Camp Hakayitz, a Jewish Orthodox Camp located in Skokie, Illinois offered a new program for deaf campers to join them for a month on July 4th through August 2nd for students grade 7th through 12th.
This camp was the only one of its kind in the United States and drew campers from as close as Skokie and as far away as France and all of them were deaf.
A young Skokie man, Daniel Chernoff, was the leader for the four-week camp, which was part of Yeshivas Hakayitz, the regular summer camp at Hebrew Theological College (HTC) in Skokie.
The deaf campers participated in all the same activities as the others except for morning study sessions, which Chernoff led. The joint activities benefited both groups of campers, according to Rabbi Yosef Polstein, HTC’s camp director.
Polstein hired Chernoff to develop the camp for deaf boys at Chernoff’s suggestion. The story behind the camp’s creation, however, really goes back to when Chernoff, now 21, was seven. That was when he first met his mentor, Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Kakon who co-founded Nefesh Dovid, the only yeshiva high school in the world for deaf and hard of hearing boys in Toronto, Canada.
In Baltimore, where he lived, Kakon founded the first overnight camp for Orthodox deaf and hard of hearing Jewish boys and ran it for seven years. Chernoff attended for five of those years and had “wonderful experiences,” especially “being with deaf Jewish friends. We went on trips every day. When I had to come home, I shed tears,” he says. Chernoff, who now hears with the aid of cochlear implants, both speaks and signs.
The camp was a great success, he reports, attracting six boys, four of whom also attend Nefesh Dovid. Their mornings were spent in learning while afternoons were for fun and adventure, which could be anything from sports to rocketry to a three-day camping trip. “Deaf people like to go out and do things, and this was the perfect place for it,” Chernoff says.
In addition, the campers shared activities, including sports and trips, with boys from the HTC camp, and Daniel taught a sign language class for hearing students. “I was shocked by how interested everybody here was in learning it,” he says, noting that one of the highlights of his summer was when a hearing student wished him a good Shabbos in sign language.
“This was a tremendous thing to have going on in camp,” Polstein says. “The deaf campers were so excited because they rarely have the opportunity to be together with regular campers. It was a whole new experience. And it sensitized my regular campers to Jews with special needs.” The hearing boys, he says, were “thrilled” to be learning sign language and enjoyed two Shabbat services that were signed by a local sign language interpreter, Steve Katz.
Deaf campers included Chaim Fomin of Brooklyn, Asher Kaplan of Skokie, David Attia-Parouche of France. Netanel Hayon of Israel. Shane Schreiber of New Orleans, and Yossi Jaffe of Minnesota.
