The author as a child. Courtesy of Benyamin Cohen
By Benyamin Cohen
July 3, 2025
It was 1985. The year Back to the Future came out, which felt appropriate, because I desperately wanted to go back in time — specifically to a time before my parents had dropped me off at Jewish summer camp.
Our family station wagon was a light blue Plymouth with rear-facing seats — because in the 1980s, we thought whiplash was character-building. Each summer, my dad would pack five of us in like kosher sardines and drive 16 hours from Atlanta to the Catskills, with a pit stop in Baltimore to refuel, recharge, and remind ourselves this was all somehow for our own good.
Then he’d drop us off at Camp Mogen Avraham. The name sounds majestic. Biblical. Like a place where you’d wrestle angels or receive commandments. In practice, it was where you got sunburned, outnumbered by tri-state area lifers, and hit in the face with a dodgeball.
I hated camp. I hated it with the passion of a thousand bug bites. The other kids had already formed lifelong blood oaths the summer before. I, a Southern rabbi’s son who enjoyed synagogue announcements and neighborhood gossip, was not a member of their club.
They cared about color wars and canoeing. I cared about what really mattered: Back in Atlanta, the Estreicher family had just had a baby boy — and I was going to miss the bris. I was a kid with very specific priorities.
So, one night, I devised an elaborate plan: I would run away.
I’d been plotting the escape for days, maybe weeks. In my 10-year-old mind, it felt more like a prison break than a stroll through rural New York. I imagined myself as Andy Dufresne crawling through a mile of sewage to freedom — though The Shawshank Redemption wouldn’t come out for another nine years.
Before sunrise, while my fellow bunkmates and counselor were still sound asleep, I slipped out of the cabin, dragging my Samsonite suitcase down the gravel path. In my head, I was already in Atlanta, triumphantly bursting into synagogue like Odysseus returning from war. “You’ll never believe what I’ve seen!”
I made it 20 minutes before the camp realized I was gone. A panicked staffer came running down the road, spotted me, and gently (but firmly) escorted me back. It wasn’t exactly a heroic takedown, but in my version of the story, there were helicopters.
I was brought to the camp office, where they called my parents. My father had just returned from the Estreicher bris, probably still humming “Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov” when he picked up the phone.
The punishment was swift and ironic: I had to call home every day for the rest of the session. A fitting penalty for a child whose core wound was homesickness. It was like forcing someone afraid of heights to write daily postcards from a hot-air balloon.
By the end of the summer, the camp administration sent my parents a letter. Official camp stationery. A single sentence: “Your son Benyamin is no longer welcome here.”
Reader, I was thrilled.
The following summer, my parents — out of options and possibly still traumatized — enrolled me in a local Chabad day camp. It technically only went up to age 10, but they made an exception, probably because they sensed I had nowhere else to go.
There, I was a star. I was 11. I was the cool older kid. Not hard, when your main competition is a roomful of third graders.
And I started hanging out with a girl at that day camp. She would later become my high school sweetheart — because nothing says romance like doing arts and crafts under the watchful eye of a Lubavitch rabbi.
Meanwhile, my siblings kept going back to sleepaway camp. My sister, to this day, works at one. And all my brothers — every last one — became rabbis.
I did not.
That great escape of 1985 left me with more than just a rap sheet. It etched something into my brain: if you want control of your life, start early.
Ever since, I’ve been a pre-dawn riser. There’s a quiet satisfaction in being the first one awake — which is probably why I enjoy getting up at 5 a.m. to write the Forward’s morning newsletter, curating all the Jewish news you need to start your day. You could say it’s my way of outrunning the camp counselors, still.
Camp Mogen Avraham still exists. It still has fans who call it “Mogen Av,” like it’s a beloved grandfather and not a place where I once plotted a dramatic escape under the cover of darkness.
I clicked through the photos on their website. I saw the bunk beds. The dining hall. The lake. I felt a deep, visceral reaction.
Some people call it nostalgia.
I simply closed the browser.
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