However, in general, she firmly believes that camp is about fun. “We work hard on making our summer themes as funky as possible. The campers love when we act kooky. For example, two years ago was our 29th year of camp, chof tes, and it also happened to be a leap year. During a leap year, there are 29 days in February. Chof tes phonetically sounds like “cat.” Our theme for that year was, ‘Take a cat nap, it’s a s’leap year.’”

The theme play featured an alley cat who couldn’t sleep — all he did was take cat naps. He frustrated all the other cats because he kept them up all night. The married staff dressed as alley cats, and they sent him to a “snorologist” to cure his sleep problems. Turned out all he needed was a change of scenery and he was shipped off to Camp Agudah where no one sleeps, anyway. They just take catnaps.

Childhood Challenges

Miral was born in Rochester, NY, and as a small child, moved to Westchester, PA, where her father was offered a position as a rav in a shul. “But there was no Yiddishkeit there,” Miral shares, “and my mother said she would rather eat beans and potatoes the rest of her life than live in a place devoid of Yiddishkeit.” So, when she was age six, Miral’s family moved to Brooklyn.

An exceptionally musical family, Miral, her two sisters, her brother, and her parents would sing together at every Shabbos meal. “There would be four beautiful harmonies going simultaneously,” Miral reminisces. “My father was also a chazzan and my brother would accompany him to shul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and harmonize with him.”

When Miral was 15, her idyllic family life was shattered. While on the way to the Catskills for the summer, a tractor trailer rammed into their car. Miral’s mother and 11-year-old brother were instantly killed.

The many years that have passed since that even have afforded Miral a unique view of her trauma. “This tragedy knocked me off my feet for a long time. Unfortunately, there were many people who contributed to that. They mollycoddled me, they nebached me, they let me get away with things. I cut class and didn’t get into trouble. I wasn’t held accountable for what I did wrong.

“I understand where they were coming from. They felt devastated for me for the tragedy I’d gone through, but it was a mistake to let me float through school with no consequences. Mr. Yanofsky, my geometry teacher at Bais Yaakov of Williamsburg, was the only one who didn’t let me get away with anything. His message to me was: your mother died, but you didn’t. He believed in me and I believed in him.

Through his actions towards me, I was encouraged to reach for the stars despite my challenges . He was like driftwood in the ocean, one of the few teachers who pushed me to do my best and to perform. It took me more than 15 years to get past the pity, but I’m the confident, happy person I am today because of him.

Miral’s personal experiences feed into her conviction not to coddle the children who are challenged — which has become a cardinal rule of her camp. “There was a child in camp who suffered a tragedy a few months before the summer. We gave her dispensations, like allowing her to take off from activities to call her mother if she felt the need, but otherwise she was accountable like all other campers. One night she wasn’t in her bunk by curfew. We were worried, but a half hour later she showed up and she was docked. Subsequently, we found out from her counselor that she was happy she was docked, because it showed we were treating her normally. Of course, it’s essential to empathize and be there for the girls when they’re going through challenges. But it’s also important to treat them normally.”

Mrs. Rachel Friedman, a veteran camper and now one of the married staff, shares her take on Miral’s approach toward campers with challenges. “Mrs. Sim is a fighter. She believes in the girls. She doesn’t let someone mope around and feel sorry for themselves. Once in a while, a girl with a difficult home situation comes to camp. With a hand on the girl’s shoulder Mrs. Sim says, ‘Sheifeleh, I believe in you and I’m not letting you give up. You are not turning into a nebach. Push yourself, because I know you can.’ And they’re success stories, one after the next.”

Creative Campers

Miral and her staff believe in drawing out the creativity of their campers. “It’s a pleasure seeing the kids come alive and bringing out the potential they didn’t know they had,” Miral says. “We also don’t have a problem running things in an unconventional way if it will be helpful.” For example, once, a counselor interrupted a head staff meeting with a problem. The bunk was having a biking activity, and one of her campers didn’t know how to ride a bike. Miral stopped the staff meeting, went out, and taught the child how to ride a bike.

“Another time at night,” Miral tells, “my married daughter who is in charge of the TC’s (teen campers) came into my room and noticed a camper sitting there. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. Sarah, I explained indicating the camper, isn’t tired so she accompanied me on all my rounds and now she’s staying with me until she gets tired.”

And what about when mass insomnia hits, like after a fast day, when many of the campers have taken long naps? Miral laughs. “Once when that happened, we brought them all out to the field and played a humongous machanayim game.”

Miral’s passion for camp vibrates through her. As we chat, this great-grandmother suddenly bursts out with camp Agudah’s zany theme song from last year. And while the medium is fun, there are vital lessons to be learned from camp. Miral explains that while parents often seek to protect their children from life’s knocks, camp is where children can learn resilience.

“To make it in the world, children need to learn to be independent and responsible. In camp, they learn they can’t go running to Mommy for every little problem. They learn to work things out on their own.” A vital part of this process is the atmosphere created by the staff, who aim to instill campers with the confidence to work out issues without Mommy.

And they learn this from the very beginning. “The whole of day one we field calls from mothers whose daughters want to switch bunks.” Miral is not swift to capitulate: She has established a rule that there’s no switching bunks in the first three days of camp. “And you know what? After three days no one wants to switch.” Miral also begs mothers to tell the occasional homesick child that they need to stand strong and stick it out. They usually do and are thrilled they did.

This is the tough love Miral practices all year around on the home front. “When my son was ten years old, he told me his bicycle broke,” she recalls “I wrote the number of the bike man and told him to call and make an appointment for the man to come down to fix it. My son whined about how no bike man would listen to a ten-year-old and all other mothers would call for their child, but I stood my ground. ‘You want your bike fixed, here’s the number” I told him. I can still see his self-satisfied look when he got the appointment. His confidence went up a notch.”

Like all mothers, Miral sometimes second-guessed herself. Was she being overly strict? Was she pushing them to independence before they were ready? “But I told myself that I wanted to save them the 15 years it took me to grow out of my own neediness. I wanted to give back to them what Mr. Yanofsky gave to me.”

Camp Frenemies

Close quarters. Lots of girls. Friction and “politics” are bound to arise. What approach does Miral take?

If there’s an issue between counselor and camper, Miral and her staff believe that it’s best to be open and work it out. “If campers complain about their counselor, we take them seriously and ask them to tell us what’s going on, what is it that bothers them about the counselor. Kids are so frank. If you’re willing to listen, they’re willing to let you hear.” Next, Miral speaks to the camp mother and the camp social worker — who will sit down with the counselor and say something like, ‘This is not working. This is what the campers are saying.’ She will explain that she wants the campers to feel comfortable to tell the counselor what’s bothering them. ‘It might hurt,’ she’ll say, ‘but are you ready to hear them?’

If it’s politics between two campers, the head staff will sit the girls down and have a frank discussion. “She doesn’t give me any breathing space. She hovers over me,” one camper will say. “The camp mother might turn to the girl’s bunkmate and say, ‘Do you understand that every girl needs her space and she may want to be friends with other girls and that’s okay?

“Most of the time it works,” Miral says. In addition, in modeling a straightforward, honest, and respectful approach, Miral is teaching the significance of working on relationships — and emes. Miral admits that these kind of lessons can only be done in an atmosphere of love. “Every camper knows that we, the staff, love each other and we love them. They feel part of a family.”

Times Change

While the values Miral instills into her campers remain the same, over the decades in which she’s been a camp director, she’s discerned a difference in the ingredients needed for a successful camp.

“Today you have to turn yourself into a pretzel to give kids the most fun time. It goes against my grain because I believe that children learn to be creative when they have to figure out how to occupy themselves. When I was growing up in camp, we were the drama heads and the arts and crafts heads. There was no married staff running every activity. But you can’t fight city hall and I had to learn to adjust. However,” she sighs and says, “it’s a shame because to the extent that we are coming up with all the ideas and plans, we are not giving the campers the tools to create on their own. They’re not learning to trust themselves, to learn what it means to risk having an idea and to run with it.”

In line with her drive for honesty, Miral is the first to acknowledge that there are challenges in running a large, successful camp. One challenge Miral admits to is feeling a lot of pressure every year to come up with a good theme song because, she observes, the camp experience revolves around the ruach in the dining room. A strong theme song can make or break the summer. Another challenge for Miral is safety. “I am a basket case when it comes to safety issues. The younger staff members don’t want me around when we load buses for trips. They know how crazy I get. The idea of taking so many children on a trip and bringing them all back safely is daunting to me.”

But the thrills are everywhere and they definitely outweigh the challenges. And there’s always the unexpected, which adds sparkle to camp life. “In camp everything is a big secret, the bigger the secret the better. Nobody knows when we’re having a special day, or when we’re going on a trip, nobody knows the theme ahead of time. One year on July 4, we decided to break out color war. We hired someone to ride through the camp on a horse dressed as Paul Revere and shout ‘The British are coming, the British are coming.’ We had a group of girls staying in a bunk nearby who had just returned from seminary in Eretz Yisrael. They heard the horse galloping and everybody shrieking. They were convinced Mashiach had come. Even though they were quite disappointed when they found out it was just color war, we were able to get a good laugh out of them later on.”

Nevertheless, despite the fact that the camp thrives on wackiness and unconventionality, Miral insists that everything is done within the realm of ruchniyus and tzniyus. The staff strives to relay the message that frum doesn’t mean boring. They also work to balance being positive and encouraging but also being fair in acknowledging if the camper is doing something wrong. “For instance,” Miral says, “if I see a child in a dress that doesn’t quite cover her knees, I will call her over quietly and say, ‘Mama shein, you need to change your dress. I will wait here until you change.’”

The camp is strict about counselors being positive role models and arriving at davening on time. “There is no leeway with that,” Miral says. “We also insist that activities run smoothly. But that doesn’t stop us from throwing in a curve ball once in a while,” she adds with a smile, “by interrupting an activity and announcing on the microphone that the whole camp meet on the ball field for a surprise.”

There is one last story Miral shares. “This happened years ago. We broke out color war and it was great. We had a spectacular breakout and the girls loved it. Then the day was over. That’s when I came up with what I was convinced was a brilliant idea. We would break out color war the next day too. Nobody in a million years would think we would do that, it would be an amazing fun surprise. The married head staff was into it and we did it. Let me tell you, we were not prepared for the mass rebellion. The captains refused to work. None of the younger staff was interested in color war two days in a row. I felt totally deflated. I wanted to get into my car, go home and not come back again. But my then assistant, Chany Bandman, forever positive, wouldn’t let me get down. She insisted that we go ahead with it, saying we couldn’t disappoint the campers. We decided to compose a song apologizing to the younger staff explaining our flub. The song would explain that we did our best and could they please work with us. We appeared in front of them with an umbrella hiding our faces which we put down to sing the song. The last line of the song was ‘now you can throw rotten tomatoes at us.’ The counselors loved it, they agreed to work with us, and we had a great day.”

Miral explains that she learned a number of lessons from this incident. One was that it’s okay to make a mistake. You don’t have to be perfect. Also, it’s important to apologize — even to (and maybe especially to) children. Finally, she was ready to pack it in after this blunder but her assistant encouraged her to continue. Her positive attitude turned things around and showed you can always regroup. This incident brought home to Miral the importance of a loving supportive staff, which she feels blessed to be a part of. She also mentions the dedicated board she works with, who share the same passion and receive no remuneration for their efforts.

“The devotion of the staff and board enables me to give all my kochos and,” she says, “giving creates happiness. So, I’m the happiest person in the world. As long as Hashem blesses me with the ability to give, I will keep on giving.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 597)