Ask any Jewish communal worker what are the three most effective ways of guaranteeing that a child will grow up with a strong Jewish identity, and he or she probably will answer: "Jewish day school, Jewish summer camp and a trip to Israel."

There are four Jewish day schools in San Diego County, while a variety of programs to send teenagers to Israel long have been in place. But summer camping used to be beyond the community's reach — until now, say officials and volunteers of the United Jewish Federation.

On Jan. 23, the UJF opened escrow on a 153-acre sleep-over camp in Mountain Center, Calif., about three miles from Lake Hemet. Purchasing the property will cost $2.5 million; to develop it into a first-class, 200-bed camp and retreat center will cost another $5 million to $7.5 million.

The camp will be one of the major new initiatives of the United Jewish Federation during the coming fiscal year. Other important new programs will include a pilot transportation project to ferry seniors from their residences to doctors' offices and activity centers; enhancement of the
Shalom Baby program, which introduces the services of the Jewish community to expectant parents and to families with newborns, and expansion of co-programming with the Sha'ar Hanegev region in Israel.

Ed Samiljan, a UJF volunteer who has been chairing the effort to develop a sleep-over camp, said he envisions two camp sessions per summer, "which will mean we will impact 400 kids."

"This is a major community-building activity," he said during an interview at UJF's Joseph and Lenka Finci Building. "We will be able to grab ahold of kids, perhaps from the age of 10 on, and involve them in a community-building process which doesn¹t exist right now. So as these kids
grow up and mature in the San Diego community, it is very likely that they are going to know each other, and it will be a much tighter community than it ever was before."

Samiljan said that the camp will be the only such Jewish facility south of Los Angeles. "There is nothing in Orange County, nothing in Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego or Imperial counties, so this will be the first Jewish-community camp in this particular part of Southern California."
With such a vast area for the camp to draw from, "we don't expect any trouble filling beds," Samiljan said.

Typically, camps make money during the summer when there are campers, but lose money when the children they serve are in school. Therefore, Samiljan said he hopes to incorporate into the camp's design the capability of serving as a "retreat center for the boards of directors of the various Jewish agencies, for youth groups, nature study groups" and the like.

Nadine Finkel, the UJF staff member who helps to develop communal programs, said an Elderhostel site is one of the off-summer uses of the facility that are under active consideration.

"We are so close to Idyllwild," she said. "One of the things that we can do is art and music programming. There are great resources up in Idyllwild, so there are lots of opportunities."

The facility, which will bear the name of a major donor if one steps forward, is expected to open for business in the summer of 2004, although Samiljan would like to provide the grounds for a positive Jewish youth experience even before that.

"I would like to set it up on an experimental basis as a 'kibbutz'-type activity," he said. "Maybe we could call it 'Kibbutz Diego' and invite teens to come out and help us prepare the camp, work in the camp, in some modest fashion for weeks at a time for an extraordinarily modest cost," he said.

"We'd make it very inexpensive just so the kids could get some exposure, and so that the camp would get some exposure to the community."

Finkel suggested that teens who participate in the kibbutz-style work camp probably would be able to make meaningful suggestions about how the camp should be developed prior to its formal opening.

Once the camp does open, Samiljan said, he envisions it would serve 100 boys and 100 girls, ages 8-16, during each four-week session, with two regular sessions scheduled per summer. If any group wanted to use the fully-kosher facility for its own programming before or after those eight weeks, such an extension could be arranged, he said.

Finkel said eventually the camp would become a separate Jewish agency and have its own executive director and board of governors.

To underscore the importance of Jewish camping, Samiljan related two stories from his own life:
"I have a granddaughter who lives in Wellesley (Mass.), with her parents. My son-in-law is secular Jewish and my daughter has gone along with his ways. My granddaughter was going to a Jewish day camp one summer, and she came home and complained bitterly that all the kids knew all the prayers, and she didn't know any of the prayers.

"She is a strong little girl, and the by-product was that they joined the local Reform temple in Wellesley, and that this little girl has grown up to be a member of the choir; she had her bat mitzvah there, and is now going through her confirmation process."

More recently, Samiljan said, he attended services at Temple Adat Shalom in which there were both a bar mitzvah and a bat mitzvah. The girl who was becoming a bat mitzvah told the congregation that "she was the daughter of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father.  This lovely-looking, beautiful young girl, with a lot of presence, (also said that) her parents were divorced, and that her mother wanted her to be raised Catholic and the father wanted
her to be raised Jewish.

"This became a matter of great conflict in her family," Samiljan continued. "The deciding moment in her life was attending Camp Swig in Northern California, where she was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere that she made a decision that she wanted to be Jewish. From there she proceeded to Hebrew school and to bat mitzvah and a commitment to remain Jewish.

"At the ceremony, you could see the tears falling, people were dabbing their eyes, the handkerchiefs were out." Camps have "access to children at a very moving time of their lives."

A study of the 153-acre site commissioned by UJF notes that the property lies at an elevation of 5,000 feet and has scenery "almost like New England and is Alpine in appearance... From the highway (Route 74), there is a well-kept tar road of about one-quarter mile that leads you to the site. The setback is far enough so that there is no view or sound from Route 74. The
terrain upon entrance is rolling hills, well-treed with stone walls, parking areas and buildings in a manicured woody setting.

"The entrance has a security gate that is opened by pressing a button that signals the office. There are outdoor meeting areas with stone barbecues and several 'meditation' areas around the site.

"About one-third of the site is hilly and treed and the balance is open meadow area," the report continued. "The site is enclosed on three sides by a National Forest and on the fourth by a private party near a stable that provides horses for rental, training. There are roads (some tarred and some hard-packed earth) that encircle the complete perimeter of the grounds. At one far end there are maintenance buildings which are out of sight and quite a distance from the principal residences."

Currently, the grounds include a 1,500-square foot administration building, four residences, catteries and kennels, a filled-in swimming pool, and a pool house.

Samiljan said part of the renovation program would include construction of a new swimming pool and conversion of some of the pasture land into sports fields. With a lake just five minutes away, boating activities also will be a focus, he said.

During Heritage's joint interview with Samiljan, Finkel and Jodie Kaplan, a volunteer who chairs UJF¹s Israel Center committee, Finkel noted that ten years ago the United Jewish Federation surveyed Jews throughout San Diego County to determine what were the community's needs.
From information gathered in that survey, Finkel said, UJF developed ten programs over the next 10 years. These included: 1) Jewish and Single in San Diego; 2) Community Teen Coalition; 3) Pathways to Judaism for intermarried families; 4) Community Outreach Program; 5) Israel Center; 6) Melton Adult Mini-School; 7) college internship for prospective Jewish communal workers; 8) community chaplain and Jewish Healing Center; 9) scholarship program to
send children to Jewish camps, and 10) Shalom Baby.

Shalom Baby is the newest program. "Right now, what it does is outreach to expectant parents and to those with newborns," Finkel said. "They get a volunteer visit and a fabulous resource basket — everything they might want to know about raising a Jewish baby and about the Jewish community. All the synagogues have brochures in the basket.

"What we want to do is expand that to a Jewish Lamazeltov program," she said, punning on the name of a popular birthing technique and the Hebrew words for "good luck." Additionally, Shalom Baby could grow into "play groups, chavurot, grandparent groups do," she said.

The Israel Center program has been in place longer. One of its major components is granting scholarships to teenagers interested in visiting Israel on trips sponsored by the Federation or other synagogues and agencies within the Jewish community.

"We gave $78,000 in scholarships the year before last for between 40 and 50 kids," Kaplan said. ³Last year, with the situation in Israel, the number was much smaller, trips were canceled, even some of the university programs."

With fewer people traveling to Israel, she said, there has been some focus on bringing Israelis here. Next April, for example, during "Israel Month" some artists from the city of Safed (Sfat) will stage an art exhibition at the Lawrence Family JCC. A city associated with mystical Judaism, Safed normally is a center for Jewish tourism, but now shops are closing because there is
so little tourist traffic, Kaplan said.

About four years ago, Yaacov Schneider came to San Diego from Israel to serve as a shaliach, or emissary. Normally, shlichim stay in a community for a minimum of two years, with an extension possible to three under the rules of the sponsoring Jewish Agency for Israel.
Federation was able to get Schneider's contract extended to four years, and then to five, but agreement to the latter came only after UJF consented to relinquish his services at the end of the fifth year, Kaplan said. In March, a group of San Diego officials will begin the process of interviewing someone to replace Schneider when his fifth year is concluded.

Schneider has become popular in San Diego, not only as someone who encourages people to visit Israel, but also as the person who was instrumental in creating the partnership between Federation and the Sha'ar Hanegev region of Israel, on the border with Gaza.

Under the partnership, Federation contributes $750,000 annually to support the student village of Ibim, where newly-arrived students from immigrant families study Hebrew as well as course work in their own fields while acclimating to life in Israel. As Ibim is located within the Sha'ar Hanegev
region, this support has a spillover effect on the rest of the area. Now there are frequent cultural and educational exchanges between the two areas, and Sha'ar Hanegev's mayor, Shai Hermesh, is a frequent visitor to San Diego.

For many years previously, UJF was a participant along with federations from other cities of the United States in a program to support Kiryat Malachi, the development town in the Negev from which Israel's President Moshe Katsav hails.

Because the money went into a central fund, with limited opportunity for direct input by San Diegans into how the money was spent, the local Jewish Federation decided to gradually withdraw from the consortium supporting Kiryat Malachi in favor of a direct 1:1 relationship with Sha'ar Hanegev, Finkel said.

The interview with Heritage concerning new UJF initiatives had one additional program to cover: the intended start-up of transportation programs for seniors.

Finkel said transportation has long been identified as one of the major problems facing not only Jewish seniors, but seniors of all religions and backgrounds. A Federation task force met with various agencies dealing with seniors to determine what needed to be done.

"Right now we are talking about getting them to JFS (Jewish Family Service) centers, getting them to their doctors," Finkel said. "It is amazing, the more you get into the subject. We learn there are such things a  'door-to-door' programs for people who are ambulatory and 'door-through-door' programs, for the ones who need assistance.

"Some people need a large bus; other seniors have special needs," she added. "We have made a list of what is available now in the Jewish community. What we need to do is look at the whole picture. What do people need to go to programs, or get out to lunch, or get to medical services? What we want to do is develop a model program, a pilot program— perhaps in one or two Zip
code areas — and see if we can get a transportation program going and go from there."

Finkel said the program probably will involve "a combination of a shuttle service and volunteer drivers."