A progressive private K-8 school in the San Francisco Bay Area has ended its relationship with a Jewish summer camp after some families raised concerns about the camp’s ties to Israel, according to The Jewish News of Northern California.
Prospect Sierra School, an independent school in El Cerrito, Calif., with about 470 students, told families in January that it had cut ties with Camp Tawonga, a nonprofit Jewish camp founded in 1925 and located in the Stanislaus National Forest near Yosemite National Park. The school had sent seventh- and eighth-grade students on several four-day trips to the camp beginning in May 2023.
Camp Tawonga employs Israeli “shlichim,” or emissaries, as summer counselors. In 2024, the camp declined to issue a public statement on Israel’s war against Hamas, despite some community pressure to call for a ceasefire, the report said.
After receiving complaints from some families, Nisa Frank, head of school at Prospect Sierra, wrote in an email to parents that the relationship with the camp ended due to its negative impact on students’ “identity safety.” She added that the school recognizes that “the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis in Israel and Gaza weigh heavily on many members of our community,” according to the outlet.
According to the report, Jewish families within the school have been at odds with senior administrators since the announcement, saying the decision was “not consistent with the school’s policies and values and may even have been antisemitic.”
Frank, who declined the J’s request for comment, sent a secondary school-wide email stating that “we want to be clear that discrimination towards Jewish people has no place in our community.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area stated that it “strongly opposes” the school’s decision to cut ties with the camp and that “following community pushback, Prospect Sierra engaged JCRC to lead a workshop for its administration and board on Jewish cultural literacy and antisemitism.”
“JCRC has since remained actively engaged with the Prospect Sierra community, elevating concerns from Jewish families who felt marginalized and urging school leadership to address the impact and reassess its policies around identity, inclusion and antisemitism,” the Jewish group stated.
