Eden Village Camp is on 250 acres and is surrounded on three sides by state parkland.
Photo: Courtesy Eden Village Camp
When Margalit Shetreat-Klein, a fifth-grader from the Bronx, heard about Eden Village, a new environmental overnight summer camp in Putnam County, she was so excited that she became the first to register.
Eden Village will open in late June and —with major support from UJA-Federation of New York, the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Foundation for Jewish Camp — it will be the only camp in the country with Jewish environmentalism as its founding principle. More than 135 third- through twelfth-graders will attend during the inaugural summer. The 250-acre site, an hour from New York City, is surrounded on three sides by state parkland.
Margalit looks forward to going beyond the art, nature, and theater camps she’s attended. She thinks Eden Village will give her all that, plus a chance to celebrate Shabbat, enjoy kosher food, swim, and be outdoors. “It sounds like a really, really fun camp.”
“We want to help young people cultivate an understanding and appreciation of the natural world,” says Vivian Stadlin, who is starting and running the camp with her husband, Yoni. Jewish learning, using the landscape and a working farm, will be a key component.
Campers will learn to make grape juice, including crushing grapes grown at the site, and bake challah after harvesting and threshing wheat. Casey Yurow, a farm educator, said Eden Village is “another step forward in what a vibrant, sustainable Jewish community can look like.” A social-justice project will involve marking off the “corners” of farm fields, as suggested in the Torah, and distributing food grown in these corners to those in need.
Wilderness adventures will be important, and making the camp environmentally sensitive has been a guiding force, Stadlin says, with reuse and composting key elements.
When Margalit’s mother, Maya Shetreat-Klein, heard about the camp, she got involved in planning meetings. “We’ve been looking for a good home for her in a diverse Jewish setting,” she says of her daughter. “We feel very blessed that Yoni and Vivian have had this vision, adding to what is available to Jewish children.” ♦
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