A Magical Week At Camp Dream Street Mississippi

By Matan Koch

Dream Street is a five day, four night camping program for children with physical disabilities. The camp is held on the grounds of URJ Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica, MS and is sponsored by NFTY’s Southern Region. Dream Street was founded in 1975 with the mission that all children, regardless of their abilities, must be offered the chance to have fun, to make new friends, to achieve, to be accepted for who and what they are, and to learn from the challenges of group life. Each counselor is paired one-on-one with a camper and is responsible for supporting, supervising, and encouraging that camper 24 hours a day for the week.  Both the children and the staff at Camp Dream Street benefit from the life-changing experiences the camp has to offer.

I just got back from my first dip in a swimming pool in about a dozen years, where I had the privilege of swimming with current Camp Dream Street Mississippi participants – as well as one camper who I first met when I came down to Mississippi eight years ago.  I came to Dream Street late compared to most participants, first experiencing it in law school as a guest of my dear friend, a long time Jacobs Camp alum, Jack Rubin.  As such I can’t really say that Dream Street facilitated my development the way it has for so many kids.

And yet, in retrospect I am aware that I learned an important lesson while watching the NFTY-Southern participants take on the role of primary care-givers for people whose disabilities exceed mine in complexity.  I had already learned many of the important lessons our campers learn about independence, communal dynamics and self worth because I was lucky enough to attend other URJ camps for the first two decades of my life.  And here I learned, from my friends who came through the program and the current students whom I watched, that, perhaps, meeting my needs was “no big deal” (a Dream Street catchphrase) and, perhaps, I could turn to my peers as a source of care.  Today my needs in my work place are entirely met by my co-workers, and while that has been an evolution that took some time, I don’t doubt that having experienced Dream Street before played a major role in that.

Camp Dream Street offers something special to three different populations.  For the young campers, we have the experiences that allow them to grow and develop in a myriad of positive ways.  For the older campers and participants in “Great Expectations” (a special program for teen campers), we teach them both skills and a world view, some of which I had to develop on my own as an adult.  Lastly, for the NFTY-Southern kids, not only do they get incredible insight into their own abilities to be caring, nurturing & capable, as well as into the lives and realities of people with significant disabilities, they also get a level of connection across generations that I think is unparalleled in other regions.  For there are staff members that come back to Dream Street for 10, 15, and in one case 35 years – starting from when they were NFTYites themselves!  From my perspective, this shared experience of service bonds these NFTYalumni to each other, and to place, even more strongly, and those bonds are maintained decades after NFTY itself has ended for them.  It even allowed someone like me, who grew up in another region (NFTY-Northeast) to be embraced and absorbed in his 20s by this wonderful community.

In sum then, what I can say is that by the simple virtue of its program, and the love & connection it engenders in both its campers and its NFTY-Southern participants across the years, in a single week each year Camp Dream Street Mississippi has the potential to play a pivotal role in the development of both Jewish young people (as well as their families & communities), and people with disabilities, from across the South.  And, in my case, also far beyond. . .

Matan Koch is an attorney at Kramer, Levin, Naftalis and Frankel in NYC, a member of the URJ Special Needs Camping Committee, and a 20 year alumnus of both URJ Camp Eisner and NFTY-Northeast. This year marks Matan’s second serving as a mentor at Camp Dream Street Mississippi