Alumni

Ramah Marriages

Paul Freedman & Wilma Levinne Freedman
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1960
Year Married: 1968
Met as campers in 1960, started going out in 1964 and married in the spring of 1968 returning as a couple that year.

Alan Lee Cohen & Linda Appel Cohen
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1968
Married: 1970
We met at Ramah in Canada in 1968, where we were both madrichim. After a year of long distance communication (no e-mails then) while Linda completed her degree at York University in Toronto and Alan was at JTS Rabbinical School, Linda moved to New York. We married in June 1970 and three days later were at Ramah in Canada for the summer. What a honeymoon! Our children attended Ramah in New England, Wisconsin and Darom. Our futures were decided at Ramah and we hope our grandchildren will be the next generation to attend Ramah.

Shimon Steve Albert Arbel & Josie Zaldin Arbel
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1969
Year Married: 1979
We met early in the summer of 1969 (my first summer at Ramah - Shimon had been going for a few years) when the Women's League were visiting and 2 senior (it was called Machon then) campers were chosen to speak to them. We were "just friends" for a long time, with mutual friends, in USY & seeing each other at ECRUSY events (I'm from Toronto, Shimon's from Hamilton) but we were not a couple. Shimon moved to Israel in the summer of 1973, and on a visit back to Canada in winter of 1976, bored because he had lost touch with people, looked me up. At the time, I was studying in Boston but was home in Toronto on winter break. We stayed in touch between Jerusalem and Boston, and got married in December 1979. We made aliyah in August 1984. We have three children. Rena was a Jewish Agency young shlichah to Ramah in the Berkshires after the army, & is now a shlichah in Manchester England. Noam is a company commander in Tzahal, and Adina is now making her plans for university study.

Daniel Zur & Briana Binstock Zur
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1971
Year Married: 1975
We met over the volleyball net the Shabbat afternoon of pre-camp, and have been eating sunflower seeds together ever since. Years later when visiting our children, we learned that the campers thought that Dan was hot and Briana was cool. Who knew?

Larry Wolynetz & Lori Beth Shapiro
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1972
Married: 1982
Lori Beth and I went to camp for many years. I was best friends with her brother Joel and she was his little sister. We were friendly as campers...nothing more. As staff we were friends and we began to correspond and speak to each other frequently, but really did not go out (although we might have spoken about it on occasion). During Hanhallah week in 1981, we started going out on the first day! That summer we were inseparable. Our parents even spent Shabbat at camp so they could get to know each other! By December of that year, we were engaged and we married on July 4, 1982 in Syracuse. (Submitted 2009)

Sholom Eisenstat & Rifka Holtzkener Eisenstat
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1971
Year Married: 1981

Judah Silverman & Margo Lightstone Silverman
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1972
Married: 1974

Robert Edward Novak & Yael Bauer Novak
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1972
Married: 1974

Danny Lipnik & Paula Pascoe Lipnik
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1978
Year Married: 1984
We met at a square dance on the tennis courts. I was shy so I had my bunkmate Lynda Taller tell Danny that I liked him. At first he wasn't so sure but eventually he came around and we have been together ever since.

Martin S. Cohen & Joan Freeman Cohen
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1979
Married: 1980
Joan was Rosh Drama, attempting to put on seven shows in seven weeks. I was a lonely guy trying to learn enough Greek in one summer to start 3rd year courses at Columbia in the fall without having taken any previous ones. We were not a likely couple...but it just goes to show: the heart really does have its own rules, and you never know what could happen.

Aaron Jaffe & Claudia Grossman Jaffe
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1981
Married: 1988
Aaron had been a camper at Ramah for many years and was away on Seminar when I spent my first summer at Camp Ramah in Canada, in 1980. I saw a notice that Ramah was hiring waiters and applied for the job. I returned as head waitress the next year and Aaron came on staff in the photography department. Two years later we both worked on the tripping staff and led canoe and hiking trips. We kept in touch, by old-fashioned mail, to a degree throughout college. In February, Aaron called me for my birthday and we ended up on the phone for an hour. He invited me to his college senior ball and I traveled from Ithaca to New York to attend. We started a long-distance relationship that continued while I attended law school. We were married in Niagara Falls in October 1988, with several Ramahniks in attendance. Our three sons, Joshua, Adam and Seth, have all attended Camp Ramah. We warned them to be careful —look what happened to us!

Howie Lupovitch & Marni Foster
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1982
Year Married: 1998
We first met when Marni was a bratty camper with her bratty friends. We re-met as staff members and friends. Seven years later the timing was finally right and we got together at another Ramah wedding. After love at third sight, we married two years later.

Guy Alberga & Beverley Moskovic Alberga
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1981
Married: 1991
Bev and I became good friends while teaching swimming together over 2 wonderful summers. While we never dated at camp, when we finally decided to get together we had so much in common through our experience at Ramah and knew so many of the same people that we never had to struggle through that awkward first date. In fact, it was more like old friends rekindling a friendship. Our Ramah experience brought us closer together.

Marty Goldberg & Sharon Zabitsky Goldberg
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1984
Married: 1987

Michael Joseph Landau & Faye Andrea Goldman
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1984
Married: 1991
We first met unloading luggage from the buses at camp. I missed staff week that summer, and came up with the campers. Since agam staff unloads luggage, I went right to work.....and there she was! Ramah was the perfect environment for Faye and me to solidify a lifelong adventure of Judaism and recreational fun for us and our children.

Mark Greenberg & Missy Hecker Greenberg
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1986
Year Married: 1988

Jonathan Rosenstein & Edith Korin Rosenstein
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1989
Married: 1993

Todd Sone & Shawna Goodman Sone
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1989
Married: 1996
Todd and I met on a canoe trip to Silver Birches on Lake Skeleton the first week at camp. Todd was assigned to my trip as staff and we spent two days caring for 20 fifteen-year-old campers.

Eitan Mammon & Rachel Shor
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1992
Year Married: 2001
Eitan and I met in '92, mostly ignored each other until '95, and then were "just friends" until 2000. We hope to one day send all of our kids to Ramah!

Jared Green & Barbi Price Green
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1993
Year Married: 2000
Jared and I met when I was teaching, or rather trying to teach, his youngestbrother, Shael, how to swim. We became friends that summer and started a long-distance romance during the ensuing school year, with him at McGill and me at University of Western Ontario. The rest as they say, is history...

Aaron Michael Beitner & Marci Iliza (Orman) Beitner
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1995
Year Married: 2005
We were on the same Yom Sport team.

Daniel H. Mink & Ronna S. Mink
Camp Attended: Canada
Met: 1996
Married: 2001
A thin wall in the crafts building separated them...but not for long! They had a shtetl-like wedding in the woods, where the groom harvested young maple saplings for chuppah poles and used his great-grandfather's tallit as a canopy. He also carved and put together a table to stick in the ground. The bride hand-lettered two traditionally-composed ketubot (just in case of breakage) on clay tablets and fired them in a kiln. She also hand-built 2 clay wine goblets (to be placed on the table) and glazed them with the words dodi-li, etc.

The underfoot glass that was broken was the light bulb from the woodshop, wrapped in a beautiful piece of silk. More than a dozen mishlachat were swept up from the camp on the way to the woods site and members of staff sang Israeli songs as everyone rejoiced. The food was brought up from the city and one wonderful couple (the parents of a camper) took photos and made a wedding album. It was a very hot day, and tears flowed copiously.

Daniel Brandes & Shana Kurlandsky
Camp Attended: Canada
Year Met: 1998
Year Married: 2002