Who Says You Can’t Go Back to Camp Again?

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We all know that camp friends are the best friends.  The Washington Jewish Week recently interviewed a group of OSRUI alums who brought their camp community to DC after college.

In 2010, Xani Pollakoff and Josh Feldman were counselors at Olin Sang Ruby Institute, a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin.

It was Feldman’s first and only summer there. But Olin Sang Ruby had been a big part of Pollakoff’s life. She started attending at the age of 10, and by the time she and Feldman were counselors, she met many of her closest friends.

In 2015, after moving from the Midwest to Washington, Pollakoff (her first name is pronounced Zah-nee) and Feldman were married.

Last month, the couple, both 30, hosted a Shabbat dinner in their apartment in the District’s Michigan Park neighborhood. Their guests were a dozen of their old camp friends.

“This is just a dwindled version of what we once were,” says Pollakoff.

The group sharing a Shabbat meal and talking about old times were part of a migration of 30 camp friends who moved mainly from the Midwest to Washington to be together. Most came between 2010 and 2012, around the time they graduated college.

“We all moved for various reasons, but the biggest reason was to be together,” Pollakoff says. “There’s just this an intentional space that we’ve created. This isn’t random.”

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