Devastating fire at Camp Ramah

Monday, Aug. 7 at 2 a.m., as campers slept blissfully, an electrical fire rapidly engulfed the kitchen, dining hall, administrative offices and a Torah scroll at Camp Ramah in the Rockies near Deckers. A staff member in the area smelled smoke, alerted fellow staffers via walkie-talkies and called 911. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and North Fork Fire Department showed up within minutes and extinguished the blaze. “No one was hurt and no other camp facilities were damaged,” Rabbi Mitch Cohen, National Ramah Commission director, told the Intermountain Jewish News Tuesday. Serendipitously, Camp Ramah conducted a practice fire drill one day before the incident. “Everyone followed protocol to the T,” says Cohen, who hopped the first available plane from New York and arrived in Denver […]