(Jewish Group) A new frontier for preventing antisemitic attacks: Jewish summer camp
The summer after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Helene Drobenare decided to take off a large Hebrew word from the T-shirts of her camp counselors.
Shirts with the word “tzevet,” Hebrew for staff, usually in big block letters, are standard swag for the legions of counselors who work at Jewish day camps and sleepaway camps each summer across the country. Drobenare, the executive director of Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake, which includes an overnight camp and two day camps, was worried that for the counselors at her day camp in Brooklyn, the Hebrew on their shirts would make the counselors a target in the middle of the day camp’s crowded neighborhood.
It was far from Drobenare’s first foray into anticipating violent threats. The 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School had convinced her that she needed to double down on security even at her more remote campgrounds outside the city. Sandy Hook, she said, reminded her of camp — a sweet, relatively out-of-the-way place full of children.
In the nearly nine years since that tragedy, and especially in the three years since the Pittsburgh shooting, Drobenare has hired armed security for her camps, applied for government security grants, trained her employees in lockdown and shelter-in-place drills, and reinforced windows. She also has her counselors wear bracelets that identify them as staff — in case police need to catch an intruder and differentiate between the staff and strangers.
more...
Fingers crossed that all these kids experience is fun and friendship!
= new reply since forum marked as read
