After three years spent in the shadow of COVID-19, the future looked bright as 800 camp professionals and supporters gathered for the Foundation for Jewish Camp Leaders Assembly in Atlanta last week, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Esther D. Kustanowitz.

Camp is back!: Among the 300 day and overnight camps FJC serves, enrollment is almost back to where it was in 2019 — and many camps have exceeded their pre-pandemic numbers. The field as a whole is on its way to closing a $150 million budget gap that resulted from camps remaining closed in 2020.

Keeping camp affordable: But some difficulties have festered — while new ones have appeared. Staff recruitment and training remains a challenge. And ongoing inflation means that most families will see significant tuition hikes when they sign up for next summer. “We don’t want camp to get so expensive that it’s unattainable for families,” Jeremy Fingerman, FJC’s CEO, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “So there’s a lot of effort and a lot of conversation around trying to address affordability to raise additional scholarship funds.”

The enrollment report: A preview of data from FJC’s annual census of camps, due out in 2023, shows that, at least in one respect, numbers have returned almost to where they were in 2019, which was a record year for Jewish camp in terms of attendance. Day and overnight camps across the sector had a total of 182,000 campers and staff in 2019, and after a dip in 2021, camps reached 95% of the 2019 number last year. Most camps are tracking behind 2019 in terms of camper registration for summer 2023, but 40% are exceeding 2019 levels.

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Last March, Kevin Warren, the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, took a moment from his demanding schedule to congratulate Yeshiva University’s men’s basketball team after the end of a historic season. To Warren, the team’s achievements were an inspiring testament to “the wonderful influence the Maccabees have had on our nation and the Jewish community,” he wrote in a heartfelt letter to Elliot Steinmetz, the head coach. Warren discussed his connections with Judaism in a series of interviews with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel this fall.

Getting personal: The sports executive, who is based in Chicago, has leveraged his position to promote diversity, equality and inclusion while raising awareness of antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry on college campuses and beyond. Last year, he helped form an ongoing partnership with the Anti-Defamation League to launch a multipart training and education commission addressing bias and hate amid an uptick in anti-Jewish incidents. “One of the things I’ve been really struck by in conversations with Kevin is he recognizes the platform that he has, he recognizes the responsibility that comes with the role, and he blends that with his personal commitment,” said David Goldenberg, the ADL’s Midwest regional director, who is actively involved with the program.

Mr. Warren goes to Washington: In 2019, shortly before he moved on to the Big Ten, Warren, then a member of the Minnesota Vikings staff, was among a group of staffers who participated in what he described as an “emotional” visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with Mark Wilf, the team’s president and co-owner, who serves as board chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and formerly chaired the Jewish Federations of North America. “He was very much always counseling us to share our stories,” Wilf said of his former charge, recalling that Warren had encouraged him to speak openly with players and employees about Wilf’s relationship to the Holocaust as the son of survivors. “He’s promoted so much in the areas of diversity and tolerance,” Wilf told JI. “He’s been a leader on all of those fronts.”

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“When I first returned to the role of educator at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav five years ago, I quietly confessed to the rabbi that we might want to merge our school with that of our nearest Jewish neighbors. Their school and ours were meeting at the same time on Shabbat mornings, separated by just a few blocks, and we share common values and goals. It seemed foolish for us to put so much effort into our own thing. But Sha’ar Zahav’s lay leaders, especially the school parents, had worked hard to keep their school afloat despite difficult leadership transitions and financial pressures. They had brought me in to revitalize the school, not to shut it down. So we went to work,” Sue Bojdak, director of education at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, writes in an opinion piece in eJewishPhilanthropy.

Limitations expand thinking: “What’s great about a small school is that you are compelled to draw outside the lines. The limitations on the ground force innovation. You know you cannot field enough kids to populate individual grades, so you work in mixed-age groupings. If you have a small building, as we do, you need to think creatively about how to best use the available spaces. Your limited budget gets you thinking about minimal staffing and the role of volunteers. If you meet these limitations with creativity and educational know-how, your too-small school can become an amazing learning lab, as ours has.”

Energy-driven: “Sha’ar Zahav made a commitment to project-based learning (PBL) and mixed-age classes years ago. In our revitalization efforts we doubled down on our PBL vision and all-school learning. We let go of a complex curriculum we had designed more than a decade earlier and let our curriculum be emergent, organized around one to three interwoven themes each year. We also added a maker space and with it a philosophy of curiosity-driven tinkering as a learning modality. What drives our learning is big Jewish ideas, our questions and the children’s energy and interests.”

Read the full piece here.