A few years ago, a school principal told me something I have never forgotten. On the first morning of the school year, as he welcomed students back, he said that he could almost tell which children had spent part of their summer at camp.
“You can see it in their eyes,” he told me—in their smiles, their energy, even in the way they carried themselves. Children who had been away at camp often returned energized and eager. Their vacation had not simply passed; something had happened to them. They had accumulated experiences, learned new things, made new friends, and in some small but significant way, grown.
Is this what summer looks like for most Israeli children? Not really.
That principal worked in a community with many immigrants from the United States, where sending children away for several weeks at summer camp is an established part of Jewish communal life.
For many American Jewish children, summer camp is among their most meaningful Jewish experiences, and sometimes one of their most formative encounters with Israel and Zionism. Research has found strong associations between camp attendance and later Jewish engagement, including emotional connection to Israel, communal participation, Jewish friendships and the practice of Jewish traditions.
But the more important lesson is how this kind of education works.
Summer camp does not usually begin with the question, “What information should children acquire?” It creates an environment. Young people sing together, travel, argue, take responsibility, meet role models, encounter stories and traditions, form friendships and discover capacities they did not know they had. Education happens through the experience itself.
That lesson belongs in Israel’s debate about the quality of our schools. It is also a reminder that Israeli education has something to learn from educational practices developed in Jewish communities abroad.
The warm-weather season is precisely the time to think more boldly.
We often forget that formal schooling is only one part of the ecosystem that educates our children.
Israel’s formal education system needs serious reform, renewal and investment. But alongside the debate over schools, teachers, curricula and class sizes, we should pay much more attention to the educational spaces we call “informal.”
Our public conversation about education increasingly revolves around measurable academic achievement: standardized tests, mathematics, science, English, matriculation rates and preparation for university and employment. All of these matter. But education is also about raising children who are responsible, decent, generous and sensitive to others. It is about citizenship, belonging, Jewish and Israeli identity, initiative, leadership and learning to live responsibly with others.
Parents invest enormous energy in these things at home. But children also need spaces beyond the family in which they can practice them. This is where informal education can be at its best.
The long Israeli summer vacation could become an extraordinary educational opportunity: a time in which young people continue to grow while feeling that they are on vacation; a time for independence, responsibility, generosity, encounter and adventure.
It could also be a natural setting in which to encounter Jewish and Israeli culture—not through another classroom lesson, but by hiking the land; singing together; hearing stories of immigration and pioneering; meeting different kinds of Israelis; and discovering that heritage can be joyful rather than merely obligatory.
Israel has youth movements with a proud educational tradition. But their summer camps are generally short and increasingly constrained by regulation and logistical requirements. Children who do not belong to a youth movement during the year have relatively few opportunities for a substantial residential summer camp experience.
Independent summer camps and excellent educational initiatives already exist, but they remain relatively marginal. Summer camp has not become part of mainstream Israeli educational culture as it has in many North American Jewish communities.
That should change.
The point is not simply that Israel should copy an American Jewish model. For generations, the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry has too often been imagined in one direction: Israel as the center providing Jewish meaning, identity and inspiration, and Diaspora communities as those expected to support, visit and connect. The reality is richer.
Jewish communities abroad have developed institutions, educational practices and forms of communal life Israeli society can emanulate. Their investment in informal education—summer camps, in particular—is one striking example.
What if we treated this not only as a lesson to be imported, but as the basis for a new educational partnership?
Israeli educators, youth movements, municipalities and civil-society organizations could join forces with Jewish camps, foundations and educational institutions abroad. They could develop summer programs, train educators, exchange counselors and staff; build shared curricula; and create opportunities for Israeli and Diaspora Jewish teenagers to live, learn and grow alongside one another.
An Israeli counselor working alongside an American Jewish counselor; an Israeli teenager spending a summer with Jewish peers from Boston, London or Melbourne; educators from both communities thinking together about Jewish identity, responsibility, peoplehood and Israel—these encounters could create connections that no conference or policy document can reproduce.
At a moment when relations between Israel and parts of the Jewish Diaspora are often described through disagreement, distance and crisis, education can offer a different model: one based on partnership, curiosity and mutual responsibility.
The opportunity is not for one community to replicate the other. It is to recognize that each has developed strengths and forms of Jewish life from which the other can learn. We can learn from one another and build something together.
Imagine thousands more Israeli children and teenagers spending two or three weeks each summer away from screens and classrooms, living together, hiking, creating, volunteering, debating, singing and taking responsibility for one another. Imagine some of those programs created jointly with Jewish communities abroad, bringing together young people and educators from across the Jewish world.
Such programs would do more than create better summer camps. They could strengthen Israeli education, deepen the Jewish identity of young Israelis, and create lasting personal and institutional ties between Israel and Jewish communities around the world.
We spend the entire school year worrying about how to educate our children. Perhaps summer is precisely the time to think more boldly—not only about how we educate them, but about whom they learn alongside.
The long summer vacation doesn’t have to be a break from education. It could become a space where Israel and the Jewish world come together to imagine and help shape their shared future.
