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Our Tikvah Mission: a Recipe for Leadership

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Our Tikvah Mission: a Recipe for Leadership LEARNING FROM RAMAH 237 HERB GREENBERG AND BARBARA GREENBERG Our Tikvah Mission: A Recipe for Leadership We bask in much pride and satisfaction as we reflect upon our efforts that spurred an entirely new direction in Jewish education. The era following the Six-Day War created an enormous surge of Zionist pride that led to an interest in innovation in Jewish educational and communal growth. As a result, our generation experienced a heightened degree of idealism and commitment to strengthening Jewish identity on both the personal and the collective level. In particular, informal education, as witnessed, for example, by the growth of the .movement, created new opportunities for the greater Jewish community חבורה Because of this trend, new leadership was needed to support a growing list of priorities in Jewish life. And so we began to link our professional experiences as special educators to the new agendas in the Jewish world. In the late 1960s, a new voice emerged in the secular Jewish as well as non-Jewish communities. The de-institutionalization process had begun, and for the first time, most children and adults with special needs were being returned to their respective communities. Modest private efforts were imple- mented to deal with this novel situation. Jewish families were faced with enor- mous challenges that included the reintegration of many children with serious disabilities — and in some cases “unwanted” children — into their homes. Jewish communal and religious institutions did not have the resources to deal with these revolutionary changes in the mental health arena. Forty-plus years ago Jewish youngsters who were developmentally chal- lenged had no identity in their Jewish communities. The Jewish world did not acknowledge the birthright of this population. By and large, families of these children remained invisible to the Jewish community. They suffered in silence, though they craved a Jewish education and identity for their children. HERB GREENBERG AND BARBARA GREENBERG are the founding directors of the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah in New England, where they worked for twenty-nine summers. Now living in Raanana, Israel, near their children and eleven grandchildren, they made aliyah after retiring from the Long Island public school system, where they served for more than thirty-six and twenty-eight years, respectively, as educators for adolescents with special needs. 238 greenberg • Our tikvah mission Until 1969, homogeneity of population had been the watchword at the Ramah camps, reflecting the reality in educational thinking of the time. The Jewish world, however, is indebted to the Ramah network for the contributions to Jewish educational innovation and leadership throughout North America, Europe, and Israel that Ramah initiated during this period. In late March of 1970, the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education for the Special Child found a home for the first Tikvah Program. Much credit is due to the members of this committee including, among others, Rabbi Joseph Kelman, z”l, Dr. Morton Siegel, Dr. Pesach Schindler, and Edya Arzt, z" l, who lobbied with great dedication for the creation of a new model to be known as Jewish special education. The United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education worked closely with the National Ramah Commission to create a novel paradigm, one that was unprecedented at the time in the secular world. The opportunity to right -or repair of the world, created its own momen תיקון עולם a wrong, to perform תיקון עולם tum. From its inception, the Tikvah Program endeavored to achieve on two levels simultaneously. In the broader population, the Tikvah Program sought to dispel the myths and stereotypes regarding children who have spe- cial needs. The Tikvah Program embraced those developmentally challenged youngsters who had been disenfranchised for so long from Jewish education and social interaction with their “normal” peers. Though Jewish special education in the late 1960s was an abstract con- cept without any concrete foundation, under the direction of Don Adelman, z”l, Camp Ramah in Glen Spey, New York, agreed to host this new venture. Three months before the opening of the 1970 summer camp season, there were no Tikvah campers and no Tikvah staff. During this period we person- ally made many hurried phone calls to rabbis of all denominations, Jewish educators, and Jewish community leaders in an effort to identify a suitable camper population for the inaugural season of the program. But to no avail! Adolescent Jewish children with developmental disabilities, along with their families, could not be found in Jewish educational and communal settings. We then turned to the world of secular special education, our professional milieu, realizing that Jewish parents were frequently very active in the various special education organizations of the time, often seemingly out of propor- tion to the number of Jewish special education students represented. When we turned to this world of secular special education, we began to identify our target population, though it was by no means a homogeneous group. The eight campers whom we then found exhibited a wide range of learning and behavioral disorders, ranging from moderate to severe. Aside from the fact that these eight youngsters possessed no Jewish background, none of them had LEARNING FROM RAMAH 239 ever experienced social interactions with non-disabled peers. In addition to the differences between the intellectual and behavioral profiles of the first Tikvah campers and those of their non-Tikvah peers, the Tikvah campers also differed greatly from one another and from the rest of the camp in their educational, social, and religious experiential backgrounds. It became apparent to us that one of the first challenges we would face would be that of reconciling the var- ied expectations of our staff, the general Ramah community, and the parents of the non-Tikvah campers. Next, we briefly outline our efforts to meet the new challenge of creat- ing a model of integrated Jewish summer camping that would sustain itself for future generations. First of all, we must state that it was, and remains, our belief that an innovative educational or communal paradigm would ben- efit one subgroup, in this case youngsters with special educational needs, if and only if, there was a commitment among all the parties involved to share a common vision, to encourage and accept constructive criticism, to support consistent leadership, to provide the necessary financial and staff resources, to adjust goals to meet new challenges as they arose, and to inculcate the tenets of the program into the consciousness of the community at large. The concretization of a vision is a milestone of leadership. During staff week in June of 1970, we told our staff of four counselors, “You are writing, figuratively speaking, a ‘Torah’ for developmentally challenged Jewish chil- dren.” In general terms, we further informed our staff that the goals, achieved through specific processes and activities of the Tikvah Program, would enable this new camper population to internalize many of the skills and values that we have always treasured as a Jewish people. We also hoped that, in the process of implementing this formidable goal, we would educate the entire Ramah community, enlisting everyone as a partner in our enterprise. Ultimately, we wished everyone who constituted the community of Camp Ramah to meet the challenge we presented, that of accepting the reality that members of the Tikvah Program must be guaranteed equal opportunity throughout the camp. As a starting point, we expected our staff to serve as role models for the entire camp, by demonstrating through their own efforts in daily interactions with Tikvah youngsters, that anyone who worked in Camp Ramah could draw upon his or her unique strengths to support this population. In so doing, every staff member would, by example, encourage the non-Tikvah campers to dispel any fears they harbored toward peers with significant deficits. We must conclude after having founded and then having directed the Tikvah Program at Camp Ramah in New England for twenty-nine summers (1970–98) that the Ramah Camping Movement has proven itself to be an incu- bator for the creation and nurturing of leaders in all walks of Jewish life. For us 240 greenberg • Our tikvah mission and for many others, our years at Ramah coalesced into a transformative expe- rience. Despite certain bureaucratic restrictions inherent in any orga nization, Camp Ramah was open to institutional change and afforded us opportunities for experimentation and innovation, while at the same time, it provided the chance for almost any staff member to participate, either individually or as part of a group, in activities with the Tikvah campers. Camp Ramah encouraged our personal growth. In a very practical sense, our entire family — including our children Seth Greenberg and Gabie Greenberg Sykora — was changed by our Ramah experience. We all became fluent in Hebrew and internalized an ,or settling in Israel (1992 עליה ardent dedication to Israel, culminating in our 1993, and 1999, respectively). One of the missions of Ramah during our early נחת and the institution can share in our ,עליה tenure there was to encourage or joy, as we now number nineteen family members, including eleven grand- children, nine of whom are sabras, all living in Ra’anana, Israel. During the first few years of the Tikvah Program, a leadership model evolved. This model enabled the project to resonate as a mission, a vision, and as a new reality for the Ramah community. To realize our vision, we had to consider many professional, as well as personal factors. We had to keep our goals clearly in mind while exhibiting some degree of flexibility in the means we employed to achieve them. We had to consider, for example, competing interests. In addition, on at least some level, there is always initial resistance to innovation, often accompanied by some degree of skepticism regarding the validity of the aims of any new program.
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