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Camp Kef: The Adventure of a Lifetime!

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Dear Friends,

Can you believe that it’s January already? A new year, full of new opportunities and new chances to try new things. Something that we here at Camp Kef partake in each year is selecting and announcing a NEW camp theme, which for 2023, will be “The Adventure of a Lifetime”. You may ask why that theme? What does it mean? What does it have to do with camp? My answer to you would be that camp is the adventure of a lifetime for so many people. As someone who grew up going to camp, particularly this camp, camp is the ultimate adventure. Camp is an opportunity to step outside your comfort zone, to try new things, make new friends, and figure out who you are. While I can say for certain that camp helped shape who I am, and is probably the reason I am a camp director today, I am also confident that throughout their history, Jewish camps have helped shaped tens of thousands of their campers into the people they are today.

For the aforementioned reason, we chose our theme of “The Adventure of a Lifetime” to take this summer to explore the history of Jewish camps! Each week we will be focusing on an element of Jewish camps that helped make them into the cultural phenomenon they are today. What are the Jewish camp games you played growing up? What are the Jewish camp foods you grew up eating? What are Jewish camp songs you grew up signing? We will be taking our 39 days of awesome this summer to explore all of those things and more. Our hope is that each camper will leave camp this summer with a sense of identity and understanding of what makes Jewish camps so special.

Admittedly, my favorite part of planning camp is making our “iconic” camp videos, which you can find on the J’s YouTube page. They’re fun, goofy, informative, and they tell a story of what camp will be like each summer. Naturally, when exploring the history of Jewish camps, we ventured down the rabbit hole of cheesy, low budget camp promotional videos from the late 80’s and early 90’s. We took inspiration from those videos and created our own, which you can watch here! I may be a little biased, but I think this video is one of the best we’ve ever made.

I take every opportunity I can to speak about the magic of camp, and the magic of Camp Kef. So here I am, speaking to each of you! Camp Kef is such a special place and I’d love to welcome every single person reading this to contact me and find out more about the amazing things that happen here each summer! Each day spots in camp are filling up, so if you’re thinking about enrolling your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbors, anyone else that loves to have fun, don’t wait to register, which you can do here. If you are interested in joining our incredible team for summer 2023, you can apply here. I don’t want anyone to miss out on “The Adventure of a Lifetime”!

Shabbat Shalom,
Jordan Bravato