Wheel! Of! Torah!” That’s what campers were shouting at Camp Ramah in Northern California, their eyes fixed on the one lucky kid who got to spin the brightly colored rainbow wheel in front of the crowd. Well, it was actually “Galgal! Shel! Torah!” but the energy was the same, as kids last summer got ready for a camp activity that turns analyzing Torah portions into something very much like a game show.
Read More“There’s a lot of stigma about mental health issues and addiction across the board, but especially in the Jewish community.” — Jory Hanselman, Director of BaMidbar Wilderness Therapy at Ramah in the Rockies. “Using a wilderness-based environment is critical to building self and understanding personal responsibility as well as resiliency, so winter provides a powerful tool to really bring a lot of presence in the program.”
Read MoreCamp Ramah in Watsonville is offering campers an array of four-week “intensives” this summer: scuba diving, surfing, horseback riding and musical composition. Enrollment was up in 2017, the camp’s second year, and Rabbi Sarah Shulman, the director since Day 1, said she expects it will grow again this summer, drawing third- to 12th-graders mostly from the Bay Area....“It has been a pleasure to be a part of the collaborative and collegial overnight Jewish camp community in Northern California with such supportive partners,” Shulman said.
Read More“Israel is just as important to the Tikvah participants and their families on this Birthright trip as it is to all those Jews who view the Land of Israel and the State of Israel as their Jewish homeland,” said Herb Greenberg, who founded the Tikvah program with his wife, Barbara, in 1970.
Read More“When you go out into the wilderness, you just become open to all sorts of change,” said Rabbi Eliav Bock, director of Ramah of the Rockies. “When you go into the wildness, you strip away a lot of the noise we have around us — family, drugs, bad influences. You take somebody out of normal circumstances and force them to confront who they are as a person, what their core values are.”
Read MoreBaMidbar Wilderness Therapy, an experiential outdoor education program for young adults struggling with emotional, behavioral, or academic challenges, will launch on January 24. BaMidbar is a program of Ramah in the Rockies. The therapeutic program includes four-day wilderness treks, with Shabbats spent at Ramah’s base camp. At base camp, participants will also have individual, group, and family therapy.
Read MoreA variety of Washington-area day camps offer activities for campers to discover abilities and interests they didn’t know they have. Ramah Day Camp of Greater Washington, in Germantown, MD, allows kids to take three electives per week in addition to swimming and activities like Israeli music and dance. Electives include candle-making, cooking, robotics and engineering.
Read MoreIn 2010, as part of a strategic planning process, the National Ramah Commission determined that one of its objectives would be to further leverage the Ramah camping movement brand and extend the Ramah mission beyond the scope of summer camps. Here are some of the lessons that we have learned.
Read MoreA partnership between Ramah Tikvah, Amazing Israel and Birthright Israel brings young adults with disabilities to Israel
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