 Massad was founded as a day camp in 1941 by the HaNoar Ha'Ivri with thirty campers, and eventually grew to three sleep-away camps in Pennsylvania, Massad Alef, Bet, and Gimmel, collectively known as the Massad Hebrew Camps in the United States () At its peak in the late 1960s, the Massad camps hosted over a thousand campers and staff each summer.In its forty years of existence, the camp strongly influenced both Jewish camping and Hebrew culture in North America.The HaNoar Ha’Ivri movement () was established in 1937 to build a Jewish life in the United States that promoted Zionism and the revival of the Hebrew language.