Centuries in the Making… Our Journey to Sephardic Adventure Camp
By: Elana Arroyo
My name is Elana, and I came to Sephardic Adventure Camp as the nurse for a few days this year to accompany my children, Golan and Annaelle Arroyo to their first summer at SAC. Their flight to camp was only five hours long, but their journey to SAC took over five hundred years. Golan and Annaelle are the first two openly Jewish children born to their paternal family since the Spanish Inquisition.
When my husband, Adam, was in middle school, his mother informed him that their family was Jewish. She told him that this information had been given to her by her maternal grandmother when she was a child. My husband’s Judaism was a heritage passed down with no ritual or meaning, just a message. There were a few family traditions that may or not have been relics of past Jewish practice, changed for safety: a recipe that should have called for pork but did not and a custom to never sweep dirt through doorways–possibly in honor of a mezuzah that was no longer there. Another family tradition – to empty a basin of water out of the window in the spring and then announce that the house was now cleaned of all bad things – may have been a way to commemorate Pesach cleaning.
Adam took it upon himself to figure out what being Jewish meant for him, and began a journey of religious discovery that led him to a practicing, orthodox Jewish life. He tried out a variety of synagogues and communities, visited Jewish sites in Spain, spent months in Israel, and eventually underwent a Sephardic conversion to ensure that no one could doubt his place in the Jewish nation. When we got married, I–Ashkenazi, born and bred–started learning Sephardic traditions, foods, and songs. When Golan, our first child, was born, he was the first openly Jewish boy to have a public brit milah in my husband’s family in centuries. My husband allowed his Jewish heritage to return to the light after centuries of hidden traditions and whispered secrets.
We live in a town without a significant Sephardic presence. We love our shul and our children’s day school. We work hard to bring Sephardic traditions, nusach, and foods into our home, but we felt that our kids needed to learn Sephardic traditions in a more formal framework as well. After an internet search turned up Sephardic Adventure Camp, the only Sephardic overnight camp in North America, we decided that when the children were old enough, they would be SAC campers.
And so, this year, for the first time, I took our oldest two children and flew from Boston to Seattle to see for ourselves how it felt to be part of a Sephardic community. We are so excited to be here at Sephardic Adventure Camp and to learn the Sephardic tunes, tefillot, and minhagim! It was very special to my husband, children, and I to spend a Shabbat at SAC filled with Sephardic tunes during pizmonim, watching our children participate in La Boz, and to know that they are baking biskochos and learning Ladino. It was a wonderful experience for me, and I can tell from the photos that my kids are still having a blast without me! I hope that we will continue to be a SAC family for many years to come!
