jvalley.org | jewish community news

Jewish Community News

JCN: February 2007

Summer Camp for children with special needs

By Cecily Ruttenberg

Every summer, parents flip through camp catalogues and choose the program they believe their child will enjoy most. But for parents of children with special needs, the offerings are considerably narrowed. Fearing inadequate supervision, some parents keep their kids home. Others take a nervous gamble.

“We’d always cross our fingers and hope for the best [but] regular camps aren’t geared for that, and they’re not supposed to be really,” said Jan Hurwitz, mother of an 11-year-old with special needs. “Sometimes the environment was too much for [my son] to handle, or they didn’t have enough attention.”

Now Jewish parents of special needs children have more alternatives. The Friendship Circle in Palo Alto offers a winter and summer camp program for children with disabilities ranging from downs syndrome, to cerebral palsy to autism. The camp pairs each child up with a trained, teenage volunteer. The camp also has a psychologist on staff, as well as adult counselors.

Camp Simcha, located in upstate New York, flies in chronically ill children from all over the United States and beyond for medically supervised overnight camp. This camp is staffed with volunteers, adult counselors, medical doctors, and other children going through similar experiences.

These specialized Jewish camp programs offer families and children with special needs access to the same profound camp experiences that had often been out of their reach.

“I feel like I’m doing my part of making a difference,” said Ezzy Schusterman, who runs Friendship Circle with his wife Nechama. “It is very inspiring to see the difference that we are making in the lives of children with special needs.For many of them, it’s the first camp experience that they have ever had the opportunity of participating in.”

Hurwitz, whose son attended the Friendship Circle camp last year, said she was delighted with the program. “They have it really well structured and the volunteers at the camp are these amazing kids,” said Hurwitz. “Whatever might come up for these kids, there’s someone always with them to help them deal with it.”

About Camp Simcha, a program of Chai Lifeline, west coast regional director Randi Grossman says that the camp is many children’s first experience away from home. “Many of these children require such involved medical care, that they have never been able to be away from home,” said Grossman. “Not only is the camp magical for the child, it gives a parent, a family, a little bit of respite from the 24/7 caretaking they do.”

Debbie Weinstein sent her daughter Simone, 15, to Camp Simcha while she was still receiving chemotherapy (the treatment runs two-and-a-half years) for leukemia. While at first nervous about not directly caring for her medically fragile daughter, Weinstein took great confidence in the physicians and medical supervision at the camp. She felt Simone benefited hugely from being able to be independent from her parents during this teenage time in life, while still closely cared for.

“At home, her friends were incredibly supportive but sometimes Simone would feel like, ‘well what am I going to talk about, because I don’t want to keep talking about my cancer,’ and she felt like she didn’t know what was going on at school,” said Weinstein.

“It was so important for Simone to be around kids who, besides being Jewish, also had cancer. It was just a very, very safe place for her to be, and open up and talk and not feel restrictive in what she had to say about having cancer.”

Both Friendship Circle and Camp Simchas parent program, Chai Lifeline, offer additional programs to families with special needs or medically ill children. For more information on either of these programs visit www.friendshipcirclepa.org or www.chailifeline.org.

Obituary Submissions

If you have news to include in this column, please contact Cecily Ruttenberg You can call Cecily at (408) 357-7505.

News

Features

JCN Issues

Information

OpenCube Drop Down Menu (www.opencube.com)