Are you completely sick of me yammering about camp? Well, you’ll be glad to know that this is my last camp-related column of the summer. But while the others have been jokey, this one is anything but.

Meet Ezra, the 12-year-old son of my friend Jeff Kress. Jeff is chair of the Department of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and co-author of the book Building Learning Communities With Character: How to Integrate Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Ezra is a cheery, funny kid who has familial dysautonomia, a Jewish genetic disease. It affects his sensory and autonomic nervous systems—which control swallowing, body temperature, pain and heat perception, the regulation of blood pressure, and the ability to produce tears.

When Ezra was 7, Jeff and his wife, Adena, learned about Camp Simcha Special, a camp run by Chai Lifelinefor kids with genetic diseases. They signed up Ezra, even though they were concerned. “He was in much less stable medical condition than he is now,” Jeff told me recently. “We were constantly going to the hospital. We couldn’t believe the camp could care for him. We assumed we’d max out the services they could provide. But each child has his own counselor, with whom you meet before camp to go over treatments, and Ezra’s counselor that first year was an Australian guy named Avi with this total can-do attitude—think Crocodile Dundee from yeshiva. Whatever we said about Ezra’s medical needs, he’d say ‘No worries!’ At first we thought it meant ‘I’m not actually listening to you!’ But he was. He was amazing.”

In addition to one-on-one counselors, Camp Simcha Special has a full 24-hour medical staff, an on-site ambulance, and an on-call medevac helicopter. The camp provides a visiting petting zoo, a zip line, and an annual helicopter ride. “I’m the only member of the family who’s been in a helicopter!” Ezra crows to his parents.

Read the full article in Tablet Magazine...