I had quite a moment at the the Jewish Teen Philanthropy Summit this week.

The list of attendees had not been distributed prior to the event, so beyond a family friend and Jewish Teen Funders Network co-founder Ricky Shechtel I was not sure who I would encounter there. I was delighted to see Ricky, along with Reshet Ramah and JTFN’s funding team from the Maimonides Fund, and an alumni engagement colleague from Young Judaea. I chatted with each of them, Ricky introduced me to a few friends, and then it was time for me to go pick a table and sit someplace.

That’s always the moment, isn’t it? In a room full of strangers, which seat do you pick? You have only a day or two to connect with all of these new people – how do you choose where to begin?

Quite randomly, I chose a half-full table in the middle. A few women were already seated on the far side across from me. As I reached across the table to introduce myself to them, the seats next to mine filled in. 

“Ramah? We are lifelong Ramahniks!” the woman to my right exclaimed when she heard my organizational affiliation. I was thrilled to meet Arlene Remz from Boston, who met her husband Sandy at Camp Ramah in New England when they were campers. Sandy is a long-time board member of Ramah New England, served as the camp’s president, and has stayed actively involved there. Arlene, now the Executive Director of Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, has long been involved with the camp’s Tikvah program for campers with special needs. In fact she is organizing a Yom Iyyun for Inclusion Professionals at camp later this summer.

Time to turn to my left and be friendly to the stranger now sitting there. A lay leader from Louisville, Kentucky, Joanie Lustig, who, it turns out, is a Ramah Darom parent whose daughter Julia is active in Reshet Ramah in NYC! Julia will be staffing a Ramah Darom’s Camp Yofi this summer. I am now astounded. How many other Ramah connections are in the room?

Joanie is attending the conference with her New Yorker sister, Lois Kohn-Claar, seated on Joanie’s other side. Joanie introduces us. When Lois hears that I work at Ramah, she tells me her son Ben is a counselor on staff at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. It doesn’t take us long to realize that her son was my own son’s counselor last summer.

What are the chances?

Upon reflection, I guess they are pretty good.

Ramah New England alum, Aviva Pearlman

After all, Reshet Ramah, Camp Ramah’s alumni network, is not something Ramah invented to superimpose on the Jewish community. Reshet Ramah is what happens when you walk into a room full of committed Jews, people from cities far and wide, and you start getting to know one another. Obviously not everyone in the room had a Ramah connection, though the impact of Jewish summer camp was a formative teen experience many people mentioned over the course of the day’s discussions. So while the chances of my happening to sit next to three other Ramah-connected women were pretty low, I suppose it just confirms that in a room full of people in positions of Jewish professional and communal leadership, the influence of Ramah is there, strong and deep, an undercurrent nourishing so much life and leadership in the Jewish community.

Arlene, Joanie, and Lois, thanks for sitting with me. Ricky and Briana, thanks for convening such a great group at the JTFN Summit. I’m so glad we all found one another.