How We are Moving Camp Ramah
by Toby Rae Irving
On Thursday night I, along with 14 other Ramah alumni, sat with Executive Director Rabbi Mitch Cohen and other leaders of the National Ramah Commission. He told us he was there to listen, so we came prepared to tell our stories. We shared personal accounts of learning about the Occupation after years of Ramah Israel education, and of trying to make changes in our campers’ experiences without resources or real support.
Through the power of storytelling I felt the tenor of the room shift. The more that Ramah’s leadership heard about our lived experiences and heard the depth of our understanding both about Israel and Ramah, the more they could see that our ask really was not radical, but a necessity. Ramah has a responsibility to include the truth about the Occupation in their programming.
Ramah committed to ‘re-evaluating’ their educational programming to better address the Occupation before this summer. Rabbi Cohen, the Executive Director of the National Ramah Commission, agreed that institutional exclusion of Palestinian narratives was unacceptable, and named staff training and curriculum changes as where he would channel his efforts.
We know these changes are easier to promise than to execute. We do not want to see the potential sparked in that room stifled, as it so often is, by those invested in maintaining the status quo. Families across North America count on Ramah to foster a love of Israel in their children. That can’t been seen as mutually exclusive with teaching about the Occupation. Ramah is failing its campers and their families by ignoring this moral disaster for the Jewish people, and daily nightmare for Palestinians. It won’t be easy for Rabbi Cohen to convince all of Ramah’s stakeholders of this, and that is why IfNotNow must keep pushing.
Organizational change at Ramah may come slowly, but we are a decentralized movement ready to make it happen now. We can prepare young people who will be on staff in summer 2018 to deliver the type of honest education Ramah youth deserve. We hope critically thinking, social justice-minded young people join us in showing Ramah that we are the generation that will end American Jewish support for the Occupation.
Every Friday night, the oldest campers at Ramah in the Berkshires leave the dining hall chanting “l’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim” — Next Year in Jerusalem. That’s true, they will spend next year in Jerusalem on Ramah’s Seminar program in Israel. When they get there, they’ll know all about Jews’ connection to the city, to Jerusalem’s biblical history, about the destruction of the temples we learn about every summer on Tisha B’av. But what will they know about Jerusalem today? About demolitions, about separation barriers, about the economic, social, and political impact of the Occupation on the residents of East Jerusalem? That is up to Ramah. We have our next steps. We’ll be here to make sure Ramah takes theirs.
