Guitar-strumming Camp Tawonga leader dies at 69
Like summer camps everywhere, Camp Tawonga has its rituals, the most familiar being director Ken Kramarz wandering through the cabins strumming his Martin guitar and singing as campers trickle out to follow him to the dining hall.
The “Shabat Stroll” is what they call this procession of 350 at the longstanding Jewish camp near Yosemite. Kramarz invented it and led it for 40 years and 40,000 campers — but he will be absent for Tawonda’s 97th season, which began Sunday.
Kramarz died of prostate cancer May 28 at his longtime home in the Murray Park neighborhood of Larkspur. He was 69 and still singing songs from the Tawonga and Beatles songbooks on his front steps, often joined by neighbors passing by.
“During his last few months, people from the Tawonga community would come by to sing with him,” said his wife, Felicia Kramarz. “The music would make him forget about his pain and be in the moment, which he always strived for.”
Kramarz (pronounced Kraymars) was not a Tawonga alum. He had never been there until he was a bankruptcy lawyer in Los Angeles, and expressed some discontent to an old friend who was running the camp. She invited him to take a break from his career by working at Tawonga — and the break became the career.
“He left law and came to work at the camp because that is where his soul directed him,” said Josh Weinberg, a former Tawonga board member.
Camp Tawonga started in 1925 as a Lake Tahoe summer camp for Jewish boys from San Francisco. In 1964, the camp moved to 160 acres it purchased on the middle fork of the Tuolumne River, in Groveland, and became coed.
Kramarz’s tenure as executive director spanned from 1984 until 2016. During that time, Tawonga expanded from a summer camp to a year-round nonprofit with a $10 million budget, a full-time staff of 25 in headquarters near the Embarcadero, and a “Down the Mountain” schedule of programs and services.
Though geared toward the values of Judaism, it is welcoming to campers of all faiths. Gov. Gavin Newsom is a “Tawongan,” as campers call themselves.
Tawonga has the usual camp stuff, canoeing, swimming in the Tuolumne, arts and crafts, overnight backpacking and opportunities to get poison oak. But there is also a moral underpinning, expounded in a 50-page staff manual written by Kramarz. It centers on the Canon of Ethics, which Kramarz wrote and all staffers must memorize and abide by, and integrate into camp activities.
“He had so many mantras he would teach us,” said Jamie Simon, who took over as executive director when Kramarz stepped down in 2016 to become a consultant and special project director. “Ken gave us all a common language and ideals to live up to. He was very inspiring.”
Perhaps his greatest inspiration was the “Peacemakers Weekends” when he brought Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs and American Jews together for a series of annual meetings in Groveland from 2003-2007. He also lobbied the state to save national forest land surrounding the camp from being clear-cut during the Reagan presidency.
“Ken really wanted to build community at camp, not some Club Med type of experience, with kids going off to do individual activities,” said former Tawonga Board President Steve Gershik. “He was one of the first in camping, let alone Jewish camping, that told staff that they were professionals, that it wasn’t just babysitting and playing with kids.”
Kenneth Alan Kramarz was born Oct. 28, 1952, in Los Angeles, and grew up in Van Nuys, deep in the San Fernando Valley smog belt. To escape it, he was sent every summer to Camp JCA, in the San Bernardino mountains. After many years as a camper, he was being trained as a counselor in 1969 when he met Judy Edelson, who was on the staff.
“This was during the Vietnam War and the civil rights era,” said Edelson. “That camp was the first sense we got outside of ourselves of making the world a better place.”
After graduating from Grant High School in 1970, Kramarz attended UCLA, where he majored in political science. From there he advanced directly to the law school at UCLA, where he built a side business offering an on-campus summer program for Japanese exchange students, whom he’d house in sororities.
The program became so successful that UCLA sued him for impinging on its own summer exchange program. Though he was still a law student, Kramarz represented himself and was victorious. Not only was the program allowed to continue, but he also received course credit for his trial experience. On top of that, the money he made on the program later made the down payment on his home in Larkspur.
Kramarz graduated from UCLA law in 1978, passed the bar exam and was hired at the top bankruptcy firm of Gendel, Raskoff, Shapiro & Quittner. His old Camp JCA friend Edelson, meanwhile, became executive director of Camp Tawonga and invited him up in the summer of 1981.
After that he quit his law firm — and L.A. — and moved to San Francisco, where he did some contract legal work and found an in-law unit in Presidio Heights. It lacked a kitchen, but that did not matter too much, because half his time was spent at the camp, where Edelson named him assistant director.
“He brought the ethics and values that we learned at Camp JCA to Camp Tawonga and really made the place his own,” said Edelson. “It wasn’t just the kids that were impacted. He had a profound effect on the staff, too, who were college students. He brought out the best in people.”
One of those people was Felicia Bendit, a New Yorker who got a summer job at the camp. When she arrived in San Francisco, Kramarz offered to give her a Bay Area tour. It started at 10 a.m. and did not end until after 2 a.m., when they were eating burgers at Clown Alley on Lombard Street.
At camp, their staff cabins were conveniently adjacent, and they were married before camp rolled around again the following summer.
In 1984, Kramarz succeeded Edelson as executive director when she took another job. He was lured away once, to work for Hillel, the college Jewish organization, but Tawonga lured him back. Even when he finally retired, in 2016, he became special projects director, coordinating building projects at the camp.
He also served as a volunteer life coach, using the training methods he’d developed at Tawonga to help people achieve their goals. His office was the back deck of a 1972 fishing trawler he kept docked among the houseboats in Sausalito.
“Ken was not the kind of person who liked leisure,” said his wife. “He always wanted to have a purpose, and that was to inspire people to be their better selves.”
His last trip to Camp Tawonga was to celebrate his 68th birthday, Oct. 28, 2020. It was off-season, but 20 or 30 full time staffers gathered for a “birthday schtick,” another 40-year Kramarz tradition. Like all campers, he was asked make a wish for a himself and a second wish for the whole world, and blow out the candles.
“That visit was like every other visit by Ken,” said Simon, who has known him since her own 9th birthday schtick, 30 years ago. “He remained the teacher, the leader and the friend that he had always been to everyone at Tawonga.”
Survivors include his wife of 39 years, Felicia Kramarz of Larkspur; sons Ben Kramarz of Berkeley and Jake Kramarz of Oakland, and daughter Anna Kramarz of Oakland, Tawongans one and all; and a brother, Robert Kramarz of Austin, Texas. Donations can be made to Tawonga Jewish Community Corporation, 131 Steuart St., San Francisco.