For at least the next three years, at least 700 Israeli teenagers from the Gaza and Lebanon borders will travel to North America each summer to attend Jewish overnight camps — a continuation of a Jewish Agency program that launched last year in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks and the ensuing wars against Hamas and Hezbollah. 

This continuation of the Campers2Gether program was made possible by a $2.5 million matching grant from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation, eJewishPhilanthropy has learned.

“We are turning this from an emergency program into a program,” Shelley Kedar, the director of the Jewish Agency’s Connecting the Jewish People Unit, told eJP.

Under the matching grant, the Mandel Supporting Foundation will double the contributions made by the participating community, either through the local federation, private donations or from the camps themselves, according to Kedar. 

Campers2Gether launched last summer, sending 1,500 Israeli teenagers who had been directly affected by the Israel-Hamas war and the fighting along Israel’s northern border to Jewish camps around the world. The goal was to provide these teenagers with some respite from the violence and turmoil in Israel, with the fringe benefit of advancing the concept of Jewish peoplehood — offering the Diaspora Jewish teens at those camps a chance to interact with Israelis their own age and vice versa.

According to Kedar, those goals have effectively reversed. 

“We set out to do this program to help the traumatized teens from war zones. We said, ‘Summer camp can heal and create resilience.’ And the secondary focus was connection [between Israelis and Diaspora Jews],” Kedar said. “Resilience was achieved, but the connection element was just — wow! We saw it in the pre- and post-surveys. It was very significant for the teens… both sides benefited to the same extent.”

These direct connections between Israeli and American teens is especially desirable for the Jewish Agency and the North American Jewish organizations that it is partnering with as Israel travel has decreased significantly in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks and is not expected to fully recover quickly. 

“We are gratified to support Campers2Gether, The Jewish Agency’s critically important initiative that enables Jewish youth in Israel and North America to flourish in the most challenging of times,” Jehuda Reinharz, president and CEO of the Mandel Supporting Foundation, said in a statement. “Campers2Gether leverages the power of the immersive Jewish summer camp experience to ensure that members of the young generation in our community — representing our next generation of leaders — form meaningful relationships that will last a lifetime.”

Though many camps from last year are signed up to again participate in Campers2Gether, Kedar said the Jewish Agency was still looking for additional partners. 

The Israeli participants are all 14-15 years old. They also come as “organic groups,” Kedar said, coming from the same community or region or even as a class from the same school.

Kedar said the decision to continue Campers2Gether came from the enthusiasm of the local Jewish federations for the program. 

“Cooperation with the federations is amazing and critical,” she said. “If there weren’t federations that contacted us about it, we wouldn’t have turned it into a program. So all the credit is to them for sparking this thing into a program and not just an emergency initiative.”

Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of JFNA, said in a statement that the program “advances our goal to strengthen both Israeli society and North America Jewish communities following the Oct. 7 attacks. We are proud and grateful that 700 Israeli teens will once again receive a much-needed respite from the war while they build relationships with thousands of their North American peers at one of our community’s hallmarks: Jewish camp.”