In 1959, a group of Holocaust survivors, most of them living in the secular, Yiddish-speaking enclave of the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, did something remarkable. Each of them shelled out $500 of hard-earned money to found a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains. The survivors’ goal was to pass on to the next generation their own devotion to democratic socialism and to Yiddish language and culture, mirroring their childhood experiences in Poland between the two World Wars. They called it Camp Hemshekh, which means “continuation.”
Although Hemshekh shut its doors in 1978, many Hemshekhists have kept in touch over the years and have begun organizing a reunion set for this fall in New York City, to celebrate 50 years since the camp’s creation.
The founders of Camp Hemshekh were all members of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party in Eastern Europe. Many had spent their childhood years in SKIF (Sotsyalistisher Kinder Farband, or the Socialist Children’s Union), and a number of them also spent several weeks or months at the Medem Sanitorium, a healing center for Jewish children with tuberculosis. As part of the healing process, the young patients were taught to garden, to care for animals and bees, to participate in group sports and sing-alongs, and to organize in order to help the children of striking miners.
That innocent world, however, was wiped away by the Holocaust. After transplanting themselves in the Bronx, the Bundists hoped that the camp they created would convey these values to their children. Besides their devotion to Democratic socialism and Yiddish, they also hoped the camp would reflect their distinctly non-Zionist stance — a formidable task, considering the strong Zionist affiliation of the general American Jewish community. They also insisted on maintaining a purely secular identity, which explains why the kitchen was not kosher, and why the word “Shabbos” was never mentioned.
The camp leaders worked hard to inculcate this Socialist, ethnically Jewish identity in their campers. The campers and counselors were taught dozens of Yiddish songs and competed in Hemshekh-yada — where two teams representing Yiddish poets received points not only in sports events, artwork and original dramatic presentations, but also for khavershaft (exhibiting good will or comradeship to the other team) and for creating and singing two original songs — one in English and one in Yiddish — in the spirit of the poet. They also performed plays in Yiddish for their parents on visiting day.
The most memorable event each summer, however, was Ghetto Day: a solemn, all-day commemoration of the Jewish partisans and victims of the Nazis that culminated in a gripping bilingual retelling of the Holocaust through poetry and song. At the end of the performance, as the piano softly played the haunting melody of “Ani Maamin” (“I Believe”), (a song reportedly sung by many Jews during the Holocaust as they entered the gas chambers), everyone walked out single file and followed a torch-lit path to the ghetto denkmol, a simple memorial that consisted of a replica of the barbed-wire ghetto wall, six signposts representing the 6 million Jews murdered, each one inscribed with the name of a death camp. In the center stood a striking mosaic of a ghetto fighter, created in 1962 by one of the older campers, Daniel Libeskind, later to become a world-renowned architect. The sobs heard throughout the evening reinforced the unique background of the Hemshekhists.
So did the Bundists succeed in their quest? Vida Semel Bauer, who attended camp in the 1970s, thinks so. “I remember what an honor it was to get points for khavershaft,” Semel Bauer, 46, recalled, “and I still try to conduct myself in that way.” She also said what an impression it made on her when the camp brought in a member of the grape picker’s union, and how she couldn’t wait till she was old enough to stand vakh (guard) by the mosaic on Ghetto Day.
In addition, Hemshekh succeeded in retaining its non-Zionist character. Aside from the two summers when the camp leaders included an Israel team in the Hemshekh Olympiada, the word “Israel” or “Zionism” was hardly mentioned.
George Rothe, 58, who attended camp from 1963 to 1974, remembers a girl who spent several summers at Hemshekh and then switched to Habonim, a socialist Zionist camp down the road. Both camps used to compete through sports and debates. One time, when Habonim was scheduled to come over, it was discovered that the girl would be coming, too. In protest, a group of older campers burned a likeness of her.
But the anti-Zionism of the Bundists was very different from that of the Arabs or Neturei Karta, said Norman Sas, whose parents were both camp founders. “The Bundists would probably have been more positive about Israel if it had been bilingual, like Canada or Belgium,” explained Sas, 60, who attended camp for seven summers. “They resented that the Zionists assumed they spoke for the entire Jewish people and that they had ‘decided’ what the official Jewish language would be.”
But the founders were less successful regarding Yiddish. Although the children of the Bundists knew it from home, they were growing up in a country where only English was spoken, at a time when minority languages had a low status. As they strived to be like their American classmates at public school, the Hemshekhists ended up speaking only English to each other.
The question, whether the camp founders succeeded in transmitting their values or not, is one that certainly could be debated as the former Hemshkhists reconnect at their reunion. Most of them admit, though, that their years at Hemshekh were among their happiest. If members of the camp committee are looking down from above, they can take pride in that accomplishment.
For more reunion information, see the Facebook page “Camp Hemshekh Reunion — October 10-11, 2009.”
Rukhl Schaechter is an editor of the Forverts, in which a version of this article originally appeared.
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I know the Hemshekh mindset pretty well. I attended Camp Hemshekh for three years in the late '60's in my very early teens, and have friends and family who attended even longer. I think the author presented a pretty fair representation of the camp experience, but I differ on and wish to clarify one point. The author refers to the "anti-Zionism" of the Bundists. That may have been the case, but I got no sense of that at camp. Whatever the Bundists were thinking elsewhere, I got NO sense of anti-Zionism or at camp. At the very most, the leadership demonstrated a sort of indifference to Zionism. It seemed to me more the case that the state of Israel and the Zionist ideas were not the focus of attention, nothing more. What was being inculcating was an appreciation of a different aspect of Jewish culture- the Yiddish experience, whose greatest flowering was in Eastern Europe from the early 1800's until World War II, and continuing in the United States until today. We had classes in Yiddish, sang Yiddish songs, learned about Jewish holidays from a Yiddishist perspective, and had occasional visits by Jewish writers. I used to joke that I probably knew most of the non-orthodox Yiddish speaking kids of my generation in the northeastern part of North America. Several campers became quite observant in later years, and a few settled in Israel. The Jewish cultural values that were inculcated might have been somewhat different from than those one might find elsewhere, but they were certainly not "Anti-Zionist".
I don't remember what we did in Turkey Point for "shabbos" but in Hunter and Mountaindale the spirit of shabbos was certainly invoked, thanks to Mikhl Baran. We dressed in white and celebrated Yiddish culture with special evening programs that were markedly different from activities of any other evening. It was not religious in a traditional sense but it was certainly Jewish and it was not "vokhedik."
Camp Hemshekh provided many of us with a strong Jewish sense of identity we were likely never going to get elsewhere, and some of us used that as a springboard for making Judaism central to our lives. That experience was overwhelmingly positive for me and remains central to the orthodox Jewish life I live today.
Clearly others left camp with different messages. Its celebration of a particular, and brief, moment in Jewish history -- an affirmatively (to put it mildly) secular, west-looking Eastern European Yiddish culture -- was perceived by many latter-day Hemshekh children, most of whom did not have immigrant parents who grew up immersed in it, as an odd antiquarian obsession. Hemshekh confirmed their predisposition to think of Judaism or Jewishness as something for museums and scrapbooks, or something that was just weird and incomprehensible.
This is to say nothing of the arguably greater obsession at Hemshekh, which was operated by a corporation named Survivors of Nazi Persecution, with Jewish victimhood. Like much of modern American Judaism, Hemshekh's Holocaust-focused infliction of the artistic precipitate of Holocaust experiences on young children bordered on the macabre. I haven't met anyone else whose camp softball diamond featured a _denkmol_ (with real barbered wire and concrete sprinkled with broken glass) in far right field or who had anything like the quasi-religious High Holy Day experience of our "Ghetto Night," or anyone who wished it had.
I still know a few former Hemshekistn who became religious Jews. A few agree with me that camp was, despite all this, a strong confirmation of their extant feeling that being Jewish was something special, something that offered higher ethical aspirations than the suburban lives we left behind each July and something, well, rootsy and authentically Jewish, in its way.
Others insist they sought and found the more timeless form of Jewish life -- the one whose rejection was the largely unspoken premise of Hemshekh culture -- despite the Hemshekh experience. I would be surprised if the intermarriage rate among Camp Hemshekh alumni is much different from among the general population, but then again, there was never, and never could be, anything in the Hemshekh philosophy that could argue against that practice, anyway.
As a secular, English-speaking Jew with very little religious connection to the Jewish past, camp did provide me with a _hemshekh_, a spiritual continuation, to my Eastern European Jewish heritage. Significantly, it gave me a way to connect to those immigrants in my grandparents' generation regarding whose Jewish connection I likely would have had little empathy or understanding at all, despite their confused attempts to convey it to us.
Thus Hemshekh saved me, though hardly with intent, from assimilation. I vividly re-live moments, cultural and otherwise, from those muggy mountain summers all the time, and continue to peel back layers of meaning and understanding in the songs and plays we performed, often revealing rather surprising messages beneath. But the irony is all the other way, and Camp Hemshekh will always be at the core of who I am and what made me commit to a Jewish life.
I don't know why "anti-Zionism" was stressed in your summary of Hemshekh. Truly for me it was about Yiddish culture and socialism. As a child camper and later a counsellor, it became about acceptance and sharing for me. We even had to share our candy, and that was a good thing! The vibrancy of Yiddish music and culture became a part of everyone who went there. For sensitive, musically oriented kids like me, Hemshekh became the thing I looked forward to all year.
I never felt that there was a "macabre" obsession with the Holocaust at Hemshekh. I greatly respected the survivors at camp, and was deeply moved each year at Ghetto Night. I'll never forget the sob in Mr. Baran's voice as he sang Moishelekh, Shloimelekh. I remember being fascinated by Mr. Palevesky and wondered about his partisan activity during the war. We had been taught in school that the Jews never fought back. For children from "American born" parents, it was a window into a very recent Jewish experience that had not touched us. I feel incredibly grateful to the survivors who no sooner had left the horrors of the Holocaust and DP camps behind, had the optimism and courage to build a summer home for their children. What a gift to all of us!!
I attended Camp Hemshekh for 2 years as a teenager in the mid-1970's. My impression and memories of the camp were that of being socialist and keeping Yiddish language and culture alive. I don't remember one mention of Israel or any Zionist or anti-Zionist sentiment for that matter. The camp was beyond secular, and as a secular Jew and pink diaper baby, I was glad for that. I fought against going there because I thought I was being shipped off to a Jewish camp full of completely "uncool" kids (though I grew up on Long Island with 99.998% Jewish kids). I came away with lifelong friends who I am still friends with and will be forever. Our "color war" (Yada) was non-competitive, teams were named after Yiddish poets; there was a cultural element to it. At breakfast singing, we sang political songs like Phil Ochs' Draft Dodger Rag in addition to Yiddish's Greatest Hits. It was an affordable and completely broken down camp with cracks in the basketball court and pool. Meanwhile my friends from home were at rich kid camps with horseback riding and no cracks. I wouldn't have traded in our protruding asphalt for anything in the world.
As a 14 year old in 1976 who was not growing up with Holocaust survivors, the visual and visceral Holocaust education we received was an eye opener. Watching friends standing "vakh" was impressive and chilling.
As a shiksa companion of a Camp Hemshekh pupil, I am so proud of the Camp and what it strive to instill in the Jewish youth. To me, it is crucial that Jews pass on their glorious intellectual and humanistic culture to the rest of us. I have no doubt that the small Jewish population on the planet, only 12 million, has made, proportionally, more contributions to humanity than any other group in human history.
Cary, I never felt I didn't feel gratitude, respect, even great admiration, for the survivors -- I did. As to the question of what is or is not macabre, I guess that's a matter of personal sensibility. When I describe to strangers what Gitl describes in this article, I find them to be astonished, and I did not realize what was so unusual about our experience until this happened many, many times. But you are right: This gift instilled in us all a sense of duty, of connection, of ... continuation.
Anyone out there from 1962-1963 camp years ?