Some call it an alumni event, many have called it a homecoming. In a few weeks time, over a thousand people will be coming to Eisner to celebrate the camp’s 50th anniversary! This event spans five decades of Eisner traditions and stories and will be one of the momentous occasions in Eisner history.
Register today to take part in these historic and important activities. You won’t want to miss it! Visit the site to see of your old friends are already signed up!
Moreover, send us a message and tell us how excited you are to see old friends and be at camp again!
Sam Salkin
Dave Silverstein
I thought for a while to determine whether to post anything here. I don’t know that my thoughts are all that deep, or if they’re shared by the others who read this, but, oh well, any who remember me know that I always have something to say.
Certainly, I am overflowing with reflection upon looking at this “homecoming blog”. With 18 summers under my belt spanning the majority of the eighties and nineties and my entire journey from childhood to young adulthood, I do feel like I’m coming home. It was at camp where I gave my first speech, (age 4, I think, to limud,) fell in love for the first time, and the second, and the third…, fell off a cliff, snuck into a karaoke bar (when I was on staff, campers, no ideas), and rode a manual wheelchair through the Hudson River. Everything about this site is familiar. Sam Salkin who maintains this portion of the blog was one of the many young Eisnerites whom I tutored in preparation for their bar and bat mitzvahs. (Sam, though you probably cannot recall, the best advice that I could give you as a teenager myself was “raise the X-Wing” and “there is no try”. I hope my brother taught you better add your synagogue). Certainly, there are few places on earth that feel more like home, or at which it feels more appropriate to say that I grew up.
Home, though, is more than the place. This blog references “keep that hill alive.” To make a point of the kind of home experience that we all share of though. “Three to one odds, sometimes I wonder if they know what I mean.” There is a unique shared experience that all of us with a significant attachment to camp can understand, that, try as we might, we have great difficulty conveying to anyone else. The readers of this blog will know what I mean when I speak of raids, song session, and banquets. Those from the eighties will remember the frogs in the swimming pool while those from the mid-nineties will remember the polka dots on pink house. I don’t think any of the current campers will remember the new facility, or when green house was actually green, and I’m certainly one of the youngest at age 26 to remember swimming in the Lake. But the common understanding goes deeper than that. I have found three Eisner alumni at the law firm where I work. Two were contemporaries of mine, and one significantly predates me. We may not share exactly the same inside jokes, or the incidents that made good Maccabiah fodder in any given year. What we do share is the experience of the place where “you lose your mind and you leave brokenhearted.” You may not always have the opportunity to return the next year, but when you find another that shared that experience, who knows what you mean even if they weren’t quite there with you, you bring the home that you made at camp with you wherever you are.
Here then is the homecoming that excites me. It will be nice to see the facility on Brookside Road and I know as well as my parents house. A strange part of me is even looking forward to the mosquitoes. The thing about which I am most excited, however, is that I will spend a Shabbat with a thousand people and not have to wonder if they know what I mean. I will return to the real world on Monday, the last tick again gone from my clock, but, having lost my mind, I expected hope to find that wherever we gather the people, “it’s all still here.” Perhaps then we need not leave brokenhearted, because whenever a few of us get together, we can keep that hill alive. Anyway, I’m truly excited to see you all in July.
By: Matan Koch on July 6, 2008
at 5:15 pm
To Matan: I first met your father my first summer, 1972. He was, I believe, one of the Tzofim unit heads. I was, I know, a CIT under the leadership of Rick Rubens. I lived with Jo Finkelstein, Naomi Maslin, and Jackie….. in an A-frame on Chalutzim Hill. None of us had bunks to care for. I worked with Ruth Hirshey and David Gruber in Drama……
To everyone from the 1970s:If you have any photos you can e-mail to me, I will put together a photoboard, or two to display in our “Tent of Meeting” at the Reunion.
Any Stand-out Memories? Arlo & Pete, Linda & James, PPM at Tanglewood? Salmonella? Viral Pneumonia? Maccabeea Breaks? Send them to me. I will print them and post them.
It’s not to late!
Looking forward to singing, smiling and schmoozing.
By: Amy Dattner-Levy on July 7, 2008
at 11:31 am
Amy, I have a bunch of old B&W photos, and sorry to say, I can’t remember the names of a lot of the people in them. What’s your email? I’ll scan them and email them to you.
By: Amy Klein-Kaufman on July 13, 2008
at 12:59 am