Rabbi Albert Thaler, founding director of Ramah Nyack day camp, dies at 91

• Published date: 23 April 2024
• Author: ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Over the next few years, Thaler would build "Ramah Nyack" into one of the most successful camps in the Ramah network, drawing devoted campers from New Jersey, Queens, Manhattan and New York's Westchester County

Perhaps as importantly, it developed an elite staff of counselors and educators, offering budding rabbis and future lay and professional leaders a chance to work with children during the day and, unusual among day camps, to live and learn at the camp overnight — what Thaler called "the best of both worlds."

"During my twenty-seven years as director I felt that our work with the staff was as important, if not more important than our work with the children, for they too were 'our children,'" he recalled in a 2007 essay celebrating the Ramah movement's 60th anniversary.

The result was one of the most successful camps in the Ramah network, seeding synagogues and other Jewish institutions with alumni who brought a high level of literacy and ruach — a Hebrew word meaning "spirit" — to suburban congregations. Former staff include a number of prominent educators and rabbis, including Rabbi Menachem Creditor, scholar in residence of UJA-Federation of New York; Rabbi Irwin Kula, the president of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership; Rabbi Shai Held, the president of the Hadar Institute; Rabbi Paul Mack Drill of the Orangetown (New York) Jewish Center and Valerie Weisler, the founder and chief executive officer of The Validation Project, a youth mentoring program.

Thaler also estimated that 40 married couples met during summers at Ramah Nyack.

Impacting generations of children and young adults

Thaler, who ran the camp until 1997 and also served for 37 years as rabbi of Temple Gates of Prayer in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, died April 18. He was 91.

"He was a visionary leader and educator who inspired generations of children and young adults, and served as a mentor and role model for many Ramah directors," Ramah administrators wrote in a notice announcing his death.

For Judaism's Conservative denomination, a centrist movement that has seen declining membership since its peak in the 1950s and '60s, the Ramah camps have been seen as an enduring success story. Arnold Eisen, a former chancellor of the movement's Jewish Theological Seminary and a historian of American Judaism, once described the camps not only as "one of the finest accomplishments" of the movement but "one of the finest accomplishments of American Judaism as a...