My return to the Catskills, after more than three decades, began on a Shortline bus from New York City. A stormy sky provoked a flashback to a similar trip when I was 5 or 6, as we set out from the Bronx on our annual trek to my grandparents’ bungalow colony in Kauneonga Lake.
The terrifying trip had been punctuated by thunder and lightning ended when we finally reached the refuge of my grandparents’ Catskills Tudor house, with its brightly-lit country kitchen, large black cast-iron stove, pine-panelled living room and big fireplace.
On this trip, I tried to spot Wurtsboro Hill, where cars used to overheat and where we stopped for ice cream at the Red Apple, but the rain was so heavy that I couldn’t see a thing.
The drive made me think of friends from long ago, of far-away places, of travelling somewhere in my grandfather’s car, filled with people and grey with cigar smoke.
Among the pleasant memories were picking blueberries and the Great Cow Roundup, when an adjacent farm’s bovines broke through the baseball field’s fence and wandered among the bungalows. Urban mothers tried to protect their kids from these wild dairy cows, but it was hard to tell who was more frightened. I think it was the cows.
My grandmother’s tall tales of thunder being caused by Henry Hudson’s men bowling in the mountains used to calm me during the spectacular electrical storms of my childhood.
The signs flashed by: 5 miles to Wurtsboro, 17 to Monticello, Town of Thompson. A billboard for the new Bethel Woods Arts Center, built where Max Yasgur’s farm once hosted Woodstock. Who from the old days would have believed that the Boston Pops would be in the Catskills, playing a program of Broadway music as they are this weekend at the new center?
28 August 2006
At the Catskills conference: A tour of faded glory
We went on a three-hour tour of the Catskills on a wet Saturday afternoon, driving past the remains of hotels and bungalow colonies of all sizes that had catered to Jewish vacationers in the golden days.
Today we saw land where only memories remain, the boarded-up windows and empty shells. In other cases, formerly famous resorts have been transformed into Orthodox and Hasidic yeshivot, schools, camps and homes.
Every seat on the bus was filled by those who had spent a large part of their lives here, mostly during summer holidays.
Said one visitor, “It was like seeing Indian ruins.”
We stopped for a tour of the small family-owned Mayflower Hotel, built in the 1920s. It had become the Pentecostal Bethel Sunshine Camp, but was abandoned about a decade ago. It's in surprisingly good exterior shape, but many interiors were not as well-preserved.
“It was a genuinely depressing sight,” said a New Jersey resident who spent many summers in Kauneonga Lake, adding that the county should require that the abandoned empty shells be torn down.
A high point was seeing Hurleyville, whose main street was lined with large, beautifully restored Victorian homes and antique shops.
Other towns, like Woodbourne, are lined with shops catering to the religious communities, with branches of businesses from Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, as well as kosher food suppliers.
Today we saw land where only memories remain, the boarded-up windows and empty shells. In other cases, formerly famous resorts have been transformed into Orthodox and Hasidic yeshivot, schools, camps and homes.
Every seat on the bus was filled by those who had spent a large part of their lives here, mostly during summer holidays.
Said one visitor, “It was like seeing Indian ruins.”
We stopped for a tour of the small family-owned Mayflower Hotel, built in the 1920s. It had become the Pentecostal Bethel Sunshine Camp, but was abandoned about a decade ago. It's in surprisingly good exterior shape, but many interiors were not as well-preserved.
“It was a genuinely depressing sight,” said a New Jersey resident who spent many summers in Kauneonga Lake, adding that the county should require that the abandoned empty shells be torn down.
A high point was seeing Hurleyville, whose main street was lined with large, beautifully restored Victorian homes and antique shops.
Other towns, like Woodbourne, are lined with shops catering to the religious communities, with branches of businesses from Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, as well as kosher food suppliers.
At the Catskills conference: Places to stay, places to pray
Preserving the Jewish legacy of the Catskills is a "holy" task for Phil Brown and others who spent many of their formative years there.
Brown showed images of the gateposts of the Catskills’ defunct, demolished hotels and bungalow colonies, comparing them to the Jewish admonition to write words of remembrance on the doorposts of our homes. In a reference to Dvarim, he added that it was only after 40 years of wandering in the desert that we were once again to have doorposts and gates.
But despite the years of decline, l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation), Jews are still in the Catskills.
In the old days in little towns across Sullivan County, synagogues took root – some simple, some truly elegant.
Jewish farmers arrived in the 1890s, but synagogues were few and far between, so groups of farmers jointly hired teachers for their children. The teacher lived with each family for a month in turn. Families traveled long distances for kosher food, and could barely gather a minyan for the Holidays. HIAS also sent teachers.
Some families kept Torah scrolls in their homes for as long as 10 years, and welcomed tiny congregations into their houses until permanent structures could be built, and itinerant rabbis led services.
Mountaindale’s shul was built in 1919, South Fallsburg in 1920 and the elegant Livingston Manor congregation in 1924. Brown showed slides of the Ellenville congregation, of the Liberty Street shul in Monticello, and of Beth El in Kauneonga Lake. Few knew that the last was named Beth El because Kauneonga is in the town of Bethel.
Some 11 of these synagogues are on the National Register of Historic Sites, and details include large stained-glass windows, fan windows, and so-called Mission-style architectural elements which, says Brown, were really taken from details of Polish wooden synagogues.
Into the 1950s, some congregations kept their minutes in Yiddish, while larger hotels published their own prayerbooks and had their own wine labels on Shabbat bottles. Some had dedicated rooms for synagogues, while others held services in card rooms.
Commenting on the increasing trend of ultra-Orthodox and Hasidim coming to the Catskills, Brown said that because these groups have large families, long-distance travel is often impractical. They also require organized communities for ritual observance and learning, as well as large housing units.
In some ways, says Brown, these new groups resemble the original Jewish settlers in 1890 and later vacationers in the 1940s-1950. They are observant and are building communities. The downside is that these major religious communities are exempt from taxes and, according to conference attendees, Sullivan County residents now have increasing taxes to pay for county services.
A new development drawing people to the Catskills is the magnificent new Bethel Arts Center on the Yasgur Farm/Woodstock site. On Saturday night, the Boston Pops performed to an audience of 12,000.
Brown showed images of the gateposts of the Catskills’ defunct, demolished hotels and bungalow colonies, comparing them to the Jewish admonition to write words of remembrance on the doorposts of our homes. In a reference to Dvarim, he added that it was only after 40 years of wandering in the desert that we were once again to have doorposts and gates.
But despite the years of decline, l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation), Jews are still in the Catskills.
In the old days in little towns across Sullivan County, synagogues took root – some simple, some truly elegant.
Jewish farmers arrived in the 1890s, but synagogues were few and far between, so groups of farmers jointly hired teachers for their children. The teacher lived with each family for a month in turn. Families traveled long distances for kosher food, and could barely gather a minyan for the Holidays. HIAS also sent teachers.
Some families kept Torah scrolls in their homes for as long as 10 years, and welcomed tiny congregations into their houses until permanent structures could be built, and itinerant rabbis led services.
Mountaindale’s shul was built in 1919, South Fallsburg in 1920 and the elegant Livingston Manor congregation in 1924. Brown showed slides of the Ellenville congregation, of the Liberty Street shul in Monticello, and of Beth El in Kauneonga Lake. Few knew that the last was named Beth El because Kauneonga is in the town of Bethel.
Some 11 of these synagogues are on the National Register of Historic Sites, and details include large stained-glass windows, fan windows, and so-called Mission-style architectural elements which, says Brown, were really taken from details of Polish wooden synagogues.
Into the 1950s, some congregations kept their minutes in Yiddish, while larger hotels published their own prayerbooks and had their own wine labels on Shabbat bottles. Some had dedicated rooms for synagogues, while others held services in card rooms.
Commenting on the increasing trend of ultra-Orthodox and Hasidim coming to the Catskills, Brown said that because these groups have large families, long-distance travel is often impractical. They also require organized communities for ritual observance and learning, as well as large housing units.
In some ways, says Brown, these new groups resemble the original Jewish settlers in 1890 and later vacationers in the 1940s-1950. They are observant and are building communities. The downside is that these major religious communities are exempt from taxes and, according to conference attendees, Sullivan County residents now have increasing taxes to pay for county services.
A new development drawing people to the Catskills is the magnificent new Bethel Arts Center on the Yasgur Farm/Woodstock site. On Saturday night, the Boston Pops performed to an audience of 12,000.
At the Catskills conference: What killed the Catskills?
Phil Brown of the Catskills Institute says that he’s been able to identify some 800 bungalow colonies and more than 1,000 hotels that operated in the area.
Among the attendees this weekend were a group of guys who have been friends since 1955 when they began spending summers in White Lake and Kauneonga Lake and have kept in close touch. Other conference-goers remarked on the way they keep renewing connections they made so long ago.
What killed the Catskills, as we knew it?
Novelist Eileen Pollack, whose parents ran Pollack’s Hotel in Liberty (where she was born), says she has spent 50 years trying to get away, but she is continually drawn to the area and her writing is born of that experience.
Pollack refers to the three A's that did in the Catskills: air conditioning, air travel and assimilation.
You didn’t have to leave the steaming city for the countryside once it became bearable to stay home.
Upward mobility meant more families could afford air travel, even to their ancestral homes in Europe.
Assimilation meant that modern Jewish families didn’t feel the need to spend an entire summer with those of the same background. They could go anywhere for vacations, and they did.
But we were back there this weekend, reminiscing with old friends and new, hearing from pioneers, authors and scholars.
Among the attendees this weekend were a group of guys who have been friends since 1955 when they began spending summers in White Lake and Kauneonga Lake and have kept in close touch. Other conference-goers remarked on the way they keep renewing connections they made so long ago.
What killed the Catskills, as we knew it?
Novelist Eileen Pollack, whose parents ran Pollack’s Hotel in Liberty (where she was born), says she has spent 50 years trying to get away, but she is continually drawn to the area and her writing is born of that experience.
Pollack refers to the three A's that did in the Catskills: air conditioning, air travel and assimilation.
You didn’t have to leave the steaming city for the countryside once it became bearable to stay home.
Upward mobility meant more families could afford air travel, even to their ancestral homes in Europe.
Assimilation meant that modern Jewish families didn’t feel the need to spend an entire summer with those of the same background. They could go anywhere for vacations, and they did.
But we were back there this weekend, reminiscing with old friends and new, hearing from pioneers, authors and scholars.
26 August 2006
At the Catskills conference: Back to the Borsht Belt
And so they came to Kutsher’s for the 12th Catskills Institute Conference.
From Honolulu, Bob and Harriet Hoffman; from Jacksonville, Florida, Ron and Susan Elinoff; Hal Bookbinder, who lives near Los Angeles, and a crowd of others, all with a Catskills connection.
Hal, past president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, grew up in Ellenville, not far from Monticello, and was here showing the area to his daughter.
The Hoffmans had just attended the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and after hearing Phil Brown’s talk, immediately decided to come for at least a portion of the conference. Earlier in the day, they had successfully tracked down Bob’s great-grandfather in a local well-preserved Jewish cemetery. His family was among early Jewish families in the area.
Although Harriet is from the West Coast, on her first Borsht Belt visit, Bob had spent summers here. At dinner, the couple across the table heard that the Hoffmans lived in from Honolulu, and began a game of Jewish geography. Did she know the wife’s first cousin, an optician? Yes, said Harriet, who is in the eyewear business, very well. The Long Island couple wrote out contact information and Harriet promised to call their cousin.
Ron and I seem to know a lot of the same people from the old days. While saving money for dental school, Ron used to work for Mendelson’s butcher in Kauneonga Lake, where my grandmother bought her kosher meat. Several familiar names will be spending Saturday at the conference and I’m looking forward to seeing them again.
"By the way," said Ron at dinner, "my first cousin is an avid genealogist in New York." His cousin is Mike Levine of the Jewish Genealogical Society (NY), which hosted the recent conference, and whom I’ve known for several years.
Catskills Institute founder Phil Brown offered a slide show of the Borsht Belt in its heyday, including postcards of area resorts by artist Alfred Landes.
A talk by Joan Micklin Silver on the making of her film Hester Street was followed by a screening. The production’s bottom line can be viewed as “be careful what you wish for.”
It portrays an Americanized Russian immigrant in 1896 on the Lower East Side, and the arrival of his old-country wife and son. Jake wants a modern New World wife, not one from the shtetl. But Gitl eventually becomes much more acculturated than Jake really wants.
From Honolulu, Bob and Harriet Hoffman; from Jacksonville, Florida, Ron and Susan Elinoff; Hal Bookbinder, who lives near Los Angeles, and a crowd of others, all with a Catskills connection.
Hal, past president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, grew up in Ellenville, not far from Monticello, and was here showing the area to his daughter.
The Hoffmans had just attended the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and after hearing Phil Brown’s talk, immediately decided to come for at least a portion of the conference. Earlier in the day, they had successfully tracked down Bob’s great-grandfather in a local well-preserved Jewish cemetery. His family was among early Jewish families in the area.
Although Harriet is from the West Coast, on her first Borsht Belt visit, Bob had spent summers here. At dinner, the couple across the table heard that the Hoffmans lived in from Honolulu, and began a game of Jewish geography. Did she know the wife’s first cousin, an optician? Yes, said Harriet, who is in the eyewear business, very well. The Long Island couple wrote out contact information and Harriet promised to call their cousin.
Ron and I seem to know a lot of the same people from the old days. While saving money for dental school, Ron used to work for Mendelson’s butcher in Kauneonga Lake, where my grandmother bought her kosher meat. Several familiar names will be spending Saturday at the conference and I’m looking forward to seeing them again.
"By the way," said Ron at dinner, "my first cousin is an avid genealogist in New York." His cousin is Mike Levine of the Jewish Genealogical Society (NY), which hosted the recent conference, and whom I’ve known for several years.
Catskills Institute founder Phil Brown offered a slide show of the Borsht Belt in its heyday, including postcards of area resorts by artist Alfred Landes.
A talk by Joan Micklin Silver on the making of her film Hester Street was followed by a screening. The production’s bottom line can be viewed as “be careful what you wish for.”
It portrays an Americanized Russian immigrant in 1896 on the Lower East Side, and the arrival of his old-country wife and son. Jake wants a modern New World wife, not one from the shtetl. But Gitl eventually becomes much more acculturated than Jake really wants.
At the ICJG: Power of the Net
At ICJG, JewishGen, www.jewishgen.org, the world’s largest Jewish genealogy website, presented some impressive statistics about their growth, and by extension the growth of online Jewish genealogical research.
* Some 205,000 registered users from 179 countries are joined by 5,000 new people every month, with 50% from outside the United States. Many subscribe to the general discussion group or one of 30 specialized groups, such as Belarus, Sephardic or rabbinical research.
* In 2005, more than 78,000 researchers performed 8.3 million searches in JewishGen’s databases. The JewishGen Family Finder holds about 400,000 entries.
* The site's Family Tree of the Jewish People has 3.5 million records submitted by 3,000 researchers.
* The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry has 600,000 records from 1,450 cemeteries, including more than 36,000 images of gravestones.
A new feature, unveiled at the conference, provides satellite images and maps. I accessed Mogilev, Belarus and by using the arrows, was able to locate my ancestral shtetl of Vorotinschtina, southwest of the city.
Volunteers are always needed in areas of data entry, quality control, project coordination and technical support. If you’d like to help, check www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen/Volunteer.html.
* Some 205,000 registered users from 179 countries are joined by 5,000 new people every month, with 50% from outside the United States. Many subscribe to the general discussion group or one of 30 specialized groups, such as Belarus, Sephardic or rabbinical research.
* In 2005, more than 78,000 researchers performed 8.3 million searches in JewishGen’s databases. The JewishGen Family Finder holds about 400,000 entries.
* The site's Family Tree of the Jewish People has 3.5 million records submitted by 3,000 researchers.
* The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry has 600,000 records from 1,450 cemeteries, including more than 36,000 images of gravestones.
A new feature, unveiled at the conference, provides satellite images and maps. I accessed Mogilev, Belarus and by using the arrows, was able to locate my ancestral shtetl of Vorotinschtina, southwest of the city.
Volunteers are always needed in areas of data entry, quality control, project coordination and technical support. If you’d like to help, check www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen/Volunteer.html.
Was Zayde a Mormon? The controversy over posthumous baptisms
In 1995, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are known as LDS or Mormons, signed an agreement with the heads of many Jewish organizations, in which the church agreed to stop posthumous baptism of Jews, particularly of Holocaust victims, and remove the names of “inappropriately entered” individuals.
Since then, ongoing meetings have done little to address the practice except to provide a way to remove the names of those “inappropriately” entered into their International Genealogical Index. The IGI has a public section, available to all, and a private section, which holds the details of church rites performed on an individual. The private section is only accessible with a church-supplied password for its members.
To see if your Jewish ancestors have been entered in the IGI, go to www.familysearch.org, and do a search for results in the IGI, not the Social Security Death Index database.
This volatile issue and its continued practice, despite the signed agreement, is taken very seriously by many Jewish family history researchers. While some say they don’t care what non-Jewish rites are performed on Jews after death because it won’t change anything, many others feel that subjecting those who lived and died as Jews (and were murdered because they were) to baptism is a repugnant, insulting act.
A third group believes the process creates fraudulent records. They fear the possibility of future generations researching their families and seeing grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and ancestors of long ago listed in the IGI. Descendants will think that Zayde (grandfather in Yiddish) was a Mormon, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Researcher Helen Radkey has proven over the years that thousands of Holocaust victims and others who were buried in Jewish cemeteries or listed in Jewish organization records have been similarly baptized after the signing of the 1995 agreement which was to have ended the practice.
Additionally, Radkey discovered that the lack of quality control on data entry by church members has resulted in the strange phenomena of cartoon character Mickey Mouse and even the Easter Island stone statues being accorded church rites.
Genealogist Gary Mokotoff has attended all the Salt Lake City meetings between Mormon and Jewish representatives. He provided a brief report of the most recent meeting to the Jewish genealogical society delegates at the recently concluded International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, which offered some hope that an entry pre-screening process would be instituted.
A detailed report of the latest meeting appears in Mokotoff's Nu? What's New bi-weekly newsletter.
To read about the London Beth Din and how those Jewish records ended up in the IGI, go to www.avotaynu.com/nu/V07N12.htm. For the detailed report of the latest meeting, see www.avotaynu.com/nuwhatsnew.htm. For more on the controversy and the 1995 agreement, www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/ldsagree.html
Since then, ongoing meetings have done little to address the practice except to provide a way to remove the names of those “inappropriately” entered into their International Genealogical Index. The IGI has a public section, available to all, and a private section, which holds the details of church rites performed on an individual. The private section is only accessible with a church-supplied password for its members.
To see if your Jewish ancestors have been entered in the IGI, go to www.familysearch.org, and do a search for results in the IGI, not the Social Security Death Index database.
This volatile issue and its continued practice, despite the signed agreement, is taken very seriously by many Jewish family history researchers. While some say they don’t care what non-Jewish rites are performed on Jews after death because it won’t change anything, many others feel that subjecting those who lived and died as Jews (and were murdered because they were) to baptism is a repugnant, insulting act.
A third group believes the process creates fraudulent records. They fear the possibility of future generations researching their families and seeing grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and ancestors of long ago listed in the IGI. Descendants will think that Zayde (grandfather in Yiddish) was a Mormon, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Researcher Helen Radkey has proven over the years that thousands of Holocaust victims and others who were buried in Jewish cemeteries or listed in Jewish organization records have been similarly baptized after the signing of the 1995 agreement which was to have ended the practice.
Additionally, Radkey discovered that the lack of quality control on data entry by church members has resulted in the strange phenomena of cartoon character Mickey Mouse and even the Easter Island stone statues being accorded church rites.
Genealogist Gary Mokotoff has attended all the Salt Lake City meetings between Mormon and Jewish representatives. He provided a brief report of the most recent meeting to the Jewish genealogical society delegates at the recently concluded International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, which offered some hope that an entry pre-screening process would be instituted.
A detailed report of the latest meeting appears in Mokotoff's Nu? What's New bi-weekly newsletter.
To read about the London Beth Din and how those Jewish records ended up in the IGI, go to www.avotaynu.com/nu/V07N12.htm. For the detailed report of the latest meeting, see www.avotaynu.com/nuwhatsnew.htm. For more on the controversy and the 1995 agreement, www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/ldsagree.html
22 August 2006
At the ICJG: It's all Greek
For 2,000 years, Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews have lived in Ioannina in the Pindos Mountains foothills of northwest Greece.
At the ICJG, Marcia Haddad-Ikonomopoulos shared her years of research into naming patterns in this community (also spelled Yannina or Janina). As museum director of Kehila Kedosha Janina (Holy Congregation of Ioannina) on New York City’s Lower East Side, and president of the Association of Friends of Greek Jewry, she is well-versed in its history and traditions.
When young Yanniote men began immigrating to New York, they founded the still-active congregation in 1927, and maintained a relationship with their ancestral town.
The museum has a large collection of the Yanniote tradition of Alephs, unique hand-painted birth certificates hung over each baby boy’s crib for 40 days. Importantly for researchers, each includes the names of baby, father and grandfather.
In a common Romaniote pattern, the father's name is passed down to the next generation. For example, if Solomon has children, each son’s first son and each daughter’s second son would be named Solomon. Many surnames are of Hebrew or Biblical origin with Greek suffixes, such as Bechoropolous (the son of a first-born son).
During the Holocaust, 1,960 Yanniotes were deported, of which 1,850 perished.
In 2003, the New York synagogue obtained Greek archival material, including a list of those who died; their names are inscribed in stone on Ioannina’s synagogue walls. The book In Memory of the Jewish Community of Ioannina, which is available at the museum, lists surnames, family nicknames, given names, ages, occupations and maiden names, if known. A survivors’ list is included.
For information about the synagogue and museum, call 212-431-1619, or go to www.kkjsm.org. Click on “Archives” for Haddad-Ikonomopoulos’ detailed conference presentation.
At the ICJG, Marcia Haddad-Ikonomopoulos shared her years of research into naming patterns in this community (also spelled Yannina or Janina). As museum director of Kehila Kedosha Janina (Holy Congregation of Ioannina) on New York City’s Lower East Side, and president of the Association of Friends of Greek Jewry, she is well-versed in its history and traditions.
When young Yanniote men began immigrating to New York, they founded the still-active congregation in 1927, and maintained a relationship with their ancestral town.
The museum has a large collection of the Yanniote tradition of Alephs, unique hand-painted birth certificates hung over each baby boy’s crib for 40 days. Importantly for researchers, each includes the names of baby, father and grandfather.
In a common Romaniote pattern, the father's name is passed down to the next generation. For example, if Solomon has children, each son’s first son and each daughter’s second son would be named Solomon. Many surnames are of Hebrew or Biblical origin with Greek suffixes, such as Bechoropolous (the son of a first-born son).
During the Holocaust, 1,960 Yanniotes were deported, of which 1,850 perished.
In 2003, the New York synagogue obtained Greek archival material, including a list of those who died; their names are inscribed in stone on Ioannina’s synagogue walls. The book In Memory of the Jewish Community of Ioannina, which is available at the museum, lists surnames, family nicknames, given names, ages, occupations and maiden names, if known. A survivors’ list is included.
For information about the synagogue and museum, call 212-431-1619, or go to www.kkjsm.org. Click on “Archives” for Haddad-Ikonomopoulos’ detailed conference presentation.
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