For the summer of 2016, Jewish overnight camps experienced an aggregate 2% growth in camper enrollment, reaching 80,622 campers. Since 2006, there has been a steady rise in campers, camps, and the number of campers per camp; the number of campers has grown 23%, with the number of camps in the Foundation for Jewish Camp network growing 13%.
Top
Foundation for Jewish Camp is GREAT! But we still have a lot of work to do.
Did you know that according to this report put out by the Foundation for Jewish Camp only about 50,000 of the 80,000 are teenagers, the rest are under 13 years of age, which means that camp is reaching ONLY 45,000 during the formative adolescent teen age years (much less when counting only 9th to 12th grades) critical for building Jewish identity. See report here:
http://www.jdata.com/documents/pages/Overnight%20Camp%20Report%20Summer%202015.pdf
MOREOVER, about 20% or one fifth of the 80,000 are Orthodox. So when you factor out the Orthodox and the younger than 13 crowd you are left with Jewish camping only reaching about 25 to 30 thousand non-Orthodox Jews in all of North America, during their formative 13 to 18 high school years- that comes out to less than 8,000 (non-Orthodox) for each age group nationally!
My point is that the Foundation for Jewish Camp is doing excellent work, but that work of getting more Jewish non-Orthodox teenagers is far from the numbers it could be. We need to triple the number of non-Orthodox Jewish teenagers in Jewish summer camps to help us have a strong and vibrant Jewish future. Also don’t forget, most teenagers are going to camp for just 2 or 3 weeks for a summer as high school youth also want to have time just to relax, go on a family vacation and work at summer jobs for pocket money. And some of these camps need to have more Jewish/Zionist/Hebrew etc.. content- which is something Foundation of Jewish Camp is also working on. What percent of non-Orthodox American Jewish teenagers go to Jewish camp? Answer: 10%? Less? Way to few.
Bottom line, yes Foundation for Jewish Camp is doing great work and the numbers of Jewish campers is growing but there is much more work needed in getting more non-Orthodox Jewish youth to Jewish summer camps.