BJVoices After Oct. 7 - “A Real Summer Camp and Not a Grief Summer Camp”

Israeli children and teens experienced a “Summer of Hope” at Camp Halfmoon in the Berkshires

This summer, the Berkshires provided all of us lucky enough to be here with its usual mixture of calm, solace, social engagement, nature, and recreation – but no one visiting these hills needed those things more than the 33 Israeli children and teens from hostage families who spent a “Summer of Hope” at Camp Halfmoon in Monterey.

Camp Halfmoon is among the camps operated internationally by Israel’s Kimama Group, which took over the venerable property – a summer camp for children for more than 100 years – three seasons ago. Mostly Jewish campers from more than 40 countries each year come to Kimama camps around the world. The Halfmoon venture represents the company’s attempt to replicate the traditional American summer camp experience and “spice it up with Israeli DNA,” in words of a Kimama executive interviewed by the BJV in 2022.

Last February, Kimama CEO Avishay Nachon was approached by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an organization dedicated to bringing home Israeli captives and supporting their loved ones. The group asked Nachon if children from hostage families might be able to attend a Kimama camp. With the help of Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, Kimama was able to bring these children to the United States for a much-needed respite from events in Israel.

Alon Parnas, COO of North America Kimama Group and a partner at Camp Halfmoon, spoke with the BJV in August. Since Oct. 7, Kimama staff in Israel have been working with children of hostage families in numerous ways. Here is his account of how that work continued in the Berkshires. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

BJV Interview: Alon Parnas

Kimama Group has camps around the world. What made the Berkshires seem like the right spot to bring this group of campers? And were youngsters affected by Oct. 7 sent to Kimama camps other than Camp Halfmoon?

This is the only one. When we made the partnership with [Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum], we knew that we have to bring the campers someplace quiet. We have to give them an escape from their daily routine, from what's going on daily in Israel. We had to put them in a big and faraway bubble so they could be in a different vibe for a summer camp that would give them a little bit of escape. Everything was fully paid for – Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston gave 50 percent of the funds and we provided 50 percent. We had two sessions and they had the option to register for both. The first session had fifteen campers and the second one had eighteen. The kids didn't know each other before the summer.

One of the moving things I read is how some of the campers who met at Halfmoon have been staying in touch in Israel – that they came across the world to find people who are undergoing the same difficulties. So, were these kids who had a relative or someone close who have been taken hostage? Were they children who had lost family, or were they kids who, while they were here, had relatives that were known to be alive or might possibly be alive?

All of the above. We had some kids with relatives that were in Gaza and had been rescued or had been able to come back to Israel. We had many with a relative still in Gaza, some of them known not to be alive anymore, and some of them about whom we don't know. We had all cases in camp.

How did your staff have to pivot to dealing with children who had undergone trauma and were dealing with grief or who were in the process of living this nightmare and dealing with uncertainty? How is your staff trained for ordinary circumstances and did you have to bring in psychologists or therapists of some sort to be a part of your camp experience this year?

At every Kimama camp, we have what we call “camper care” – a social worker or a psychologist who helps the kids with normal issues, like homesickness. This summer, Cindy Geva [head of camper and staff care at Halfmoon] trained with the [Hostages Forum] and she he was in touch with them on a daily basis. We also had another camper care specialist on call for any difficult cases that we needed extra help with. But we train each member of our staff to be a counselor – to be the best counselor they can be and to provide a great summer camp experience for all the kids. Kimama is not a therapeutic camp. We're a summer camp, and we were able provide the kids who came from Israel with amazing place and experience as we do for every other kid.

Of course, they had some hard moments. Shabbat evening was very hard for them. It's generally a family occasion, so this was a harder evening for them. Once we recognized that this had happened, we dressed a little bit different on the next Shabbat in camp. We always put an empty yellow chair in the dining room and explained the story of why it was there to everybody. But this was only a tiny corner of help for us to explain to their camp friends what they're going through. Otherwise, as a camp, we tried to leave the stories out of camp. Of course, if an individual wanted to tell their friends the story, of course, they're in a bunk together, they can share experiences from their life, and it's good. That's how you open up. We tried to let them have the experience of a real summer camp and not a grief summer camp.

Was there any preparation you had to do with the campers coming from other places and their families to explain to them that you were going to have this cohort of Israeli campers coming in?

That’s a question we asked ourselves many times before we started – should tell the other kids or the other families, or we should just let it be? And we decided not to tell anybody else, because the Israeli kids didn't don't know each other. They didn't arrive as a homogenous group. They came with the other campers, like any camper, but with a big sad story on their backs. But it was theirs. One of our very important beliefs in summer camp is in the “freedom to be me.” If I want to be someone else in camp, and I don't want to mention the story, and I don't want to be this kid who has a relative in Gaza, I'm not going to be. I can tell the world that I'm someone else, and I can tell all of my bunk friends that I'm someone else. We saw that some of the kids decided not to talk about it. I can tell you, sometimes it was almost as if we didn’t know who was from the project and who was just another camper. But for some of them, it was very, very important to go with shirts with their relative’s picture on it and to tell everybody.

We let them to decide. And that's why we didn't call the other campers before they arrived, because we believed that it was for the program’s campers to decide. We didn’t want to put a label on any camper before he or she arrived [that conveyed] “be aware we have ‘those campers’ in camp.” No. Every year, we have many campers (not only this year with this sad story of the war) who come from home with different stories – some of them with sad stories, and some of them with very happy stories. We wanted to look at this the same way, to apply the same idea.

How did it work out? Was there a different consciousness that developed over the weeks that the campers from Israel were there? Did a consciousness develop for the campers who may not have known that they were going to be with peers who were experiencing trauma from the what was happening in Gaza?

I almost think the opposite. What you say is not something that developed over the weeks – it’s something that decreased over the weeks. At the beginning, we were very, very cautious with our wording or with some activities. And very fast, a few days into camp, we understood that they were just kids, and they wanted to have fun. And yes, sometimes they were triggered by this or by that, or we had to hug them and have another conversation. Or we had to wait for them to fall asleep at night, or let them leave the light on. But we were there. We just hugged them and that's it. As for the rest – they're kids and they had great time with the activities and with the camp, and that's what's important. That's what we know how to do.