New CKids Overnight Camp to Open on the West Coast

Across the world, Chabad offers Jewish programming for every age, and children are at the center of it. In more than a hundred countries, Chabad rabbis and their wives run Hebrew schools, holiday events, teen groups, and summer day camps, and for many families this is the whole of their children’s Jewish life. The West Coast is no exception. From San Diego to Seattle, Chabad Houses fill every Sunday morning with Hebrew school and every June with day camp, serving thousands of children whose families belong to nothing else.

One piece has always been missing here. When a West Coast child outgrew day camp and was ready for the immersive experience of a Jewish overnight camp, the nearest Gan Israel camp of its kind was a continent away. Every summer a small number of families put their children on planes to New York or Pennsylvania. Most did not.

This summer, that gap closes. CKids Gan Israel West Coast, a new overnight camp in the Lake Tahoe region, will welcome boys ages 9 to 13 for its first session, July 20 through August 2, giving families across the western states a CKids Gan Israel overnight camp within driving distance of home.

The camp sits on new grounds in the Lake Tahoe region of California, with extensive recreation on site and in the surrounding area. The grounds are equipped for sports, water activities, and everything a camp needs, and the region offers trips that few camps anywhere can match. Running through all of it is the Jewish experience that defines a CKids Gan Israel camp, where Jewish children from every background, many of them public school students, live Judaism among their friends, not as a class but as part of the daily fun.

The camp is the seventh in the CKids Gan Israel network, joining camps in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Wisconsin, Denmark, and Hungary. The camps serve children from Jewish families of every background. Most attend public school and encounter Jewish life a few hours a week at best; at camp they get it around the clock for several weeks, and parents routinely describe the result as the single biggest shift in their child’s sense of being Jewish. The model goes back to 1956, when the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, founded the first Camp Gan Israel with the view that a few weeks of living inside Jewish life could do more for a child than months of studying it.

The camp will be led by co-directors Rabbi Yona Weiss and Rabbi Shalom Yaffe. Rabbi Weiss, grew up on the West Coast and knew the gap firsthand. “Families out here are looking for a CKids Gan Israel overnight camp close to home, with the same program, the same standard, and no plane ticket,” he says. “That’s what this is. A child can leave Los Angeles in the morning and be swimming in the lake by the afternoon.”

Chabad rabbis across the western states have been saying the same thing. They run Hebrew schools and day camps for thousands of local children and have long described an overnight camp as the missing step, the place a child goes after outgrowing day camp. For many of them, a West Coast camp has been a standing wish. CKids Gan Israel California was built in answer to it, and the directors say they intend to work with every rabbi, family, and community in the region to fill it.

Rabbi Shimon Margolin of Northern California, who saw the need early and reached out to the directors with an open offer to help get the camp off the ground.

Rabbi Zalman Loewenthal, who directs CKids International and its CKids Gan Israel overnight camp network, says “This is long overdue, bringing the Rebbe’s vision of a Gan Israel overnight experience to the West Coast. What has been especially beautiful is seeing the directors of our existing camps, each of whom runs and funds his own camp independently, give their time to guide the new directors.”

Both directors came to this the same way, by spending their summers inside the camps they are now replicating. Rabbi Yaffe spent eight summers at CKids Gan Israel location in the Catskills, L’Man Achai starting as a counselor, and later as head staff. Every year he watched the same scene at the airport. “A bus would go pick up the kids flying in from California,” he says. “I watched what those few weeks did for them, and I watched how far they had to come to get it. At some point the two things together make the decision for you.” His director through all those summers, Rabbi Yitzchok Steinmetz, has been at his side through the launch of the new camp.

Rabbi Weiss spent his own summers on staff at CKids Gan Israel overnight camps. “I saw kids come in barely knowing what Shabbat was and leave with it as part of who they are”

Both grew up in Chabad families serving communities, where making a difference in people’s lives was simply what the household did. camp is where they saw children living, over a few weeks, what they had only learned about during the year. “In Hebrew school a child about Judaism,” Rabbi Weiss says. “In camp he lives it, with two hundred friends, every week. That is a different thing entirely.”

This July, for the first time, West Coast families will send their sons to a CKids Gan Israel overnight camp without a plane ticket. The directors expect the first session to fill with boys from across the western states, many of them going to overnight camp for the first time, and they are already planning for the summers after it. 

Registration is open at ckidsganisraelwestcoast.com. Scholarships are available.