He had few prospects until he met a a representative from Camp Extreme — a sports camp for Orthodox teens at risk. Matthew was immediately hooked by the thought of a summer adventure out West, that included rappelling down mountains and visiting Alcatraz, an adventure, it turned out, that would change his life.
These days, Matthew lives at home with his parents and four siblings, and he’s planning to enroll in a GED high-school-equivalency course. He attended Camp Extreme for the past two summers and said he’s been drug-free for six months. Some of his free time is spent speaking to fellow teen-agers about quitting drugs.
Matthew said he did drugs for depression. He repeated what he said he told fellow campers at a Narcotics Anonymous session: “My life’s a lot better without that crap.”
Matthew credits Camp Extreme, not his parents, school or rabbi, and its founder Rabbi A.Y. Weinberg with turning him around.
The camp’s roots began in 1999 after Weinberg, then-director of the Greater Midwest Region of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, was asked to run an outdoor summer program for 22 teenage boys.
Four at-risk teens ended up in the group, and Weinberg noticed that certain activities and group dynamics seemed to help the teens break out of their shell.
“We decided to try a program just for teens at risk and to take them on the road for four weeks,” Weinberg said.
Armed with little more than tents and flashlights, appointments at the nearest extreme-sports site and directions to all the glatt kosher food facilities within a 200-mile radius, Weinberg led a group of 18 campers and 10 staff members from Denver to San Francisco for four weeks of white-water rafting, mountain biking, jet skiing and Jewish spiritual renewal.
By summer 2001, Weinberg was organizing four groups, including three all-boys and one girls-only session, in Camp Extreme adventures.
Starting from campsites in Denver or Reno, Nev., the group ends up at such places as Pier 39 or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The trip halts during Shabbat, when the campers take up residence at empty schools and observe a day of rest.
A 1999 study conducted by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty titled “The Incidence of At-Risk Youth in Brooklyn, New York,” found that Brooklyn’s 23,000-student yeshiva system includes some 1,500 at-risk youth.
According to the study, 6.6 percent of 14- to 17-year-old Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are considered at-risk, with problems ranging in severity from drinking and drug abuse to feelings of isolation and learning disabilities.
At Camp Extreme, campers ages 14 through 17 arrive with typical at-risk problems. Some are high-school yeshiva dropouts, and many of their families are dealing with the strain and stigma of raising a troubled teen in a community that until recently didn’t acknowledge that some religious kids take Ecstasy, have sex before marriage and don’t believe in God.
The camp’s list of extreme sports is what convinces many to sign on. But despite its name, the Camp Extreme brochure notes that the sports are merely a means to Weinberg’s goal, which is to integrate the kids back into the Orthodox world by summer’s end.
“Extreme sports require and instill in them a necessity for teamwork, along with a tremendous sense of pride and accomplishment for doing what many cannot,” states the brochure. “By nightfall, they are worn down and more than happy to relax around a campfire, allowing us to have incredible sessions.”
“All the kids are stimuli junkies, so we try to stimulate and challenge them without having them do anything illegal,” added the camp’s drug counselor, Chaim Winter.
One camper, 16-year-old Yitzi from Baltimore, said the best part of camp was that “it gave me a bunch of friends and a sense of belonging. You know,” he said, “here in the Jewish community if you’re a rebel, then you’re a reject.”
The first day of camp is a flurry of drug testing and acting out, said the counselors. Drug levels are monitored throughout the session, and campers who use them are sent home — usually two or three out of a group of 20 among the boys and none, so far, from the girls’ group.
Kids addicted to drugs like heroin and cocaine are not admitted, and most campers have a substance-abuse history with alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms and acid. Each counselor is assigned three to five campers, and they all live together in a tent pitched on campgrounds along the route.
Campers’ resistance to the Jewish learning sessions is high at first, noted the counselors. Counselor Sruli Smith, 22, said he talked about girls and sex for the first week of one session to show his campers they could talk to him about anything.
Once the kids begin talking about Judaism, they tend to open up on other issues that are irking them, such as family and school, said Weinberg. “It doesn’t mean that next Pessah they’re going home and say, ‘OK, I’m ready to observe,'” he said. “But for some it means it registers. They see that [Judaism] does make sense.”
After Camp Extreme’s first summer, three quarters of the campers who came to camp as high-school dropouts re-enrolled in school. Of the 25 percent who didn’t return to school, some began pursuing a GED.
Though awareness is a key issue, the ability to pay for the programs often takes center stage. At a cost of $2,000 per week per camper, Weinberg sometimes charges the families as little as 25 percent of the cost and funds
Weinberg is looking to secure funding for a session during Passover and a year-round high-school equivalency program for the teens. He’s also looking into providing weeklong getaways for students who are having problems at mainstream schools.
According to Ruchama Clapman, the founder of Mothers Aligned Saving Kids, whose Boro Park-based group operates a hot line for parents of teens at risk, Camp Extreme has been getting high marks in the community. The campers “come back with a more wholesome attitude in life and more self-confidence,” she said.
Clapman was quick to point out that awareness and empathy are still lacking in the community. “There are people that have a hard time hearing about it,” she said.
Moshe Bellows, a program board member, applauded Weinberg’s refusal to look the other way when teens at risk presented themselves in his community.
“As someone who works in both worlds, in the Jewish world as well as the outside ‘real world,’ I think it’s really strong when the leaders of our community say that there’s an issue and we have to deal with it,” said Bellows.