September 27, 2000
by Josh Dugan

At the Lauder Foundation’s camp in Hungary, Alina Rhektman and friends, Russian-native Bela Fishbeyn, Lithuanians Sasha and Daniel Tfomik and Belarussian Artyom Sharayev, share a summer of Judaism and inter-cultural connections. At right, Rekhtman and camp director Yitzhak Roth celebrate her 16th birthday at a camp-wide meal. This past summer, Rekhtman returned to the camp for the

The last time senior Alina Rekhtman entered the gates of Camp Szarvas, she was about to celebrate her tenth birthday.

This summer, she returned to the familiar camp and began her reconnection with a place and culture she had not seen in years, hoping to establish new bonds with Jewish teenagers from all over Eastern Europe.

Rekhtman was one of 27 American high school students, including 10 other JDS students, who traveled to the The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation/JDC International Summer Camp at Szarvas in Szarvas, Hungary.

According to the brochure put out by the Lauder Foundation and the Joint Distribution Committee, the camp was established as “a vibrant emblem of the Jewish revival that has taken off in the region since the fall of communism.” The camp hopes to help continue the revival of Jewish communities in the region.

The participation of the American campers, who generally had more exposure to their Jewish identities than their Eastern European peers, was intended to allow members of both groups to interact with Jews of another culture.

Rekhtman’s trip to the camp was unique among the American campers in that she was once a child coming to the camp to experience Judaism for the first time.

Growing up in Moscow with very little knowledge of her Jewish identity, Rekhtman had the opportunity to attend the Lauder camp. According to Rekhtman, she feels lucky to have been given this opportunity to attend the camp, which is open to Jewish children ages 6-18 from all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

”I went to a Jewish Sunday school in Moscow, and two people from the school were offered positions in the Moscow group going to the camp,” she said. “And fortunately, I was one of the children offered that chance.”

It was her first chance to travel beyond the Russian border and her first opportunity to meet a diverse Jewish community. Rekhtman fondly remembers that at the camp, she learned Jewish songs, played games and gained a basic understanding of what it meant to be Jewish.

Rekhtman regrets that she was unable to gain as much from the experience as she might have had she been older when she first attended the camp.

“I was just a little kid,” she said. “I liked to sing songs and play games. I never thought of why I was doing it or what the message was behind it. I just wanted to have fun.”

When Rekhtman returned to the camp this summer with her friends from JDS, she also had the chance to see how her current peers would react to the foreign culture that she had known as a young child.

“It was very interesting for me to watch the reactions of my American friends to the Eastern European lifestyle which was new to them but old and familiar to me,” she said. “I was really glad to see how fast they embraced and got used to it while still reasonably acknowledging all of its shortcomings.”

Rekhtman, along with the other American students, had to overcome the hostility many campers harbored towards them.

“On the last night of camp, I remember all of us sitting together laughing, crying and sharing all of our feelings and emotions that night. One of my closest friends was a Yugoslavian girl, and that night I fell asleep in her bed after we had spent hours talking and crying together,” she said.

Rekhtman feels that the close friendships she formed with people from many different political and religious backgrounds enabled her to find the deeper meaning of the camp, which was beyond her grasp as a young child.

“What makes the camp so successful is the idea of Am Echad, Lev Echad [one nation, one heart], the united spirit of everyone in the camp.

“The common Jewish bond between many different people of various ages and from diverse backgrounds could be detected in every single activity that we did, “said Rekhtman.

“For us, the camp became a microcosm for the whole world, and the close friendships we made, in our minds, had the ability to smooth out all of the problems in the world,” she added.

Looking back on her summer experience, Rekhtman said she very much wants to return to the camp in the near future.

“The camp taught us how important it is to be aware of the other kinds of Judaism in the world,” she said.

“Whether more observant or less observant, it’s not about what kind of Jew you are or how you practice. It’s just about being Jewish and all of us being held together by the Jewish community.”

photos courtesy Alina Rekhtman