There has been a serious uptick in coronavirus infections in several areas of the New York City metropolitan area and the Binghamton area. Governor Andrew Cuomo called for a virtual meeting this week with Orthodox Jewish religious leaders in those areas including Monroe, Kiryas Joel and Palm Tree (Orange County); Monsey, Spring Valley, Chestnut Ridge and New Square (Rockland County); Rego Park, Jamaica, Flushing and Far Rockaway (Queens); Endwell and Endicott (Broome County); Silver Lake and Great Kills (Staten Island) and in Brooklyn the neighborhoods of Williamsburg, the Ocean Parkway corridor including Midwood, Boro Park, Bensonhurst, Homecrest, Sheepshead Bay, Marine Park. Not on the list seeing a cluster of coronavirus cases are the prominent Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Mill Basin.
At press time it was not clear who the governor was going to be speaking with or exactly when the virtual conference call would happen.
“I’m going to be meeting with religious leaders of the Orthodox community and local officials,” Cuomo said at a Tuesday news conference. “If you look at those clusters and you look at those zip codes, you will see there’s an overlap with large Orthodox Jewish communities. That is a fact. I will be meeting with them to talk about it. This is a public health concern for their community. It’s also a public health concern for surrounding communities. I’ve said from day one, these public health rules apply to every religion.
“These are embers that are starting to catch fire in dry grass. Send all the firefighting equipment and personnel to those embers and stamp out the embers right away. That’s what this data does. Local governments are the first line of defense and they must respond. Competent government must do compliance and enforcement. A cluster today can be community spread tomorrow.”
Cuomo has other fires to put out in the Orthodox Jewish community. Dozens of Jewish camp operators have collectively lost millions of dollars as a result of the governor’s order to close down sleep away camps in New York state this past summer. Many camp operators packed up and retrofitted rental properties in the Poconos of Pennsylvania and the mountains near Bethlehem, NH. Camp ended August 20 and in the intervening weeks the governor’s worst fears did not happen. There were no massive outbreaks of coronavirus.
Before the summer began camp operators lobbied the governor’s office and the state Health Commissioner, Howard Zucker, who is a doctor and a lawyer. After having tense phone conversations with lower level staff, The Jewish Press has learned Jewish camp operators finally got their phone meeting with Zucker. The outcome of the meeting led to hurt feelings and a costly decision for the camp owners.
Some camp operators felt Zucker was thinking more like an attorney than a doctor when he recommended to the governor that the sleep away camps not open. Sources told The Jewish Press the theory goes that when the sleep away camp decision was made it was after a debacle of allowing patients who tested positive for the coronavirus to enter nursing homes even after being hospitalized. The speculation is that state officials were being skittish, needlessly erring on the side of caution, at that time. The camp operators presented state officials with a detailed 18-page Health and Safety Plan dated May 10. The report was reviewed and approved by eight prominent infectious disease doctors from across the country. The plan included maps, charts and diagrams to demonstrate the point of view from the camp operators.
But the legal side won out in the end. After the meetings, the prevalent view from the camp operators was that day camps were safer because in a day camp, if something goes wrong, Zucker could say, they didn’t catch it in the camp. We had all these protocols. They caught it in the bungalow colony. Many camp operators have expressed their disappointment. As they tie in the nursing home debacle to the shutting down of sleep away camps, many feel “Zucker should lose his job over the nursing home debacle because he killed thousands of people and everybody knows that,” according to camp officials who wished to remain anonymous. Many camp operators did not want to come across being too negative or attacking the governor openly.
One camp official who went on the record, Rabbi Shlomo Pfeiffer, the director of Monticello-based Camp Romimu, told The Jewish Press, “I think what it was, is that he (Zucker) messed up very badly with the nursing homes and unfortunately thousands of elderly died because of a bad decision. Governor Cuomo and Dr. Zucker really had black eyes with this nursing home situation.”
“The Department of Health did not honestly engage. It is one thing to disagree but I don’t believe we were engaged.” Rabbi Hanoch Hecht, administrative director of the Ulster County-based Camp Emunah, told The Jewish Press. “He (Dr. Zucker) wasn’t looking at the perspective of science. We have our reputations at stake. The most important thing is to make sure the kids are healthy and safe. Our goals are aligned. They should have engaged with us and came up with a plan that was acceptable to everybody. Forget about the loss to the camps. Forget about all that business. From the perspective of the county the loss of the tax money that comes in from gasoline and sales taxes to the trips to the local businesses that are all effected by this.”
At a cost of $1.2 million to retrofit and a loss of income to keep the immersive sleep away experience intact, the operators of Camp Emunah packed their bags from New York and set up camp in Green Lane, Penn., a small community in the Poconos with a year-round population of approximately 500 residents. Camp Emunah averages 400 staff and 800 campers across all three of their camps in the town of Wawarsing on a campus of 250 acres each summer. This year the numbers paled in comparison with only 250 staff members and 600 campers in the Poconos.
“We did meet our expectations,” Hecht said. “We had zero cases (of coronavirus). We’re still in the hole. We’re still raising money. It will take us years to recover. I hope we don’t have to raise the cost for campers but if we have to, maybe. The community has to stick together.”
Camp owners attribute the decline to a loss of campers from other states such as California, Florida and Maryland, as well as other countries such as Israel and Belgium. The venerable Camp Agudah was another facility that moved their sleep away camp to the mountains of New Hampshire. Some sleep away camp operators did not pack their bags and instead turned their facilities into day camps, which was allowed by the governor’s executive order.
“They’re not at risk. The hospitalization rate was 0.2 percent at that time for youth up to the age of 25. It was more than an overabundance of caution, it was misguided,” Pfeiffer insisted. “The decision was not based on what he constantly said was go with the data. Let’s go with the science. He did not go with the data or the science. We had eight top nationally recognized infectious disease doctors who signed onto our protocols and they were not taken seriously. Very prestigious doctors signed onto our protocols and actually the camps in Pennsylvania and other states used them.”
As a sleep away camp, Camp Romimu accepts approximately 650 campers who enjoy extensive sports facilities, davening in shuls, different dining rooms for different programs and age groups. As a day camp, the facility entertained approximately 160 campers with approximately 100 to 150 staff.
“We never proposed social distancing in camp,” Pfeiffer admits. “We feel that the CDC and the American Campers Association completely missed the boat. I wouldn’t open up a camp with social distancing. You can’t play basketball or football. You can’t have a play or singing in the dining room. What could you really do?”
As for his loss of income, Pfeiffer said he was hit from two sides.
“I had two problems. I had a tremendous loss of income and we put a lot, a lot of capital improvements into the camp this year so it was a double whammy. We also returned every penny to the parents who weren’t able to send their kids because of the law. We refunded everybody. We took a bath financially but we opened up for the kids. I don’t want to say how much we lost,” Pfeiffer said.
Cuomo was not available to comment for this story but during a telephone news conference on August 31, Cuomo told The Jewish Press, “We do have the quarantine in place depending on where the camp was so it will be the same rules.”
Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, added, “It will be 14 days of quarantine when the campers return home. The majority of the northeast do not have sleep away camps so we don’t anticipate this (infectious spread) being a significant issue.”
Meanwhile, reportedly a close friend of Cuomo, Sol Werdiger, CEO of Outerstuff, a sports apparel business and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Agudath Israel of America, told Jewish camp owners and members of the Cuomo administration that because of this move “the governor is losing the support of the Orthodox Jewish camps owners.” Werdiger was not available to verify the comment.
