Two Traffic Accident Stories

Lev Shreiber was asked:

"What is the closest you’ve ever come to death?

And he replied:

A car accident in British Columbia 35-40 years ago. I was driving too quickly on a dirt road and lost control of the car, and it went off a cliff and got stuck in some treetops. We were not at all hurt; we actually just climbed out."

And that reminded me of my own experience. 

In 1968, I was at Camp Betar in Neversink, NY and a few madrichim had a day off and decided to visit friends at Camp Moshava in Pennsylvania.  We were five in the car and we were coming down a slight hill when the driver realized he should have made a turn and began to slow down and he turned the wheel slightly to the right. However, the car behind us was driving fast and coming over the hill probably did not adequately notice we were slowing down. He smacked into us, luckily, not at full speed, and off we went into a field with little control. After a 100 meters or so, we came to a stop. There may have been a few cows but I am not sure. We checked ourselves but no one was injured.

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Bet Sefer Lemadrichim Misdar - 1966 (1967?)

 LtoR: Efraim (Frank) Dimant, Yisrael (Winkie) Medad, Barak (Bruce) Koffler

Camp Betar, First Year at Liberty, NY

 

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Camp Betar, 1950

 

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Camp Betar Mid-1940s

Thanks to Twitter, one @SapirAnalytics has been sending us material on the possible location of the 1940 Hunter, NY Camp Betar location where Rosh Betar died.

In the process, he has found relevant information regarding the Camp in the 1940s and here is what he has sent:

It seems that in 1945- 1946, the Camp was at Spring Glen near Middletown.

And in 1948...

And in 1949:

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Jabotinsky Visits Camp Betar, Hunter, New York

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Chaim Potok Goes to Camp...Betar

Chaim Potok writes about going to summer camp.


It arrives, finally-summertime! Gone forever-so it seems as we joyously enter summer's wonderland-are the cruel winds of winter. An enchanted realm stretches before us: a landscape washed in golden sunlight; a languor of long lazy afternoons; flocks of birds and clouds of butterflies; nights cool and fragrant; mornings miraculous with dew. And a sudden dazzling explosion of color: from the dull browns and grays of winter to the exhilarating kaleidoscopes of flowering fields and dense woods and grassy meadows and piney hills and a vast visible cerulean sky.

Summertime. And summer camp

During the first two decades of my life, the thirties and forties, poliomyelitis was a frightful scourge made all the more horrifying in that most of the afflicted were children. Summertime the disease would run rampant through urban populations, striking randomly, at times paralyzing the legs and the respiratory system of its victims. Parents sought desperately to send their sons and daughters out of cities--to summer camp.

I grew up in New York, where the fear of that illness was so overwhelming that my father, a deeply religious man brought to ruin by the Great Depression, would send me to non-kosher Jewish overnight camps sponsored by local community centers, the only free camps available to us. Breathe the fresh air, he would say. Have a good time. He did not say what I read on his face and in his eyes: I am sending you Out of the city so you will be far away from this sickness that is crippling children....And so, as I grew up, chief among the uses of summer camp was the saving of young lives.

...We fled the city to save our lives and breathe fresh air and have fun; we did not know we were being educated. Summer then had its own special uses, and it played them upon us like a wind through the strings of a harp.

* * *

Let it be noted that mine was a religious Zionist family deep in the ranks of the rightwing Revisionist party, zealous followers of Zetev Jabotinsky. The youth movement of the Revisionist party was, and still is, known as Betar, named after the last Jewish stronghold to fall to the Romans in the 67-70 C.E. revolt. Because the Second World War depleted the pool of people available for camping staffs, my new summer home, as a novice fifteen-year old junior counselor, became Camp Betar

There I quickly discovered some rather unusual uses of summer.

Sports, swimming, boating, campfires, cookouts-all the normal uses of summer were to be found in that camp. But for staff and older campers there were other activities as well: military drill, rifle practice, ideological discussions. How those Revisionist ideologues loathed the centrist and left-wing Socialist Zionists! The place was an odd mix of fun and ferocity, relaxation and tension, democracy and fanaticism.

I learned too that summer about the ravages of forest fires when I joined a crow to engage a mountain fire rampaging too near the camp and was suddenly beneath a ceiling of flames leaping across the crowns of trees and rushing downward to form a surrounding wall of burning wood and air which abruptly parted and let us plunge through to safety. I became from then on rather respectful of fire: another use of summer.

Nights free after the campers were put to bed; hanging out with truck drivers and townspeople in the diner on the highway outside the camp; girl friends; hitch hiking on days off. There seemed more civility then; hitch-hiking was an acceptable way of getting around. I discovered the lure of the road that wartime summer, an indispensable beguilement to a future writer.

Three summers later, a senior counselor now in Camp Betar, I hitch-hiked to Hyde Park and stood reverently before the grave of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in silent homage to the man who had been a sort of deity to those of us who grew up in the terrible years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. What we know now about Roosevelt we didn't know then. Perhaps it was better that we didn't know it: we needed faith in powerful gods to steer us through those awful times.

Weary of overheated and melodramatic right-wing ideology, I moved on to a privately owned camp in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, where the ideology was: Fun, Frolic, and Frivolity...

...Gone is the terrible need to flee from the horrors of polio epidemics-that first use of summer in my life. Drs. Sabin and Salk saw to that. Now we have fears of a different sort. Ponder the serious summer talk presently taking place in Jewish camps: intermarriage; assimilation; the general shallowness of Jewish knowledge among Jews; the probability of the vanishing of American Jewry as a uniquely creative culture participating openly in contemporary American life-and what we must do to counteract that troubling vision of the future.

The season of long days of sunlight and warmth offers us so much. Rest of all it offers us a worthy use of summer.

Thanks to Chuck Waxman and Ellen Llinas.

P.S.  If he spent three summers at Camp Betar, then two years at a private camp and he came to Camp Ramah Poconos in its second year, and it opened in 1950, he was at Camp Betar 1945-1947.

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Camp Betar - The Start

Through the kindness of Harry Kline, Brith Trumpeldor of America will have the use of an extensive farm near Albany. All the Hachsharah activities of the Betar will be centered there. The farm will comprise 120 acres of fine land, a portion of which is covered by a lovely orchard.

JTA

Thanks to Meredith Weiss

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Camp Betar at Neversink - First Season 1951

We now have a referenced confirmation of when the property at Neversink, N.Y. was purchased and when was the first season there of Camp Betar.

1951.

Here:

From:

________________

Update from Yitz Hemowitz:

I was the one who drew the plans for the buildings.  They were built by a carpenter,  Mr. John Mosier assisted by Betarim.  In 1951 the entire camp lived in the main building down the hill.  In 1952 we built two bunks on the hill.  In 1953 we built another two double bunks on the other side of the hill, so all the campers lived in the bunks.  (The older kids called "Yarden" slept in tents, as did the Bet Sefer.) In 1954 (or maybe 1953) we built the dining hall, which included the head counselor's office.
 Then we built the Rec Hall, in which I had no part.  Some time later they built the swimming pool.  When Mr. Mosier wanted to encourage the working Betarim, he called out, "Klap naigel, man!"

Yitzhak Heimowitz

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Camp Betar 1950s

From Yitz Heimovitz's archives:

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Steve Adler adds:

I recognize some in the pictures.

Pix 2 2 girls Phyllis Heimowitz (nee Goodman) in white Evelyn (nee Goodman) in blue

Pix 3 Izzy Herman standing

Pix 4 standing in extreme right Dov Hertz ,standing in extreme left Mischa Abramov kneeling in middle Steve Adler and next to him on left Nira Rubin

Pix 5 on Left Steve Adler in back Nira Rubin

pix 6 Standing right to left  Yitz Heimowitz, Gery Ferman Sitting: Steve Adler, Gad Padhatzur, ?, Phyllis Goodman, Evelyn Goodman, David Niv

Pix 7 Yaacov Leiberman, Caption should be Camp Yarden

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In picture 6, the question mark happens to be me, yours truly, Roz Rubin, probably called Rachel (Hebrew) or Rozzie Rubin.in those wonderful days. I am the person (i.e. question mark) sitting between Gad Pedhazur and the Goodman girls.  Clearly much younger than now and also thinner with shortish brown hair.  

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From Seymour Rosneberg's memoir:

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Camp Betar newspaper - August 1967

Camp Betar newspaper - July 1967