The Kibbutz Yarok Experiment

This book describes the events surrounding the establishment and build-up of an innovative approach to a Jewish summer sleepaway camp experience. The events described in the book took place during the five summers of 1999-2003. Kibbutz Yarok served as an adjunct to its sponsor Camp Newman, located in the Santa Rosa mountains of northern California. Newman is one of fourteen summer sleepaway camps supported and supervised by the Union for Reform Judaism. The kibbutz was an experiment in Jewishly inflected outdoor living. It was designed to be a cooperative, eco-friendly enterprise inhabited, built, and managed by teenaged Newman campers who chose to volunteer for the assignment. The author of the book lent his financial support to the venture via annual grants and made periodic on-site visits for the purpose of monitoring progress.