A fresh start in Running Springs

On a recent day in the San Bernardino Mountains, hundreds of Jewish children and counselors were running around and having fun on 70 acres of gorgeous wooded campground. They played football, tennis and kickball, swam in a clear, blue pool and climbed a 44-foot rock wall. 

Ten months ago, when the religious Zionist youth group Bnei Akiva of Los Angeles bought this property in Running Springs for $7.1 million, this scene at the newly inaugurated David Oved Retreat Center was nearly unimaginable. As recently as September 2014, the grounds were virtually desolate: Weeds overran the tennis and basketball courts; the large swimming pool next to the site’s majestic lodge was empty and filled with cracks, and a coat of dust covered floors and mattresses. Bnei Akiva had only eight months to restore the campground before its announced launch in summer 2015.

But $2.5 million worth of renovations and repairs later, the site is the new home of Moshava Malibu, which opened in 2013 on the property of the Shalom Institute’s Camp JCA Shalom in Malibu. This summer, about 200 campers will be in Running Springs during any given week — some for two-week sessions, others for four weeks. Most come from Southern California, but there also are some from the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, New York, even Mexico City and Israel.

Bnei Akiva’s newly hired executive director, Menachem Hecht, pointed out some of the Modern Orthodox camp’s new additions during a recent tour. These include about 20 horses, a petting zoo with goats and chicks, a 350-foot zip line and an archery range. Near the pool, which measures 60-by-30 feet, groups of teenage boys were on the adjacent concrete taking lessons from the camp’s lifeguards on CPR, choking, heat stroke and first-aid response. (One of the lifeguards had his kids singing the Bee Gees hit “Stayin’ Alive” as kids practiced basic CPR.)

Inside the main lodge, Rabbi Aaron Bayer, a scholar-in-residence visiting for the summer from Efrat, Israel, was busy studying Jewish texts with a few members of the camp’s beit midrash, which has four men and four women who learn and teach classes primarily centered around Jewish law and the modern State of Israel. They also focus on the stories and lessons of Samuel I, which is about the first Jewish commonwealth. 

Each of Bayer’s students teaches two 40-minute classes every day to the campers. “It’s about engaging campers in creating a vibrant, thoughtful and strong religious Zionist identity,” Bayer said.

Before Shabbat, which Hecht said is the camp’s weekly highlight, all the campers clean their bunks, put on matching white tops with blue bottoms, and come together for a camp-wide Kabbalat Shabbat service, dinner, singing and dancing.

The camp offers a four-week program for campers entering fourth through ninth grade that costs $4,100. A two-week program for campers entering third through fourth grade costs $1,900, and a four-week program for incoming high school sophomores is $4,400. But with various discounts and a scholarship budget of at least $100,000, Bnei Akiva can attract families who can’t afford full price, Hecht said.

“We don’t want to turn anyone away because of financial constraints,” he said.

When summer ends, the site will be used as a community retreat center that schools, synagogues and other groups can rent for things like weekend getaways, conferences and scholars-in-residence events. 

Hecht said more improvements to the site are on the way. He said the camp still plans to build a baseball field and is in the process of getting county permits for its kitchen. (For now, its chefs are using the kitchens at the nearby Snow Valley Mountain Resort to prepare kosher food, which is then driven to the camp.)

The site’s previous owner, Chabad of California, lost the site in 2011 after six years following its default on a loan from Pacific Mercantile Bank. Before Chabad purchased the site, it was owned by CEDU Educational Services, a company that operated boarding schools for troubled teenagers throughout the Western United States. CEDU was accused on multiple occasions of misconduct, neglect and abuse, including at its Running Springs site.

Bnei Akiva’s purchase of the site from Pacific Mercantile Bank last September was hardly a given. Other bidders were competing for the site and Bnei Akiva’s annual budget was only about $500,000 until it decided last summer to launch a $10 million fundraising campaign to purchase the campground.

Hecht said the main challenge for the camp is that it has “grown so quickly” in under a year — from a run-down site in need of millions of dollars in repairs to a modern camp with hundreds of children.

“It’s basically just been a sprint. I’m looking forward to going from startup to established,” Hecht said. “We’ll get there.”