And at Camp Lauder in Szarvas (pronounced SAR-vash), Hungary, a summer camp for the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe, everybody did love Friday night. Kabbalat Shabbat services opened with a performance by the Romanian campers, getting everyone in the Shabbat spirit and unleashing a torrent of excited singing. After a delicious Shabbat feast, the revelry continued with an Oneg Shabbat. Campers and counselors from each delegation taught the crowd Shabbat songs, z'mirot, with accompanying hand motions when appropriate. We learned that even a Friday night staple like "Ay Gazoomba" differs around the world, as the Hungarians had an extra set of motions and the Russians sang different words. Deep in the night, when the last die-hard Onegers finished all the songs they knew, everyone went off to bed, excited for the Shabbat day to come.

Camp Lauder may look like a typical Jewish summer camp, but I was completely unprepared for what went on there. Run under the auspices of the Lauder Foundation and the Joint Distribution Committee, the camp draws Jewish youth from across Eastern Europe to Szarvas for an intense, educational, Jewish experience. The camp was built to accommodate 500 kids, but the demand has increased exponentially across the region; the staff now breaks the summer into four ten-day sessions, each of which is filled to capacity. The campers come to this quaint little town in Southeast Hungary from Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Albania, and of course, Hungary itself. I went to the fourth session this summer as an auxiliary staff member and part of the Romanian delegation.

Having this multinational mass of youth around was exciting, but it also made life at camp much more complicated. All announcements were made in English and then repeated in all the relevant languages by a squad of translators, a lengthy and often amusing process. By the end of the ten days, all the campers knew how to ask for quiet in five tongues and had personally compared the relative merits of different "Happy Birthday" tunes and chosen their favorite. (Mine is "Boldog Szuletes Napod," the Hungarian version.) Most programs at camp were divided into groups by nationality to avoid constant translation difficulties. At first, this hindered the growth of international friendships, but by the second or third day, through the use of English, cross-cultural understanding began to develop.

But it wasn't the international flavor or the energetic singing which was most impressive about the camp. I had expected those. What surprised me was the overall attitude of the camp; I had never seen an atmosphere of such mutual trust and respect in a youth organization. There were almost no rules at Szarvas, and direct supervision was minimal; the kids were expected to be at places on time and behave appropriately, and they did. Even as one of the few adults in a room at a night program, I did not have to worry about anything.

This atmosphere I so enjoyed exists in part because of the work of the international staff. Itzko, the director, is universally loved by the campers, both for his antics and for his infectious enthusiasm: he sang "Romania, Romania, Romania" while running through the bunks at 8 a.m., waking up everyone for breakfast, and climbed to the roof of the gymnasium dressed as Moses in order to bring the Ten Commandments down to the camp, for example. Scooting into our singing session to teach the kids a song he happened to like (the old classic "Love is something if you give it away") or riding through camp on his green bicycle, he was always on the verge of starting something new and unexpected. The rest of the staff, whether arranging a mock wedding or choreographing an interpretive dance to the story of creation, also kept things interesting, to the point where even the other staff members often had no idea what was going to happen next.

When the ten days were up, we were sorry to leave. But we were sent off in true Camp Lauder fashion. As the sounds of "Od lo ahavti dai" blared from someone's stereo, the other delegations came out to swat at mosquitoes and to wave goodbye to the Romania gang as our bus drove away. Some danced, some wiped away tears, and some looked confused as to whom they were waving goodbye, but all of us on the bus yelled and waved back excitedly as we pulled away. We cleared the camp's gates, leaned back in our seats, exhausted, and were all quiet for about thirty seconds before someone on the bus broke into "David Melech Yisrael" and we sang all the way to the train station.

I'm sure we'll sing all the way back next year.

Saul Zipkin, SY'97, is working for the Joint Distribution Committee of the Jewish Agency in Bucharest, Romania.