Elliot Dorff & Marlynn Wertheimer Dorff
We were really a mixed marriage because Elliot grew up in Milwaukee and the Wisconsin camp and Marlynn grew up in Philadelphia and the Poconos camp. We met in Mador in 1961, which at the time was a national program for training counselors. Marlynn’s parents had sent her there specifically to meet someone from Philadelphia, but instead she met someone from 1,000 miles away who took her 3,000 miles away to California to live. As the Yiddish has it, man tracht und Gott lacht — man plans and God laughs! Elliot told his parents as he left them at the airport on his way to camp that summer that he might meet his future wife there because Mador was a place where people came who shared his desire to be both serious about Judaism and part of the modern world — and who knew how to integrate the two. Marlynn followed Elliot back to Wisconsin for the summers of 1962-64 and 1966, with 1965 spent back in Poconos camp on the Bekhir program for training Roshei Aidah. When we moved to California, we spent every summer between 1972-1986 at the California camp except for 1978, when we staffed the Ramah Israel Seminar, and returned in 1991.