t pitch forth the Ghetto dweller into the country. You must lead him there by his own desire, and summer outings are one of the most effective methods of inducement.”
The “worn and fragile mother” of the ghettos came in for special consideration. “If preventive charity is to have a chance ... here is the opportunity,” settlement house workers were told. Remove the tired mother, “overburdened with care, with drudgery, with discouragement,” together with her children, to restful surroundings, and within a week, one would witness a marked physical and social improvement. “Too tired to take the journey on Monday morning ... they return home on Saturday night, rested and bright and hopeful.” Heartened by such empirically based evidence of success and convinced that there was “probably no means by which so much happiness can be conveyed for so small expenditure,” dozens of Jewish welfare organizations such as the Educational Alliance and the Henry Street Settlement sponsored a steady round of harbor excursions, picnics in the park, and week-long trips to the country or the seashore for the urban poor.
Many of these philanthropically inspired facilities, attentive to the ritual requirements of their clientele, made sure a “truly Jewish spirit” reigned at their resorts. The New York Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society insisted that its strictly kosher meals be opened with a “short Hebrew grace” and closed with a “benediction.” Others, like Philadelphia’s Vacation Home for Jewish Working Girls, placed a premium on Friday evening services. “The festive air of lighted candles and best gowns,” an eyewitness related, “set Friday evening apart as something altogether different from the other evenings.” Elsewhere, however, the familiar rhythms of Jewish life were sharply interrupted as many summering Jews appeared to take a vacation from God as well. “Out for a holiday time,” Jews have “thrown off all restraints of religion and of Jewish self-respect and deport themselves as though no tie bound them to race or religion,” observed 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 congregat