Remembering Cejwin Camps

Wow. Thank you for bringing me back to a wonderful place. Some of the best memories are my summers at cejwin. As an adult now I still speak to all of my bunk mates and we are sisters forever. Cejwin is a big part of who I am today.

Thanks for taking and posting your photos. My wife and I were there two years ago, and the memories came flooding back. My brother, Ron, and I attended Cejwin from 1966 until around 1975. His experience culminated with a trip to Israel with LTC, while I was a Carmel DH.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be back at Cejwin circa 1989.

It looks like you had a fun and thorough time shooting this site and you’re certainly getting a varied portfolio of abandoned places!

more comes flooding back….speak of floods…do we remember helicopters landing on the main field, delivering supplies to the hurricane ravaged Port Jervis area? I can still see the ball I hit arching over Aviv bunk 17 during the Cookie Bar v. Hertzel all star came when I was in bunk 1….How many rye breads did I slice in preparation for visiting day and the ubiquitous salami? Must admit, lo after these many years….we, in the kitchen, did misappropriate sheets of brownies when they were backed….sorry if you couldn’t get thirds!!! It was really strange to walk into my high school and see Morty Abler—swim counselor, there as a teacher. How many know, that the main canteen, when viewed from above, was/is in she shape of a Magen David?

again….gotta stop

It’s so sad when a place which holds many treasured memories simply ceases to exist.

I was the out door counselor back in the summer of 1967. I recently was going through a lot of old books and was surprised to find my copy of the “Songbook of the Cejwin Camps”
I loved rowing across the lake to the “overnight” camp site. Even the one time when there was a torrential downpour that some people wanted us to come back “because it would be safer!”
Memories of our youth!

I spent a total of 15 years at camp spanning four decades. There were different configurations each tine I left and returned.The loss of the girl’s side was the beginning of the end, When the Tri State organization took over and then the Syn Aud burned down I felt no sadness. Cejwin was long gone. The friendships remain thanks to the internet.

My first foray into sleep away camp started with a camp representative coming to our Flushing apartment in the winter of 1961 with a projector set up in the living room.
2 minutes into the film, I was in!
I was going to turn 11 mid-July, and yes, I had a birthday cake and had hundreds of my fellow campers sing “Happy Birthday”. I recall near the end of camp we had a “Birthday Ball”, where campers sat at tables with fellow birthday-month campers.
What motivated me to write is the upcoming solar eclipse. With the benefit of an internet search, I found that on July 20, 1963, there was a total eclipse of the sun. We were forbidden to leave the bunk with the warning that viewing the event would result in future loss of eyesight. We were taught how to experience the eclipse with pinhole devices, but I recall that that was a letdown.
Camp Cejwin was the start of camping life for me for 9 summers. That’s where I learned the Birchat Hamazon, and still sing it with glee.
For me and 3 of my best friends from camp, all of us retired, there was no better place on earth to be in July and August. I wish I could go back even now.

Even though I ony spent like 6 weeks at Camp Cejwin in the summer of 1978 I will never forget that time. The heat in the kitchen, the ice cold lemonade, my first kiss from an American girl, my introduction as a non-jewish Duch boy to the kosher kitchen, late night skinny dippng in the lake, sneaking under the fence to drink beer at he nearby cafe, playing football with all the foreigners, warm instead of cold rain showers. And meeting people like Jean-Marc who also worked in the kitchen and could barely speak English at that time and Richard Gardner who worked as a waiter whom I last saw some 15 years ago in Boston. And al those flies in those bunks, we must have killed hundreds of them but they still kept coming. Since then lots of things happened and I worked in advertising, film distribution and film production (I have produced films like Black Book, Winter in Wartime and Suskind). Been to the States many times but except for Richard never met anybody from Cejwin ever again. Thanks for this trip down memory lane.

Came upon these pix today by accident. I was there ’61 – ’63, Hadar and Carmel. We took a ride up one day in summer 1994 and could barely find it. It was the second year as a small Christian camp. The management gave us free reign and I remember how much of the facility was abandoned even then and how the old records were strewn all over the administration building, as were hundreds of Jewish books. My wife’s cousin had been a counselor in my time but by the end was a board member and how much that board struggled financially in the last years to the point that it had become somewhat nonsectarian by the end in 1992. I had heard that the old synagogue/social hall had burned down a couple of years ago, but these pictures are heartbreaking. Funny you mention Ockanickon – 10 minutes away from our house – I’m sure a great camp experience too but so much different from Cejwin.

Just found this web site and am happy I did. I was a camper there from 1949 to 1956—Yonim (or Hadar) to Aviv My sisters, Carol and Rhona were there on the girls side in the early 50’s. My father, Dr. Simon Mendelsberg, (Mendy) was the camp doctor for a few summers He and our mother stayed on the peninsula . He had been a swimming counselor there back in the 30’s and was a friend of Dr Schoolman. My aunt, Lillian Biener worked in the admin building and my cousins Jeff and Alan were also campers about that time. I have a few old pictures of us there some where and will try to find them. It has been well over 60 years but the memories remain.

I was a counsellor at Cejwin in 1946 and enjoyed my time there immensely. I made lifetime friends there.

Does anyone remember taking the train to the camp? The Erie had a Port Jervis stop and there was a connecting line from there that ran north up the valley. The O&W operated the old Port Jervis-Monticello tracks that went right through the camp. The O&W went bankrupt in 1957 and the Erie-Lackawanna used the tracks to shuttle campers as well as to store long-term consists. I remember sitting in a window seat with my family at The Park Lane restaurant across the street one night in the 60s when a train made a stop there. Tracks were taken-up in the late 60s.

My late father attended Cejwin in the 1940s. He started going when he was six years old. From what I was told, his parents wanted to get him out of the Bronx for the summer.

I had the wonderful opportunity to be a Cejwinite from 1964-1974. From Hadar, to Carmel, and thru Aviv I graduated to being a waiter then an Arts & Crafts counselor in Carmel. My mother, Miriam Grossman, was in charge of the mens dining room and the waiters for most of those years so I was a spoiled staff kid. I still treasure my memories of Cejwin and all that I learned about being a good Jew.

I just thought about Cejwin for the first time in decades. I was a camper in Aviv c.1960-1963 and then a CIT for a year and then the gateboy. Great experiences. Unfortunately I cannot remember anyone’s names there except I believe there was a Joan Magida(?) from East Rockaway(?) I remember meeting her and a few of her girlfriends at the gate several times in the early sixties. Anyone remember me by chance?

I was a governess at Cejwin in the late ’70s. The comments by “anonymous” above coincide perfectly with my own memories! I was there only two summers, never as a camper, yet what summers they were!

When my older sister attended this camp (1958 through 1961), my family would visit the place on visiting day. I remember the railroad line that ran through the center of camp (a spur line of a private railroad), It would race through, with an engine pulling only one car. By the time I attended (1964), the line was shut down, and all the steel rails were removed. But on nature hikes, our group would follow the wooden railroad ties and concrete markers on the ground clear into the forest.

Richard
It is amazing that a “simple” photo spread of a summer camp that was abandoned almost twenty years would continue to have people respond with their own remembrances almost three years after this was started.
As I mentioned two and a quarter years ago, my short relationship at Cejwin is in a way so similar to the over one hundred campers and employees who have great memories of Cejwin.
It is a shame that this property is no longer a camp, a hundred years after it started.
Amazing! Such memories

Here’s 1960s video of the Port Jervis Cejwin Camp on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2wvowuzlufE

Cejwin had a major influence on my life. When I first arrived at Cejwin at age 12 in 1957 I knew more or less nothing about Jewish prayer and services. My three years as a camper and year as a waiter greatly molded my life as a Jew. Little could I have imagined that when I worked in Arts and Crafts on a wood cutout of two lions and the Ten Commandments that fifty years later I’d design the Torah ark curtain and Torah mantles for New York’s Temple Emanu-El and Prague’s seven hundred year old synagogue, the Altneuschul. And for forty years work with Elie Wiesel illustrating his books and have my art collected and reproduced many times by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Without my Cejwin experience, I believe I would never have created art on Jewish subjects, which have been exhibited and published worldwide.

When I was a counsellor at Cejwin, there were not enough male counselors for the boys, so I became Uncle Rosalind and was counsellor to a bunk of young boys. I met my future husband there. I am now over 90 years young.

My mom, who is 100 years old, just told me that she went to Camp Cejwin probably as a young teen. She doesn’t remember too much about it but she loved hearing others posts about their experiences at camp. She is probably the oldest living Cejwin alumna!

I was at Cejwin for three years in Hadar, three in Carmel and three in Aviv—then I was on the play production staff at the Synagogue Auditorium.
It was truly my summer family–I even sent my oldest to the one year attempt to restart the camp. They used the Aviv campus and he was very proud of himself when he found my initials and a year in a neighboring bunk house.
I still have my songbook and much of my judaism was learned around the flag pole each morning and shabbat services—and by the lake havdallahs—followed by a “social”.

I could go on —but Thank you Richard

September 10, 2022 Richard, these photos and their descriptions are just so poignant and beautiful. You’ve obviously touched a chord here and thanks for doing that. Love the comments too. I spent a lot of time those two summers of 1968 and 1969 on that abandoned basketball court and I’m spellbound looking at that barely hanging-on collapsed rim. Both parents gone, kids grown, nearing retirement, I am at an age where I’m looking at a lot of the voluminous “stuff” I’ve accumulated and unloading. This photo essay of yours, however, is a keeper. Like the others who’ve commented, I’m sure, as we try to figure out where 40, 50, 60 years went, it’s good to remember those days and nights when we were trying to figure out where we would be heading. I remember those bunks in Aviv, the weekend socials and dances, the care packages from home (of comic books, baseball cards and kosher salami), the terrific athletes, the lake, the shoddy lamp I made because who knew you had to wipe the stain off, that ill-conceived prank when toothpaste was subbed into the Oreos one afternoon, that strange weekend when most of the counselors left for this weird thing called Woodstock. So very thankful to you for putting this together and sorry it took me so long to stumble on it! Peter Brav

I was a waiter in 1961. My aunts are Ella and Syd. My first known alcohol drink was a seven and seven and I had it at the bar across from the camp. My mother, Ethel, worked with Rose Gold in the NYC office.

Wasn’t there also a home type building that was used as a rehab? Ella brought her husband Joe there. WhenI was driving around the area and the remnants of Cejwin all is saw was the closed Cornucopia restaurant.

Do you want to come back for the in the works Jim Henson’s “All of a Kind Family” TV series.

Attended Cejwin in the mid 50’s. Don’t remember much, but recall counselors and a few fellow campers. Also went to Mossad for a few summers and the two are muddled in my memories.