Pasa Punto, Pasa Mundo – A Moment Passes, A World Passes: Ground-breaking Sephardic Education at Camp

This year at SAC, we’re bringing Sephardic Education, Language, and Culture to the forefront of our camper and staffer experience. Our Camp theme, En La Kaza Mueva – In the New Home focuses on the Sephardic experience in the Ottoman Empire. Each bunk is named after a Sephardic city, like Salonika, Sarajevo, Rhodes, or Tekirdag, and paired with a key Sephardic figure from that city’s history. We’re highlighting great scholars like Rabbi Yosef Karo, who wrote his famous Beit Yosef in the city of Edirne, modern leaders like Yitzhak Navon from Jerusalem, the first Sephardic President of the State of Israel, and even local community leaders like Bension Maimon, a native of Tekirdag who had a major impact on the Seattle Sephardic Community.

All of this is part of a special year-long project developed specifically to educate the next generation of our Sephardic Adventure Campers on their Sephardic heritage. Our new Sephardic Core Curriculum, a specially designed, four-year curriculum created to fully integrate experiential learning of Sephardic history, traditions, Ladino language, and communal identity, is helping teach our campers the beauty of Sephardic life in a fun and meaningful way.

This year, we’ve continued to build on programs that have been successful for many years in camp, including our famous Coca en La Boca, where our Haham tells riddles, Ladino Refranes (sayings or proverbs), and of course, our favorite Joha stories, all while enjoying some hot coco. Our Ladino 101 sessions and Avrahahm & Sarah’s tent each help expose our campers to the beauty of the Ladino language in an interactive way, peaking their own curiosity and encouraging them to learn more.

Using this new curriculum, we’ve also expanded our Sephardic content and educational programming by leaps and bounds. New signage has appeared across our campsite for each bunk and major location, using the Ladino words for specific sites written in both Hebrew Merubah characters and Latin characters.

Campers now call the synagogue La Kehila or El Kahal – לה קהילה/איל קהל and the kitchen La Kozina – לה קוזינה, both classic ways to refer to these locations in our Sephardic communities. Every day at camp flag raising, we announce a Ladino Word of the Day and both campers and counselors have been consistently using them on a regular basis. During our amazing Color War, we had a special Ladino Lunch where campers were given a Ladino menu with verbs and had to answer questions about what they were eating or interact directly with our Sephardic educators; Kualo es en Judio…? – What is this in Ladino…? Dame la kuchara por favor – Pass me the spoon please. All of these things have helped to infuse our unique language and culture into everyday life at SAC.

While our camping season included Tisha B’Av this year, a difficult day in the Jewish calendar, we were able to use it a special opportunity to teach our older participants and CITs about the Sephardic experience in the Holocaust, something many of them didn’t even know existed. This provided them with a powerful aha moment, understanding that Sephardic communities in Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and even places in North Africa like Libya and Algeria did indeed suffer tremendously. It gave them a chance to connect, discussing what it means to be Sephardic, how the Holocaust still impacts us today, and what they’re responsibility is when we say never again. The program specifically highlighted testimonies from Seattle Sephardic Survivors from Rhodes and Salonika, some of whom were the grandparents and great-grandparents of a few of our campers, as well as other survivors from the Jewish community of Libya.

Possibly our most exciting new Sephardic initiative is having not one, but TWO nationally recognized Sephardic Scholars join us at camp this summer. Both Dr. Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Chair of Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington, and Dr. Bryan Kirschen, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Binghamton, are joining us for 3 day periods at camp to help teach Ladino, create fun Sephardic cultural games for our campers, and have meaningful conversations with our staff about what it means to be Sephardic. All of this is helping our camp to bring more of our Sephardic heritage and worldview to the forefront of our summer experience. Our campers are living what it means to be Sephardic today.

SAC is building the next generation of Sephardic leaders across the United States and around the world. For all of this, we say a special mersi muncho! (thank you!) to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Innovation Grants Program and the Samis Foundation for their support in making this new Sephardic Core Curriculum a reality. Si Kere El Dio (G-d Willing) this is only the beginning of growing our amazing Sephardic education experience at camp for years to come.