Family Focus

h•I.C414A4 REysON

presents

The Money Factor

JCC Day Camps offer scholarships

to assist cash-strapped families.

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February 12 • 2009 iN

6,

Elizabeth Applebaum

Special to the Jewish News

D

iversity may give life some
of its finest flavor, but people
everywhere are united in
their distaste for at least one activity:
applying for scholarships.
They're certain that that it will be
embarrassing to ask for money; that
providing personal details will be
dreadful; that scholarship forms are
long and complicated and take forever
to complete.
But in this economy an increasing
number of families — many of them
for the first time — will be seeking
financial help for everything from
making a house payment to one of
their children's favorite activities:
summer camp.
Applying for a camp scholarship
is, in fact, a detailed and careful pro-
cess, explains the Jewish Community
Center of Metropolitan Detroit's
Center Day Camps Director Forest
Levy. This isn't because scholarship
committees are a nosy bunch with
nothing else to do, but rather to guar-
antee that limited money is properly
distributed. Everything is confiden-
tial.
It begins with your call. Center Day
Camps scholarships are given "until
the money runs out:' Levy says, so
it's good to start early. Just phone the
camp office and request an applica-
tion.
The form will ask for basic informa-
tion. The next step is the interview
process, where families will have the
opportunity to provide details regard-
ing their finances. This is where a par-
ent can explain that while he makes
a decent living, he also is paying for
care for a disabled relative or will soon
be forced to pick up the cost of his
family's health insurance or is facing
the prospect of a spouse losing his or
her job.
All this information gives camp
staff a better picture of a family's

life. It's not an invasive process, Levy
explains; it's an effort to understand.
And what there is to understand is
often heartbreaking.
Levy recalls meeting up in a gro-
cery store with a mom of three whose
boys had been attending camp for six
years. "I can't wait to see your kids this
summer',' Levy told her.
The woman was quiet for a moment.
Then she whispered, "Actually, they
won't be coming:'
Her husband had lost his job, and
her position didn't pay enough to
afford camp. It was a painful situation
at home, because the husband was ter-
ribly depressed.
Levy also recalls when a man, his
10-year-old daughter tagging behind
him, appeared at camp the first
day. He hadn't registered. He hadn't
requested help. But he told the staff:
"I have to go to work and I don't have
anywhere else to take my kid."
They didn't have money for food,
either, he admitted, so his daughter
was without a lunch.
In so many cases, then, camp isn't
a luxury. It means a child will be
removed from a home filled with
worry, stress and loneliness.
And how, exactly, are scholarships
funded?
The Center Day Camps Send-a-Kid-
to-Camp scholarship fund receives
donations from large organizations
and individuals and everything in-
between, ranging from a few dollars to
gifts in the thousands.
The JCC also has received help
from the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit, including a
one-time gift from the Federation's
general allocation fund and scholar-
ship money from the Federation's
Rebecca and Gary Sakwa Challenge
Fund, created to help financially
distressed families and youth-at-risk
both locally and in Israel. it

Elizabeth Applebaum is a marketing
specialist at the ICC.

To apply for a scholarship, contact the Center Day Camps office, (248)
432-5407. To make a donation to the JCC camp scholarship fund, con-
tact Susan Chomsky, (248) 432-5418, or mail to Send-a-Kid-to-Camp,
JCC, 6600 W. Maple Road, West Bloomfield, Ml 48322.

U-M Writer Feted

Ann Arbor

A

ssociate Professor Eileen
Pollack, Zell director,
MFA Program in Creative
Writing at the
University of
Michigan, was
named this year's
recipient of the
Edward Lewis
Wallant Award for
her collection of
short stories, In
Eileen Pollack
the Mouth (Four
Way Books, 2008).
"Eileen Pollack has managed to
take the lives of retired Jews and lift
them out of the ordinary to reveal
the strangeness and desperation
of aging;' writes award committee
member Mark Shechner of State
University of New York at Buffalo.
"She does it with love and ten-
derness and an attention to lives
that fiction usually passes by. In
a voice that recalls that of the late
Bernard Malamud, she writes of
rueful human predicaments, the
looming sense of mortality that
hangs over us all, and the familiar
world suddenly grown unfamiliar"
The Wallant Award is presented
annually to an American writer
whose work of fiction is considered
significant for American Jews. The
award was established shortly after
the 1962 death of Edward Lewis
Wallant, author of The Human
Season and The Pawnbroker.
Past winners are Chaim Potok,
Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum,
Myla Goldberg, Jonathan Rosen
and Nicole Krauss.
"I'm thrilled," Pollack said. "Many
of the stories in my collection were
inspired by my father, who was a
small-town Jewish dentist [hence
the title]. He lived just long enough
to learn that the book had been
accepted for publication — and
then, as he lay dying, hallucinated
that I'd been given a $2 million
advance for the book! It's dedicated
to his memory"
Deborah Dash Moore, direc-
tor of U-M's Frankel Center for
Judaic Studies, said, "It's so excit-
ing when a creative writer and
gifted teacher wins such recogni-
tion because it reminds us that
Frankel Center faculty members
not only study Jewish culture,
they also produce it." El