erved one vacationer. On Friday evenings, they danced in the ballroom instead of singing zemirot at the dinner table; on Saturday, more people attended tennis matches, lawn parties, swimming contests, and horse shows than Shabbat services. Not one to let this “reckless indifference” go unnoticed, Esther Jane Ruskay angrily denounced her coreligionists for their “summer resort Judaism.” Year after year, until her demise in 1911, she filled the pages of the American Hebrew with her impassioned, seasonal pleas for ritual constancy and steadfastness.
Still, laments about “summer Judaism” continued to multiply, becoming in their own way as much a summertime ritual as a two-week vacation. “Many Jews and Jewesses who are compelled to pay a considerable charge for excess baggage because of the number of gowns and hats and shoes which they feel called upon to take with them consider it an encumbrance to include also their Judaism when they leave for the summer vacations,” wrote Althea O. Silverman in the 1930s. But Judaism, she insisted, should not be discarded like a winter coat. “A garment of the soul,” Judaism was appropriate for every season. “It might be thought and felt and lived during the summer also—in the cottage, in the bungalow, in the hotel, as well as in the city home and in the Synagogue. The spirit of Judaism,” Silverman ringingly concluded, “suffers no climatic disturbances.”
Toward that end, concerned organizations like the Union of American Hebrew Congregation’s Bureau of Summer Services expended much effort to provide religious services and rabbis at summer resorts throughout Michigan and Wisconsin where “Jewish people congregate in large numbers.” Others urged the vacationing American Jew to follow the lead of his or her “Gentile neighbor,” who, spending time at a local chautauqua or a Methodist summer colony like Ocean Grove, “makes the best possible use of the summer life for religious propaganda. Wherever he goes his church goes along.” Resistant at first, Jews eventually developed summer congregations. By the 1920s, according to the United Synagogue Recorder, summer synagogues with memberships “equally divided between men and women” began to take root in resort towns everywhere.
For many Jews, camp provided the best solution to the doldrums of “summer Judaism” and, by extension, the anomalies of the American Jewish experience. “American Jewish children ... do not live a natural Jewish life,” explained Shlomo Shulsinger, who, with his wife, Rivka, founded Massad Camps in the 1940s. “Radio, movies, newspapers, books, games—all the factors which go towards developing a child’s character and mode of living are far removed from Jewish realities.” At a Jewish summer camp, however, youngsters could live in an environment where Jewish culture mattered: Buildings and walkways carried the names of legendary Jewish personalities, while lively, contemporized Yiddish or Hebrew could be heard on the baseball diamond and on the outdoor stage.
Initially, Jewish summer camp was inspired more by charitable than cultural concerns. As “armies” of poor, unsupervised Jewish children took to the streets in July and August, many communal leaders such as Rabbi Maurice Lewisohn worried about their physical and moral well-being. “There is no plainer fact than the relation of the lack of recreation to moral breakdown,” he observed, adding, “recreation is not only educational, it is a moral force.” To Lewisohn’s way of thinking, supervised play, especially in the form of a two-week stint at a summer camp, was the perfect antidote to the anomie of the slums. In the early years of the twentieth century other like-minded Jews formed a number of “philanthropically correct” summer camps where young boys, “far removed from the temptations and pettiness of city life,” learned the gentleman’s code of behavior. “Camp should become the Mecca for every young man who enjoys camping and is willing to live up to the rules,” stated William Mitchel, the director of Surprise Lake Camp in 1910.
In the years that followed, girls, too, raised their eyes