Louis and Emma Blumenthal founded the camp in 1925, though it looked nothing like what it would become. The original operation consisted of two separate programs -- Camp Kelowa for Boys and Singing Trail for Girls -- at Huntington Lake in the High Sierras, about 65 miles northeast of Fresno, at 7,000 feet elevation. The Blumenthals documented their creation in a 1936 film, "A Visit to Camp Kelowa and Singing Trail," now preserved in the Internet Archive. The camps closed during the Second World War, and when they reopened, the Blumenthals eventually sought a new home. In 1963, Camp Tawonga moved to its current 160-acre site on the middle fork of the Tuolumne River, just a few miles west of Yosemite National Park in the Stanislaus National Forest. The location -- near Buck Meadows in Tuolumne County, technically in Groveland, California -- put the camp in one of the most beautiful and fire-prone landscapes in the state.

Today, Camp Tawonga operates as a nonprofit affiliated with the Jewish Community Center Association, with its main office in San Francisco. The facility supports roughly 500 people at a time, with about 2,000 attendees and staff passing through each summer. Most campers come from the San Francisco Bay Area, though families from Los Angeles, other states, and Israel attend as well. The physical camp is deliberately rustic: around 30 cabins lack electricity, running water, or heating. Twenty additional heated cabins serve other guests. A lodge-style dining hall with a kosher kitchen overlooks a lake, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, ropes course, and outdoor amphitheater round out the facilities. The camp's programming has expanded well beyond traditional summer sessions. From 2003 to 2007, Tawonga hosted the Oseh Shalom-Sanea al Salam -- the Palestinian-Jewish Family Peacemakers Camp -- in cooperation with the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue. Camp Keshet, an LGBTQ family weekend, remains one of the only programs of its kind in the country.

The Sierra Nevada does not make it easy to run a summer camp. On July 3, 2013, a tree fell without warning during breakfast, killing Annais Rittenberg, an arts and crafts specialist, and injuring several others as campers were rushed to the girls' side field. Barely a month later, the Rim Fire -- which would burn over 250,000 acres -- swept through the area. After the camp's evacuation and the dramatic Torah rescue, three buildings were destroyed, though the rest of the damage proved repairable. The camp rebuilt. Then in the summer of 2018, just two days into the final session, dangerous air quality from the Ferguson Fire forced another full evacuation. In 2021, counselor Eli Kane drowned off-site while working at the camp. Each crisis tested the community's resilience. Each time, Tawonga reopened.

The Torah scroll rescued from the Rim Fire had survived the Holocaust -- a fact that gave the 2013 rescue an almost unbearable symbolic weight. In 2020, the camp acquired a replacement scroll from the former B'Nai Israel synagogue in Olean, New York, adding another layer of continuity between distant Jewish communities. That same instinct for connection and adaptation runs through Tawonga's recent history. In 2019, the camp became one of the first in the United States to offer all-gender cabins, a decision covered by the New York Times. The camp's cultural footprint extends in unexpected directions too: flashback scenes in the 1988 film "Heathers" show characters wearing Camp Tawonga merchandise, and writer Steve Almond documented his experiences there in his 2007 book. A century after Louis and Emma Blumenthal set up their first tents at Huntington Lake, the camp they built continues to evolve -- still rustic, still Jewish, still stubbornly present in a landscape that keeps trying to burn it down.