Sharing Cultures at Camp
by David Crumm • The Detroit Free Press
posted Sunday, May 13, 2007

The 14 Jewish and Latino families who nervously unpacked their gear for a cross-cultural camping experience Friday afternoon in northern Oakland county soon discovered their communities shared more than they expected.

Beyond mutually enjoying the made-from-scratch guacamole and braided Jewish challah bread at supper, the families soon blended until it was hard to tell whose children were chasing soccer balls or snapping photos of each other on the lakeshore.

Gail Katz, vice president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit, said a lot is riding on the success of the three-day event, which ends today at Camp Maas in Ortonville.

In recent years, the local Jewish community, which is concentrated in Oakland County, has launched an array of programs to strengthen its historic ties with Detroit. Those programs range from partnerships with churches in the city to support for various public schools, including Harms elementary in southwest Detroit.

“But we’ve realized that we have to do more with these programs,” Katz said. “We need to form personal relationships, so we decided to organize this weekend camp for some families with children at Harms and some families from our community with children about the same age.”

Since the late 1990s, the Jewish-sponsored camp has funded a weekend camp for dozens of Harms students, but this was the first time entire families were involved.

Detroiter Amanda Gonzales admitted that she was a little nervous about the invitation to spend three days with 60 people she had never met. But, she said, she works as a cake decorator nearly every weekend and the idea of arranging a special time away from home with her three children, ages 6 to 13, soon won her over to the concept.

“We all love spending time with our families,” she said Friday as she helped kids scramble across a climbing structure.

After dinner, counselors organized activities to highlight that theme. Each family colorfully decorated a cardboard figure of a person in a happy, dancing pose, and soon all the figures were arranged in a chorus line along one wall.

Each family also took a turn standing up and listing favorite pastimes. Like others, Gonzales’ family said that any time together was great and they especially enjoy going to the movies. Families said they like playing games, riding bikes, walking dogs, going to parks – and these activities were repeated again and again by Jewish and Latino speakers.

The kids took all of 10 minutes to get past any awkwardness and head out to play. The adults slowly discovered their connections through the evening.

Max Valdez, a native of the Dominican Republic whose family members are Pentecostal Christians, said he initially agreed to participate with his wife, Veronica, and their three children because his work a s a construction supervisor rarely allows them to get away together. But as he watched the Jewish families demonstrate the lighting of Friday-night Sabbath candles and explain the blessings over dinner, he felt right at home.

“In our family, for everything we do, we first thank God, too,” he said.

On Saturday, in addition to outdoor sports and activities such as boating on the lake and hiking in the woods, the families had a lineup of group games designed to highlight their similarities. Katz designed one to award points for correctly guessing facts about minority groups around the world.

By late Friday, Mitchell Alexander, a Jewish resident of southwest Detroit who works as a community developer with nonprofit agencies, said he was very happy with what he saw unfolding.

“When I moved here from New York in 2001, one thing that struck me is that the migration of families out of Detroit to the suburbs seems to have been more pronounced than in some other cities I know,” he said. “There are a lot of us who want to be part of making new connections.”

›› Go Back