We were engaged around Thanksgiving 1991, and married on Hanukkah in 1992. Cheryl Magen, our chadchanit, made our ketubah and was one of our witnesses. Our other witnesses were Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom (my home rabbi) and Rabbi Arthur Ruberg, director of Camp Ramah in the Poconos, 1976-1980.

We had wanted Rabbi Eli Havivi, director of Camp Ramah in the Poconos, 1981-1984, also to be a witness. Unfortunately he was not able to attend our wedding because he was in “eivel” (mourning for one of his parents). Every year of our marriage we visited camp for a Shabbat, usually during alumni weekend. In 1998 Bruce became the Director of Finance and Operations for Camp Ramah in the Poconos, so now we have been back to camp every summer since then.

Summer 2005 will be our 8th summer as a family. Our daughter Rachel (11/27/95) has all but two summers of her life at camp. Our son Avi (3/22/98) has spent every summer of his life at camp. He started at 3 months!!

What is fun now is that every summer Bruce and I present a peulat Shabbat to an edah, either Machon (entering 9th grade) or Shoafim (entering 10th grade) about our relationship, which is really about making choices. We call the peulah “Al Tistakeil BaKankan Elah b’ma She’yesh bo” — Don’t look at the pitcher but what is in it — don’t judge a book by its cover. We use this name because of the assumptions we made about ourselves in 1987 and then learned differently in 1989.