From Ellenville to Everywhere: Camp Gan Israel Turns 70

This summer in Bangkok, a group of Jewish children will sing the same Hebrew songs being sung in Tucson, and wear t-shirts with the same logo in Melbourne, and in Mumbai, and in Mexico City. From Hong Kong to Alaska, across dozens of countries on six continents, Camp Gan Israel will open its doors for the seventieth consecutive summer — the largest Jewish camping network in the world. Annual enrollment figures worldwide are estimated at roughly 200,000. For a majority of the campers this is their only formal Jewish experience.

The Camp Gan Israel phenomenon began in the spring of 1956, when a young man studying at 770 Eastern Parkway named Moshe Lazar pitched an idea to the Lubavitcher Rebbe: a summer camp for public school children that might steer them toward further Jewish connection. The Rebbe asked Lazar to assemble a team to make it work. Weeks before that summer, they found a campground in Ellenville, New York.

Days before the first campers arrived, the Rebbe visited the grounds — one of the few occasions he ever left New York City after settling there. He walked the property, told the directors to fence the lake and mark the deep end, and reminded them to make the grounds attractive for the children.

Among those present that first summer was Shmuel Lew, a sixteen-year-old from a non-Chassidic family in Williamsburg who served as one of the camp’s youngest counselors. He came with his two brothers. Most of the campers were not from a Chabad background — children from the schools of Chaim Berlin and Torah Vodaath, many from homes that weren’t observant. “My mother was there together with other parents to see the buses off,” Rabbi Lew shared, “and she later sent me a postcard to camp, saying it was her first time seeing the Rebbe — and she was so impressed that she wanted to transfer my youngest brother from Torah Vodaath to the Lubavitch school.” Both of his brothers would later celebrate their bar mitzvahs in camp.

The idea crossed the Atlantic quickly. In 1959, Rabbi Gershon Mendel and Bassie Garelik opened the first Gan Israel in Europe, in Italy — on borrowed money, with one child showing up on the first day. The counselor was a young Rabbi Avrohom Osdoba whose ship from America had docked in Venice for the weekend; a crew strike stranded him in Italy for months, and he became the camp’s staff almost by accident. At a farbrengen on the 13th of Tammuz that year, the Rebbe described how the Gareliks had built something from nothing, then asked the crowd to raise a L’chaim for every Gan Israel in existence — and every one yet to come.

Fourteen years later, the Gareliks’ son Levi arrived from Italy at the original Camp Gan Israel in upstate New York, which had since relocated to Parksville after a ten-year stint in Swan Lake. During the summer, donors would fly in on private planes, landing at the old Swan Lake campgrounds — since sold to the government and converted into an airstrip. Rabbi Avraham Shemtov, who had become executive director of the camp about a decade prior, used to choose children from different countries to greet the arrivals. “I went as the representative from Italy,” said Rabbi Garelik.

In 1963, days after his wedding, Rabbi Shmuel Lew traveled to England, where he visited the local Gan Israel. When he returned, the Rebbe sent him to speak at the end-of-summer banquet at Gan Israel in Detroit — and to tell the children he had just visited Gan Israel in England — emphasizing that the camp was truly one big family. “There were maybe ten Gan Israel camps at that point,” Rabbi Lew recalled, “but to the Rebbe, it was something bigger.”

Today, it truly is — with branches still opening in new locations across the world each summer.

Asked what he would tell a child heading to Gan Israel today, Rabbi Lew returned to that same message the Rebbe gave him more than sixty years ago: every camper, wherever they are, is part of one global family.