This summer, 1,250 kids will trek to Camp Ramah in California to plunge into pools, belt out camp songs and play endless rounds of gaga. Several of them will have the opportunity thanks to Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta COO and author of the best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. 

Last Thursday, Sandberg announced the Dave Goldberg Scholarship, in honor of her late husband, the former chief executive of SurveyMonkey, who died 11 years ago at 47 from a cardiac arrhythmia while vacationing with his family in Mexico. The endowment ensures that 30 campers in need can attend Camp Ramah in perpetuity and comes at a time when demand for summer camp — along with the cost — have skyrocketed.

“This is a gift that allows Ramah in California to live toward our deepest aspirations,” Rabbi Joe Menashe, CEO of Camp Ramah in California, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “As costs escalate and tuitions rise in camps, schools, universities, across the world, we’re able to ensure that families who have the most significant need and may have never considered Jewish camp as a possibility can now not just consider it, but can feel welcome and embraced in the process.”

Camp is a generational experience for Sandberg and her family. Growing up, Sandberg attended the Union for Reform Judaism’s Camp Coleman in Cleveland, Ga., which she credits with shaping her Jewish values and identity. Her late husband attended Camp Ramah in California, as did their children.

According to last year’s Foundation for Jewish Camp census, attendance at Jewish summer camp is at an all-time high, but so is the cost of running a camp, with last year’s expenses increasing 5% over the year prior. The price of everything has risen: staffing, security and food.

Still, attendance at camps across the country has soared, in large part due to the vast number of scholarships offered to campers by the camps themselves, local federations, philanthropic partners and FJC. According to the census, without assistance, 37% of families said they couldn’t afford camp. This mirrors the experience of campers at Camp Ramah of California, one of many Conservative-movement affiliated Ramah camps, where a third of attendees received scholarships for the camp, which costs $6,730 for a four-week session.

“Sheryl started this scholarship because Camp Ramah is where Dave built friendships that lasted decades, where he developed independence, and where his Jewish identity took root,” Inbar Kodesh, chief of staff to Sandberg, told eJP. “She wanted other kids — especially those who, like Dave, need a scholarship to attend — to have that same experience for decades to come.”

The scholarship, announced on Facebook, was made alongside Goldberg’s brother, Rob, and Sandberg’s current husband, Tom Bernthal, the founder and former CEO of the strategic consulting agency Kelton Global.

Camp Ramah is where Goldberg “developed a sense of independence that shaped the rest of his life,” Sandberg said in her Facebook post. “If you ever got Dave talking about camp — the late nights, the inside jokes, the competitions he swore he won — the kid in him came right back.”

Goldberg especially enjoyed sharing his camp memories with his and Sandberg’s children, who formed their own cherished experiences at the camp. “The friendships they made. The Shabbats under the trees. The games and the songs and the prayers,” she said in the status of her children’s stories, which often reflected her late husband’s.

The scholarship came together after Menashe reached out to Sandberg while planning for the camp’s 70th anniversary, which falls this year. Sandberg has supported the camp behind the scenes for years, ensuring the camp had the resources “to be able to support our families who really have the least,” he said.

The scholarship is a way “to honor [Dave’s] memory, knowing that there will be hundreds of kids and families touched by this over the decades to come,” he said, “and it [will] inspire other [philanthropists] to hopefully look at Jewish summer camps and other Jewish educational institutions to follow suit.”

In 2014, Sandberg signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment by ultra-wealthy individualrs to give half their wealth to charity. She is also a supporter of Birthright Israel — speaking at its Excelerate26 Summit in March — as well as BBYO. In honor of her parents, she has also given $2.5 million to the Anti-Defamation League and $5 million to United Hatzalah.

In addition to the camp scholarship, Sandberg has honored Goldberg in numerous ways including: the Dave Goldberg Scholars Program, which provides 15 college scholarships, and Option B, a grief-support organization named after the book of the same name that Sandberg co-wrote about navigating her own loss.

Menashe gets teary-eyed thinking about the scholarship, he said. “I’m inspired, personally as a human being, as a Jew, as a donor, and, riffing off of Sheryl’s language from her famous book, Lean In, this does seem like a time to lean in, and she is again modeling and teaching us how to do so.”

Goldberg’s memory is a testament to the way camp connects generations, he said.

“Jewish camps are places that are steeped in history and nostalgia,” Menashe said. “So frequently, kids that come into camp have the very trajectory of their lives changed and shaped by their Jewish camp experience without having any idea upon whose shoulders and shoulders of shoulders and shoulders of shoulders of shoulders they are standing.”