A Commum

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Gabe, Zach, Amy and Max:
Happy Campers

How a camp
in the deep
South builds
the identiy
of young Jews.

Amy Neistein
Special to The AppleTree

Amy Neistein lives in
West Bloomfield and serves
as program assistant for the
Neighborhood Project.

I

have seen what a Jewish camp
experience can do for you, but I
didn't always see it so clearly.
I didn't grow up in a community
with 100,000 Jews such as metro
Detroit, in a suburb readily identified
as one where young Jewish families
live. I couldn't always have my stand-
ing weekly order for challah at the
neighborhood bakery, or find matzoh
year round at any grocery store.
When I was 9 and 11 — the ages
of my two oldest boys today — there
was no Jewish camp for me to
attend. It wasn't until the summer
before my senior year in high school
that everything changed.
In 1972, I had an opportunity to
go to the newly opened Henry S.
Jacobs Camp near Jackson, Miss., to
work as a summer-camp counselor.
My older brother was going, my
mom was suffering from multiple scle-

a
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A Single Life

rosis, and it was a first job offer
away from home for the summer.
Clearly, I wasn't making a choice to
attend simply because going to a
Jewish camp was the priority.
I grew up in Shreveport, La. I've
heard a million times what you may
be thinking: "You mean there are
Jews in the South?" The question
always seemed ridiculous to me. After
all, my family belonged to a Reform
congregation of some 250 families
where we were regulars. My father
took us to temple services almost
every Friday night. I was the youngest
of six children, and we easily filled
up two rows of the sanctuary (with
that many children, gentile neighbors
thought for sure we were Catholic).
You see, my father wasn't that differ-
ent from other Southern-Jewish par-
ents. He was determined that his chil-
dren would stay Jews, and participa-

tion at the temple was the avenue. (It's
hard to say what my mother, who
grew up in Chicago, would have
mandated for raising Jewish children
had she not been ill for most of my
youth.)
For most, keeping kosher meant not
eating shellfish — a choice not made
by my family. In fact, I don't think we
ever even considered it, in light of the
integral part the ham played at our
Thanksgiving dinner. You can imagine
how stunned my Brooklyn-born hus-
band was the first time he visited my
family in Shreveport, which hap-
pened to be for Thanksgiving.
While we never lit candles or had
a Shabbat dinner at home, we never
would have dreamed of attending
our public school on Rosh Hashanah
or Yom Kippur. We celebrated
Christmas with my aunts and uncles,
who with their gentile spouses had -

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