the region’s military power. The miracle of its victory in the Six-Day War of June, 1967, remained fresh, and threats to its existence felt imminent – as the Yom Kippur War of 1973 showed. Controversies about its policies and governments were few and far between.
Still, Massad did not brainwash us. What the camp did was offer – in an immensely enjoyable environment – significant and for the most part subtle lessons on what it meant to be Jewish in North America, where antisemitism was still prevalent. As Dr. Fox notes, quoting a 1966 article by Jewish education expert Daniel Isaacman, Jewish summer camps enabled “the experience of Jewish living” to be more effectively conveyed in a couple of months in the summer than in “an entire school year of class instruction.’” Or, as New York author Rachel Mann put it in a 2016 article in The Forward: “During the rest of the year, a few weeks can pass by in a blink, with little to ‘write home’ about. But in camp, a person can grow up in a month, or two. A person can fall in love. A person can change, forever.”
And we did.