Part of our family lore is that when I was 5 years old, the summer that before I entered kindergarten my parents brought me to the corner of our street, a big yellow bus pulled up, and without any hesitation or trepidation I stepped onto that rumbling behemoth, didn't look back and went on my way.
That bus took me to what would become my happy place for the next 14 years.
What was the place? The JCC Jacob and Rose Grossman Camp in Westwood, Massachusetts.
In the years that followed I was joined by my brother and then my sister. Every summer from then on I looked forward to all that awaited me. At Grossman I explored the world in ways I wouldn't otherwise have the chance to. There was boating, fishing, gymnastics, frog catching, camp crafts, singing, drama, photography - you name, this camp had it. All in one place. And the best part, I got to come home at night.
It’s no secret that Jewish Camp is crucial for Jewish pride and connection. Grossman was absolutely that place for me. I spent three summers at sleepover camp which were also formative, but for me, I’m proudly a day camp kid and to this day I am amazed by how much it has transformed me into the person I am today.
I was a camper at Grossman from 1987-1996. It was the wild west for campers in a lot of ways. There was no technology - no parents were tracking us to and from camp. We got on that bus at 8am with only our bus tag to identify us (name, address, bunk number, bus number - the important stuff), and they just assumed we’d be back at the stop by 5pm. They didn't hear from us, they didn't get pictures of us, they couldn't see where the bus was at any given moment to make sure it was taking the right route. My bus counselors didn't have phones. The only way to get in touch with the bus before or after it got to camp was through the driver’s CB radio. Fred Freedberg was the Director of Transportation at Grossman during those years. On the occasion where we were picked up from camp and I waited in the office for my parents, I remember Fred with his CB radio communicating with the drivers during those commutes. He’d sit there with a pile of paper maps of all the routes the buses would take - probably about 30 buses in all - and with lists of all the campers on each bus - probably over 1,000 in all. For that hour each direction Fred was king. He knew it all and it was quite an amazement he did it all without the internet.
The other thing about not having any technology at that time means I have virtually zero images or records from my time there other than the few photos my parents took at family night. However, the memories are seared into my brain like a carved sculpture. Roasting potatoes or making fresh blueberry jelly in the woods on an open fire with our Israeli camp crafts specialists. We trusted these sabras implicitly that knew what they were doing - but an open fire at a camp? Ein Ba’ayah (no problem). They had just been in the IDF, they probably knew what they were doing.
Nature was an activity we looked forward to as well - whether it was trekking down the road to the bear caves hoping to catch a glimpse of the bears who lived there (for the record, there were never any bears, this is Grossman lore), or learning about the various flora that fill the grossman forest. But wherever we went we looked for those wild blueberries we could nosh on as we walked through the woods or the sassafras root we could chew on to keep ourselves occupied.
I can still feel the mud squishing between my toes and the smell of the slop when we went to the “other side” of the lake to catch frogs in the swampy marsh. We hoped we’d catch just the frogs and avoid the snapping turtle which lore told us had lived in the lake for decades. Did we ever catch one? I have no recollection. But did we love being dirty and messy? Yes. Did we love the adventure? Absolutely. Was it worth it? No doubt.
Frog catching wasn't the only thing the lake was used for. We’d go out on the boats and circle the mysterious haunted Victorian house that sat on an island in the middle of the lake shrouded by ivy and enclosed by trees. We wouldn't dare to dock the boat and get out to see what was really inside those shuttered doors for fear it would break the illusion of the mystery.
The lake held lots of mysteries - but we also swam in it every day. I learned to swim on those sandy shores, first in the shallow end with my bathing suit seat filling with sand as we practiced our kicks and strokes in just inches of water. As we progressed in our skills we made it further and further into the deep end for our lessons. But we were still never allowed to walk on the dock. The dock was for the oldest kids, the best swimmers, and the lifeguards in their red bathing suits. You knew someone was a Gossman lifeguard because by the end of the summer their tan had gotten so dark they were barely recognizable.
The Grossman Lake (which I learned much later is actually a pond, but we’ll stick to calling it the lake because that’s how we all knew it) holds legends of catching fish with your bare hands when you practiced your diving. Adina got her earring caught on the dock and it ripped right out of her ear. My own star of david earring fell out at some point and now lives somewhere deep beneath the sand. My brother coming home with what we thought was a permanently red chest from winning the belly flop contest. We’d change in the rickety wooden changing rooms, between the stalls pairing up with a friend so you could hold each others’ towels up while the other changed. Because, who needs doors in a changing room?
When I had excelled at swimming to the point that I was able to take my lessons on the other side of the dock - the real deep end - I knew I had made it. And as I took the scorching walk from the beach to the deep end on the metal dock I watched those littlest kids learning their strokes from Josh Shapiro, the beach mainstay for over 50 years and smiled with a sense of nostalgia that they too were making memories that would last a lifetime.
In those years Grossman was led by Stu Silverman. The man, the myth, the legend. Stu was a looming character who you only went to see if you did something really bad. The smaller offenses bought you a visit to David Wolf or Sue Green who were only moderately scary by comparison. Luckily, I was a good kid, and to me David was Mr. Maccabiah and Sue was just Sue - the nice lady who brought us challah and hoodsies at Oneg Shabbat on Friday and introduced the rainy day movies. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of Stu driving around in the golf cart or you could hear his loud booming Boston accented voice yelling for something or someone across camp. I had the pleasure of working in the winter office during my breaks from college and got to know Stu as a professional doing that admin along with Alice Freedberg (Fred’s wife). We stuffed envelopes, sent acceptance letters and invoices, we processed checks and mailed out the bus tags. I joked with Stu that I was the glue that kept that camp running, but without him at the helm for 40 or so years the camp would be a very different place.
In many ways Grossman is structured like an overnight camp. Housed on the sprawling land of Hale Reservation in Westwood, MA, there are only about 2 or 3 fully enclosed buildings. The office, of course, which we’d volunteer to bring notes to to get a puff of air conditioning on those scorching days, the Lodge, which housed gymnastics, the kitchen, and where our sleepovers were held. During rainy days the whole camp would pile into that building and we’d watch from the rotation of VHS tapes: Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, Goonies. By the end of the summer we knew those movies by heart. Stu always said that it doesn’t rain at Grossman - which really meant that rain doesn’t keep a Grossman kid down. Between the movies, the arts and crafts, music, drama, or sports specialists who came to the units, there was never a dull day. The counselors also did their very best to keep us entertained. Case and point: to this day, Simon Feil’s lipsync rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the best moments of theatrical performances I’ve ever witnessed.
In the later years, the Arts and Crafts building became the third enclosed building, replete with Gimp (decidedly NOT lanyard), paint, glue, clay, and all of the other fixings you’d expect in a camp’s crafting repository. We always looked forward to gimp days when we would ask for outlandish stitches to be started by the counselors. By the time I became counselor I was known as the Gimp Queen (not an awesome title, I know) but my 6x6 tornado stitch became something of legend. We looked forward to tie dye day when our moms would send us with old bedsheets to get spruced up and then waited with baited breath for it to dry so we could observe our creations.
I’d be remiss not to remember the bathrooms. The Grossman bathrooms are stuff of legends. Technically they were toilets - but since Grossman sits on Hale reservation where plumbing is limited, the toilets were just seats on open pits. That’s right. You’d open the toilet seat and get to view the business of the entire camp’s week. Lots of kids claimed they stopped coming to Grossman over the bathrooms, but as Kelly Clarkson promises, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. If you were a lifer at grossman, you learned to do your number 2 at home, hold it in, pee in the lake or, as a last resort, use the bathroom. My friend Shosh was the counselor for the youngest kids. The fear of falling was real (no one ever did). But inevitably, a volleyball, a basketball, and a few kippahs would end up down there every week. To be a Grossman kid, you had to be tough.
And then there was my unit. As an Orthodox kid growing up in Boston who did not want to go to sleepaway camp, Kehillah, the Orthodox unit, became by home away from home. Grossman was organized by age - which each unit named after a different part of Israel. The youngest kids were Carmel, then Galil, Negev, Golan, Kinneret, Kfar, Kibbutz, CITs. Kehilla was thrown in there, although we always wished they called us Jerusalem. When the camp grew they added Aravah between Negev and Golan. We were a little enclave of religious kids: boys in hats, girl counselors in skirts. We swam separately from the boys even though our bunks were mixed, we had parsha class once a week, davened every morning, benched after every lunch, skipped free swim during the 9 days, and watched our counselors fast on tisha b’av. It was pretty special being a part of the JCC community camp and also being able to observe in our way. Sometimes it was hard being separated - like we had our own Maccabiah and the “rest of the camp” kinda thought we were weird because we were off in our own little corner of the camp, but mostly it was great.
There was of course a steady cohort of friends from school. My school - Maimonides - was a major feeder to Kehillah, but there were also the friends I made who were new. Frum kids from Malden, Lowell, Medford, Lexington and other places. Kids I became friends with and spent my summers with who only existed for 8 weeks out of my year but became central to it. But it was the counselors I remember and looked up to with such awe and wonder. Kira, Sara, Penny, Rachel, Robert, Jake, Simon, Josh, JJ, and the list goes on. I don’t even know all of their last names - they exist only in my memories or in nostalgia talks when I reminisce with other Kehilla alumns. These were some of the coolest high schoolers I had ever met. They were frum, they were fun, and they were interested in me - me?! They introduced me to pop music that we listened to on the walks down the long road to the waterfront. Nothing says high quality audio than “blasting” Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out With Him? from the headphones of a walkman. Sara taught us, “breeze - armpits up” as we walked through the heat of the summer. And then when I got back to Maimo and would occasionally see them in the halls they even said hi to me - i knew HIGH SCHOOLERS!? It was the literal best.
Fridays at Grossman - no matter which unit you were in - were great. The final period of the day was Oneg Shabbat. Each bunk had to put on a skit, perform a song, or lead a unit activity. Each week there was a bunk who “won” and got an extra freezer pop or Hoodsie. We lit shabbat candles, ate challah and celebrated the week that had just passed. Doing Jewish at camp was special and very different from doing Jewish anywhere else. Grossman Jewish was like a time travel through hippie Judaism from the 1960s into the 1980s. Every week we had bunk music where we pulled classics from the songbook like Puff the Kosher Dragon, Nachamu, Just Another Foreigner, Wherever you go (there’s always someone Jewish). Those songs exist deep in my soul and you can always spot another Grossmanite if they know all the words.
Food at Grossman was, of course, also a big thing. Afternoon snack was always the very nutritious bug juice and sugar cookie. You just hoped that the person who made the bug juice that day knew what they were doing when it came to the water to syrup ratio - you want that flavor needle threaded just right so you didn’t go into glucose shock. I still want to know where they got those sugar cookies and why the pizzas at the overnights were square.
Bus rides tend to get a bad rep - but the Grossman bus is something of legends. When I worked at Grossman as a high schooler I remember Stu telling us bus counselors during our training that the bus is the most important part of the day at Grossman. Why? Because if a kid has a terrible day at camp but then has a great bus ride, he’ll get off that bus and tell his parents he had a great day. But conversely, if he had a great day at camp but then something happens on the bus - the whole day is shot and he’ll come off that bus crying that he had a terrible time. He was 100% right.
The Grossman bus is an experience all its own. I can still pick out the sound of a yellow bus’s motor rumble from other motor sounds. As a kid I’d sit with my brother and sister at the end of our street which sits at the top of the highest hill in metropolitan Boston and we’d wait to hear that rumble. Sometimes there was a garbage truck throwing us off the trail, but at 8:00, you could set your watch to it, and that bus would appear. We’d get on it, sit down and make our journey to camp. When the bus took the turn onto Dover road and made that winding trip down what seemed like an infinite road we knew we were close. We also didn't know how the driver made those tight turns but we trusted him and he always got the job done.
Each bus had its own culture. Ours was the Brookline/Newton bus. One of the longest routes - mine was the first stop on and the last stop off. I would sit and watch all those kids on the bus. I learned the back roads of those towns by just looking out the window. I learned about the world on that bus - like when Josh Klaver led us in a moment of silence for Celtics player Reggie Lewis in July of 1993 after he died during a practice at the Brandeis gym. Robert Liebowitz taught us all the words to Pretty Woman on that bus. We did gimp, made friendship bracelets, and gossiped. It was also a chance for some of the kids (ahem, boys) to act out. My brother’s hat got thrown out the window onto Beacon st by someone who shall remain nameless, others would start food fights. You never knew what the ride would bring.
As a kid that bus was also the chance to mingle with new kids - the “regular camp” kids that were outside my Kehillah bubble. There was Fish - no idea his real name - who wore black and had a chain attaching his wallet to his Jenkos. He sat in the back seat. No one else dared to. There was my best friend Julia, who would get off the bus 10 minutes before me in the afternoons so she could catch the last 10 minutes of our favorite summer show, Swans Crossing, and tell me what I missed. I met kids who lived on my street that I never had met before. Stu’s immortal words couldn't have been more true.
After 8 summers as a camper I graduated to counselor. My dreams had come true - I had made it to the big leagues. I knew most of my co-counselors from school but something magical happened when we gathered together under the awning of the Kehillah unit building. Ari, Yaakov, Dave, Dov, Avi, Jon - guys I had known my whole life were suddenly, friends. Bonded. My female co counselors are my co-counselors for life. Shira, Shosh, Fradie, Lainie, Gabi (sister and counselor!), Rachel. I’d even argue that without Grossman I wouldn't have met my husband as it was Shosh who introduced us and it was through Grossman that Shosh and I became close. Sweating together for 8 weeks in the woods changes a person - for the better. Plus we all bonded over which sports specialist was the cutest and who chatted with them the most.
Something unique to Grossman (or at least it felt unique) were the sleepovers. Kira mastered the art of washing her hair in the water fountains, we played Capture the Flag in the dark with flashlights (for the record, I hated that), and we piled in the lodge in our sleeping bags for a night of ghost stories and girl talk. When I was the counselor for the oldest kids - Kehillah Kibbutz, we slept over once a week. I don't know who decided that leaving 15 12 year olds alone in the woods with five 16 year olds with no cell phones was a good idea - but, again, wild west. There were the indoor barbecues when it poured (bad idea, we know), nighttime joy rides on the golf carts to the lake when all we had were flashlights as our guides, and taking more than our fair share of freezer pops from the lodge’s kitchen (sorry, Marcia). Nothing says “camp” more than an apology note written on purple construction paper with a green crayola marker.
In those days my campers made the time special also - Hannah, Janna, Maya. These girls brought the joy every single day. When I see them now - all of us adults with kids of our own - we still talk about the Grossman memories.
I thought all JCC camps were like Camp Grossman. I knew that wherever I ended up in the world when I had kids I’d send my kids to their own Camp Grossman to have incredible adventures similar to what I had. But when I searched, I did not find anything like the camp that had nurtured me so deeply. Nothing with the focus on the outdoors, rustic play time. I knew my mission. When my oldest finished first grade we shipped up to Boston from our home in CT and thanks to the generosity of my parents who opened their house to us and freed up their week for her, we were able to make it happen for the next generation. My parents took on the challenge of getting her up and out of the house every morning to get on that bus. When my twins were ready to go I joined them and now it's tradition. We interrupt our summer for two weeks every year so three Connecticut kids get their Boston camp fix.
What’s amazing is that that hasn't changed. When my oldest started Sue, David and Shari were all still there and could look out for this legacy camper who knew no other kids. They’ve since retired but I’m grateful for that overlap. David’s son Jesse now runs Maccabiah though! When I return today for family night and to pick them up, the camp looks exactly as it did 30 years ago. Still rustic, still outdoors. Same wooden signs with carved lettering on the unit walls. The kids still kick up dirt as they walk the paths to the unit. The bathrooms still get pumped out once a week. They sing the same songs, swim in the Grossman lake, go boating and fishing, get hoodsies and play with gimp. The bug juice is gone though (maybe not the worst thing). There have been some updates, ropes course, lake trampoline and mountain biking are now available - and all awesome. Grossman remains a stronghold of those simpler days when there was no technology and when analogue living was king. These days though I can track their bus ride, get photos automatically tagged of them right to my phone and follow the camp on social media. Small changes that come with our digital times, but as for the rest of the camp, this is one camper who hopes it never changes.
It brings me so much joy when my three kids pile off the bus, sweaty, adorned with first, second, third ribbons, come home. Their socks filled with sand, regaling me with the same songs I sang, showing off their ceramic masterpieces, their gimp creations, and most of all their memories.
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