Samuel “Skip” Vichness is one happy camping professional. For more than three decades, he has been a fixture at day camps and overnight camps, from Camp Ramah in the Berkshires to a camp in West Orange for developmentally disabled children.

Now he is applying that experience to the eight-year-old Foundation for Jewish Camping as the new president of its board of directors. In this position, Vichness, a longtime New Jerseyan who now lives in Manhattan, replaces FJC founders Robert and Elisa Spungen Bildner of Montclair, who have shifted over to head the organization’s board of trustees.

“We feel we have achieved our vision to establish the foundation as an organization that will continue on its own and accomplish the transformation of Jewish camping,” said Rob Bildner.

“And I don’t think we could have a better next leader than Skip Vichness,” added Elisa Spungen Bildner. “He’s well known in the world of for-profit camping as a pioneering leader, and he served as chairman of the National Ramah Commission, so he’s quite familiar with not-for-profit overnight Jewish camping. And Skip is a dynamic, passionate leader. I can’t imagine anyone having more qualifications.”

Vichness has also been instrumental at the foundation since its inception. He and the Bildners met as fellows of the Wexner Heritage Program, a two-year program designed to educate and train Jewish volunteer leaders. According to the Bildners, he offered “critical input” even before he joined the board two or three years into the organization’s life. He served a one-year term as vice chair before being elected to a three-year term as chair in September.

“I had nothing better to do,” quipped the 59-year-old Vichness, who spends about one day a week working on behalf of the foundation. Actually, he said, he was “honored” when the Bildners approached him to take on the position. Working with FJC “was the logical next step” for him. He said he hopes to bring his skills and “move the cheese” forward.

He sees some serious challenges ahead for Jewish camping, but also believes institutions and philanthropists are beginning to recognize its power in shaping Jewish identity. “People working at Jewish sleep-away camps always have known how strong and defining a product it is,” said Vichness. “But it never received credit from the broader Jewish community. That seems to be changing now.”

Still, he acknowledged, a major issue is attracting Jewish kids to Jewish camps. “Our market penetration is poor,” he said. “There are 60,000 kids in Jewish-sponsored overnight camps. That’s 8 percent of our target population. There’s lots of room for growth.” He reasoned that part of the problem is finances — most Jewish overnight camps cost $1,000 per week. Another challenge is demographics — of 130 Jewish nonprofit camps, perhaps a dozen are west of the Mississippi.

And part of it is the quality of the product. “People have to think the best camping is Jewish camping. That’s a leadership issue,” he said.

Vichness has set a target for growth during his tenure at 80,000 campers. If they reach that number, he said, “I’ll be ecstatic.”

He has already begun tackling this leadership issue with a training program known as the Executive Leadership Institute. A cohort of 19 camping professionals, selected last spring, embarked this fall on an intensive plan to provide management and leadership training.

Jewish overnight camping began about 100 years ago. Today, Surprise Lake Camp, which opened in 1902, is the oldest Jewish overnight camp in the same location, about an hour north of New York City. But it took until 2006 for the convening of the first conference for Jewish camping, held last spring and organized by FJC. Vichness points to the conference as one indication that “something is happening.”

Vichness, who moved to Manhattan seven years ago, raised his family in New Jersey. A Virginia native, he first moved to the Garden State in 1976, settling in Princeton when he began an eight-year stint at New York state’s Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. There he honed camp management skills, from recruitment to finances. “It was about getting the chance to learn how to run a camp without all the risks of ownership.”

Until that experience, he had only worked in private camps: first at Camp Greylock for Boys in Massachusetts and then Pine Forest Camp in Pennsylvania. Ramah, he said, was good to him beyond the professional opportunities it afforded. “I left Ramah with a wife and two children.” He moved with his wife from Princeton to Plainfield, then New Providence, and ultimately they settled in South Orange, where they joined Congregation Beth El and where, he said, most of his friends still belong. He returned to the synagogue in October for a special kiddush honoring a friend’s 75th birthday.

He spent the bulk of his career — the next 20 years — at Harbor Hills Day Camp in Mount Freedom, which he purchased in 1984 with a partner, Ben Applebaum. “He put up the money and I did the work,” said Vichness.

That move, which enabled him to take a small local day camp and transform it into a large and popular facility, also gave him an unusual distinction: He is now one of the few people who has worked in overnight private and Jewish not-for-profit camping as well as a private day camp. He is also the person behind Harbor Haven Day Camp, a camp for developmentally disabled children located on the Eric R. Ross Campus of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange.

The location is no coincidence, since Vichness sent both his children to Schechter and served as president of the board. He got involved at the school through his wife. “I married in. My wife was a macher at Schechter.” He eventually served as president of the school. He also recently served on the board of Masorti Olami, the international body of the Conservative movement, and has served with many secular camping organizations, including as past president of the American Camping Association-New York and past chair of the Tri-State Camping Conference. But his social circle stayed within the Jewish world, in particular at Solomon Schechter and Ramah. “That defined our social circle,” he said. “Particularly Schechter. People with those values were our very close friends.”

He has dropped his other commitments, he said, to focus on the work of the FJC.

Few people know that Skip Vichness started his professional life on a completely different trajectory — he earned a PhD in history and served as a professor before entering the field of camping full-time. Today, his only link with that past seems to be his own role in the history of camping.