I’m a first-generation American. In the late 1970s, when I was of Jewish summer camp age, my parents had never heard of the concept. In retrospect, it isn’t clear to me that college had been on their radar, either. But summer camp? Feh. They didn’t know from such things and probably wouldn’t have sent my sister and me if they had. Even back when camp was a pittance of what it costs today, my parents would have deemed it a large and unnecessary expense. 

And for what? So we could spend the summer outdoors in the fresh air? We lived on a dairy farm, for God’s sake.

My sister, Sue, and I grew up on that dairy farm in Goshen, N.Y., about 65 miles northwest of Manhattan. It wasn’t the standard upbringing for nice Jewish girls. Goshen was fairly antisemitic. Our schoolmates threw pennies at us and called us kikes. Our only connection to Judaism was Friday night dinners and, in the next town over, a dismal Hebrew school we were forced to attend. 

Nor did we have any Israel connection. As a teen, I’m not sure I could have found Israel on a map.

We were lucky to be in Goshen at all. In 1934, before some people were worrying about Hitler, my Opa, a dairy farmer in Ulrichstein, Germany, heard from an army buddy who was blunt: It would get worse before it got better—it was time to get the hell out of the country. His parents abandoned the dairy farm, the cows, the house and their bank accounts and set sail for the United States with my father and his sister. They arrived without English or connections, nothing but the proverbial shirts on their backs.

Just before they had left, a German they didn’t know, a non-Jew, had approached Opa with a proposition. Since Opa couldn’t take money out of Germany, this man offered to bring some money and jewelry out for him. When they all got to America, this man would find him and return it, minus a percentage.

Opa figured his chances of ever seeing that money again were slim. But what was the alternative? Germany certainly wasn’t going to give him his money, and most of it was tied up in real estate and cattle, regardless. Opa gave the man some money and bade it farewell. A few weeks after the family arrived in New York, the man appeared and returned their money, just as promised. The legend of this man’s good deed remains, but his name has been lost to time.

With the unexpected cash, Opa bought a small dairy farm in Goshen and began cattle dealing, the same as he had done in Germany. At the time, many of the farmers in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley were German Jews, so not speaking a word of English wasn’t much of an impediment. Thirty years later, when my parents married, they, too, ended up on the farm, peddling cows.

By that point, the Jewish observance they had so meticulously kept in Germany had tarnished a little, but they still kept a modicum of Shabbat and kashrut. But summer camp? Es pas nisht, it’s not fit for a Jew. Had it not been for a fateful phone call, Sue and I would probably have developed no further connection to Judaism and likely would have drifted into some form of secular, cultural Judaism, unfettered by ties to Israel.

Except that one day, in the late 1970s, my father got a call from Mel Reisfield, who ran Camp Tel Yehudah, a Zionist summer camp in Barryville, N.Y. Mel wanted our cows.

Mel explained that he had gotten my father’s name from someone who gave it to someone else, who thought he might be the person to call. Mel wanted to rent two cows from us for the summer.  

My father chuckled and told Mel, nicely, that you don’t rent cows. You buy them. Mel explained that he needed the cows because he wanted to create a simulated kibbutz experience at the camp, the flagship overnight teen camp of the Young Judaea movement. He would only need the cows for the summer; after that, he said, he’d have nothing to do with them until the following summer. He just needed two rent-a-cows.

My father thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. For him, working with cows was a job, and not a romantic one. The idea that you’d pay a lot of money for your children to go to camp, to work with cattle—well, it was too absurd. Americans.

Again and again, Mel implored him to rent him some cows. My father kept explaining about how you don’t rent cows, you buy them. Mel talked some more. My father was, despite himself, starting to get interested.

Also, my father, like my Opa, was a cattle dealer. They hated to leave money on the table. My father asked him if it was a Jewish summer camp. Yes, Mel assured him. A Jewish summer camp.

Then my father wanted to know if it was a kosher camp. Yes, yes, it was a kosher camp.

My father thought for a minute. Then he told Mel that he could rent two cows for the summer—if he also took two girls along with them. 

And that is how Sue and I, who were 15 and 16 at the time, got to attend Camp Tel Yehudah on the cow plan. Never mind that we didn’t know what to bring to camp. Never mind that everyone else drove up to camp in their sporty little cars. (My sister and I came in the cattle truck.) 

“Here are the girls,” my father said to Mel when we arrived, pointing. It was not clear to any of us whether he was pointing at the cows, or at me and my sister.

Despite the potential pitfalls, camp was a magical place. And Tel Yehudah was an inspiring, motivating, mesmerizing experience. During our two summers there, Sue and I learned about Jewish and Israeli history, but not in the stuffy, dry way it had been taught in Hebrew school. We quickly picked up Israeli songs and dances. More than that, we picked up a sense of community and purpose that was seductive. For the first time in maybe forever, we felt like we belonged somewhere.

Luckily, we didn’t see much of the cows those two summers. They stayed in their part of the camp, and we stayed in ours. Summer camp, despite my family’s unorthodox approach, was a defining experience for us.  

A few years later, midway through college, I cobbled together money from part-time jobs and went to Israel for a year of ulpan learning on a kibbutz. Israel, like Tel Yehudah, penetrated my essence, my soul. Years later, I made aliyah, as did Sue.

So it was Mel—and of course those cows at Camp Tel Yehudah—who were responsible for a lot of our Jewish identification, all our Zionism and, if indirectly, our families ending up in Israel.  

I will be eternally grateful.

Fern Reiss consults on how to write, publish and promote books at fernreiss.com and represents Jewish-interest speakers through jewishspeakersbureau.com.