The First Ever Intersession Cup & Other Silliness!

July 27, 2021

We’ve had an incredibly fun, special intersession these past two days here at camp! As we all know, this was an unusual year, in which we couldn’t have our usual Visiting Day for the families and friends of our full-summer chanichim (campers). So we knew it was more important than ever to pull out all the stops and give our full-summer campers a fantastic intersession jam-packed with special events just for them.

On Sunday morning after some tearful goodbyes after breakfast, as our first session chanichim boarded the buses to the airport or headed down towards the Tzad Aleph lower migrash (A-Side lower field) where they would be picked up, our full-summer kids jumped right into an array of special programs. We converted our Beit Am Gadol into a mini-golf course:

Kids joined me for a “Snack Seder”, in which we enjoyed a snack-filled seder that followed the structure of the Passover Seder, only with yummy treats for each step of the seder. And our “haggadah” was the “Sefer Ramah”, which charts the history of Ramah New England!

Kids created their own candles in our candle-making studio:

Here’s Tikvah having fun cooking at our outdoor cooking/pizza oven:

At the same time as all this programming was happening, Michelle Sugarman oversaw a massive new undertaking: our Virtual Visiting Day, in which our chanichim were able to get set up with computers in our O”CH — the covered pavilion attached to our Chadar Ochel (Dining Hall) — where they could Zoom or FaceTime with family members. Campers rotated in and out of the programming to be able to log-in during their assigned spots to connect with their family members who love and missed them!

Because we know that kids’ visitors on Visiting Day often bring fun care packages filled with treats, we felt it was important that we be able to provide our chanichim with that aspect of this day! And so, the night before, many of our kitchen staff and other adult staff-members gathered together to create individual care packages for every single full-summer chanich/a, filled with snacks and toys and other goodies. Here’s Rabbi Gelb and our crew at work preparing these care packages:

When campers came for their Virtual Visiting Day slot, we surprised them with these care packages!

Om Sunday evening, we launched our first ever Intersession Cup competition, a multi-day event in which groups of full-summer chanichim from across our edot competed with one another in a variety of fun, crazy, and very silly competitions! Adat ha-Nivonim helped us kick off the Intersession Cup competition with a camp-wide peulat erev (evening activity): “Are You Smarter Than a Nivonimer?” The Nivonimers divided into paired and dressed up in themed, goofy attire, and competed against the groups from across the other edot in a wild trivia bowl that included questions on Torah, Jewish history, American history, Star Wars, music, science, spelling, and lots more random stuff.

The intersession Cup continued throughout this morning (Monday), culminating in a Photo Scavenger Hunt in which the groups were challenged to take all sorts of silly photos, such as making an amazing layout catch of a frisbee: