Get to Know Capital Camps
It's Summer Camp Season!
A summer away from home. A dining hall full of noise. A Shabbat filled with song and dance. A friendship that started in a bunk and is still going strong twenty years later.
Ask an American Jew what first made them feel “Jewish,” and there’s a decent chance the answer involves summer camp.
Jewish overnight camp is one of the key ways that Judaism becomes an immersive way of life. For families in the DMV, Capital Camps has been that introduction for nearly four decades.
What actually happens at Capital Camps?
The short answer: a lot.
Located in the Catoctin Mountains of Pennsylvania, just 75 miles from DC, Capital Camps is the premier Jewish community overnight camp in the region. A core partner of The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, each summer, more than 900 campers and 180 staff come together across multiple village programs. Programming spans waterfront activities, a ropes course, theater & arts through the Habima program, a working farm, and Jewish life experiences that run through the entire summer. A 700-person dining hall serves kosher meals (meat, dairy, and pareve kitchens, if you were wondering), and staff provide daily opportunities for campers to connect with Jewish text, tradition, and community.
First-time campers enter through the Yalla program, a specially designed experience for children navigating camp for the very first time. Older campers transition into leadership programming that, for many, becomes their first tangible leadership experience: running a Shabbat, taking responsibility for a cabin, or mentoring a younger camper.
Capital Camps also works to ensure that different groups feel included and that they can enjoy everything the summer camp experience has to offer. The Atzma’im inclusion program ensures that children of any denominational affiliation, gender, race, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status, including those with a range of intellectual, emotional, and physical abilities can fully participate in the camp experience. The campus is fully ADA compliant and support staff is available for medical and mental health services. Through annual partnerships with Friends of the IDF, Israeli campers who have lost someone through conflict are welcomed to camp, a reminder that the camp’s community extends well beyond its 75-mile radius.
How does the Foundation support camp?
Access to transformative Jewish experiences is one of the most powerful investments a community can make. Research shows that Jewish overnight camp creates lasting connection to Jewish identity, community, and leadership in ways that are difficult to replicate.
Study after study, from the Foundation for Jewish Camp to Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, finds that Jewish camp alumni are more likely to marry Jewish partners, raise Jewish children, donate to Jewish causes, and remain engaged in Jewish communal life across the arc of their adulthood. The mechanism is straightforward: immersive, joyful, community-based experiences during formative years create an attachment to Jewish life that withstands the drift of adulthood.
We know this, and yet, cost remains one of the primary reasons families don’t send their children to Jewish overnight camp. If we can lower this barrier to access, we know we can create strong and vibrant future generations of Jews.
Scholarship funding exists to remove this exact barrier.
The Jewish Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is proud to support the expansion of access to transformative experiences like Capital Camps through strategic philanthropy and scholarship funding through both Donor Advised Funds and Legacy Gifts. Because one of the truths we keep returning to in this work is that belonging isn’t something you can teach in the abstract. It has to be lived. And the experiences that young people carry with them into adulthood, their sense of Jewish identity, their instinct toward community, their capacity for leadership, are often rooted in summers like this one.
Ready to learn more?
If you’re a donor thinking about where camp scholarship funding goes, it goes here: to a child who might not otherwise have access to the people, the places, and their connection to Jewry they just haven’t met yet.
The Catoctin Mountains are waiting!
