"It was an intense, passionate, spiritually charged summer— and even without relaxing, we were rejuvenated and reinvigorated"
There’s a certain thrill in planning the “best summer ever,” whether that means an adventurous cross-country road trip, having a blast in camp as one of the cool staffers, or some exotic vacation destination. But sometimes the greatest opportunities are the ones that aren’t even about you. What happens when you spend your summer in the service of others?
“I can’t adequately describe the feeling of being honored with sandek at a teenager’s bris”
While the 70-yearlong Communist chokehold on the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, the decades of oppression behind the Iron Curtain left their mark, especially on the Jews of Russia who had largely been cut off from their mesorah. At the Agudah convention that year, a plea went out to the American Jewish community to get involved and make a difference. Philadelphia Rosh Yeshivah Rav Elya Svei immediately jumped into action and put together a group of balabatim who created “Operation Open Curtain,” chaired by my uncle, Mr. Reuven Dessler. Among the many mosdos founded by Operation Open Curtain was a boys’ and girls’ summer camp.
The girls’ camp maintained an incredible streak since its inception, but their male counterpart wasn’t so lucky: In 2008, the boys’ division took a ten-year hiatus; it took until 2018 for a group of generous donors to resuscitate it. That summer, I and two American yungeleit, Reb Shlomo Duetsch and Reb Shmuel Dimarsky, boarded a Moscow-bound Aeroflot plane to run Operation Open Curtain’s Camp Eitz Chaim under the direction of Rabbi Dovid Laugunov. None of us spoke Russian, and we certainly couldn’t drink more than an ounce of Stolichnaya Vodka, but we were able to connect with the boys through a different type of spirit.
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