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Borscht Belt Blues
Yigal Schleifer, New York
 MELANIE EINZIG |
Driving through the Catskills hamlet of Woodbourne during the winter gives no indication of the buzzing hub of activity that this one-street town, an hour and a half outside Manhattan, becomes during the summer months. With restaurants like "Mazel Wok" and "Yum Yum Glatt Kosher Gourmet," along with a Judaica store, Woodbourne in the summer becomes a mini-Brooklyn, the sidewalks of its short, main drag filled with strolling Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox families from the nearby bungalow colonies and hotels. In winter, though, Woodbourne is a ghost town, its stores boarded up and shut down for the season, the main street eerily devoid of human activity.
For years locals have complained about the annual post-summer exodus of Jewish businesses, which leaves the town looking just plain ugly and them feeling somewhat seduced and abandoned, as if after Labor Day Woodbourne no longer existed. Last summer, sensing a business opportunity, Yossi Solomon - the enterprising 27-year-old owner of Woodbourne Cholov Yisroel Pizza & Felafel - decided to stay open through the winter. With locals and guards from a nearby prison stopping in, as well as some of the growing number of Jews who come up to the Catskills in winter, Solo-mon, whose family has also run the town's kosher bakery for the last five years, felt he could make a go of it. There was quick support from locals, and a favorable article in the area newspaper further encouraged Solomon, who hung two long strips of small American flags outside his pizzeria to announce that he was still open.
A few weeks past the summer season, when all the Jewish visitors were already gone, Solomon came to work one morning to find something disturbing. A few doors down from his store, on the white-painted plywood board covering up the closed Jewish-owned pharmacy, were a spray-painted swastika and the words "Jews Stay Home." Solomon's first thought was to pack up and leave. "At first I was scared," Solomon, who grew up and still lives in Brooklyn's ultra-Orthodox Williamsburgh neighborhood, recalls in a strong Yiddish accent. "If I'm not welcome here, if I'm just one Jewish store, then it's not so comfortable."
After speaking with local officials, Solomon decided to stay open and, so far, there have been no other incidents. But he is still baffled by why his decision, which brought pizza to town when the nearest slice used to be 20 minutes away, would be greeted in such a way. "I'm not just living there," he says. "I'm there as a service. Why are they doing this? It was a bad welcome."
The welcome was bad, even shocking, but for most locals it probably wasn't surprising. For the last two decades, the Catskills - particularly Sullivan County, where Woodbourne is located - has been undergoing a massive transformation. Once known as the Borscht Belt, famous for its now-closed resort hotels like the Concord and Grossinger's, the county is still very Jewish in the summers, only now with a pronounced Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox flavor. Ultra-Orthodox groups, in particular, have become an increasingly visible presence in the economically struggling county, buying failing Jewish hotels to turn into summer camps and yeshivot and closed-down bungalow colonies for vacationing families.
According to some estimates, close to 100,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews make their way each summer to Sullivan County, which has a full-time population of 70,000. Along the way, though, tensions between local residents and the Orthodox summer visitors have been rising, with locals complaining about everything from how the Orthodox Jews drive to their use of religious exemptions to take properties off the tax rolls. "As the growth [of the Orthodox summer population] continues, so does the tension," says one local elected official.
With summer approaching, county officials are being forced to confront the situation head on with a new campaign aimed at opening up lines of communication between the county's predominantly non-Jewish residents and the Orthodox visitors.
ATOUR THROUGH SULLIVAN County underlines the changes that have taken place. In small towns such as Woodbourne, kosher restaurants and groceries line the tiny main streets. In the bungalow colonies, solid fences have been put up around the swimming pools to ensure the modesty of the swimmers. Meanwhile, along the county's main road, Route 17, a billboard that probably used to advertise who was performing at the Borscht Belt resorts now reminds drivers to buckle up and recite the Tefilat Ha'derekh (the Traveler's Prayer).
"During the heyday of the bungalows, in the 40s, 50s and into the early 60s, it was secular. A lot of bigger bungalow colonies had luncheonettes in their casinos, and they were seldom kosher," says Irwin Richman, an American studies professor at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, and author of "Borscht Belt Memories," a memoir of the time he spent as a child at a colony owned by his parents. "It was a purely secular kind of thing."
By the late 60s, though, the Catskills hotels and bungalow colonies were beginning to fade, as their traditional clientele started going elsewhere for summer vacations. In their place, says Richman, came the Orthodox, whose growing communities in New York were looking for an affordable place to summer and who were able to buy old properties for a song. "[The Orthodox population] just zoomed along in the 70s and 80s and now... you are relatively hard-pressed to find a non-Orthodox bungalow colony," says Richman.
The arrival of these new summer residents, says Richman, presented locals with a challenge. "I think the goyim in the area took a long time to get used to the ordinary, run-of-the-mill Jews, and then these more 'exotic' folks came along," he says.
And, in many ways, locals have not taken well to the ultra-Orthodox visitors. Throughout the county, grumbles can be heard about the effect they have had on the area. "To me, I think the major concern is cleanliness," says Les Kristt, a leading businessman in Monticello. "It has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of the [ultra-Orthodox] communities only come up here for two months and that many of them are not keeping [their properties] as clean or neat as could be," Kristt, who is Jewish, says. "If they lived here full-time, maybe they would be more concerned about keeping it looking neat, having it boarded up better, not having lounge chairs lying around. That's probably the most visible thing happening here."
In the small town of Fosterdale, just outside Monticello, local residents banded together last year when an ultra-Orthodox group was considering buying an old hotel that had gone out of business (they ultimately didn't purchase the property). "We weren't too happy about it," says Howard Murns, a retired truck driver who lives across the street from the hotel in a tidy black-and-white painted trailer home. "Take a look around Sullivan County. They ruin everywhere they go."
"They put nothing back in the community," Murns, dressed in a blue T-shirt and red suspenders and sitting on a wooden deck that looks out at the hotel, adds. "They bring everything with them. They don't pay taxes - first thing they do is make it a religious retreat. Other people now have to pay higher taxes."
THE ISSUE OF PROPERTY TAXES causes a tremendous amount of friction in the county. Under the New York State Constitution, religious organizations are exempt from paying property tax, which has allowed Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox groups to take a number of hotels and bungalow colonies in Sullivan County off the tax rolls, says Michael Pilmenstein, the assessor in the town of Fallsburg, which has 40 percent of its local properties listed as tax-exempt (a figure which includes two prisons as well as a large ashram).
Fallsburg is a major center for Jewish summer visitors and Pilmenstein says the exemptions leave the town struggling. "The bottom line is that economically it's hurting the town, and [the exemptions are] growing. Basically, somebody else has to pay the taxes for those properties to be in existence, and the more they buy, the more they take off the rolls," says Pilmenstein, a Russian Jew who left Moscow 20 years ago. "What do they leave behind? What do they give back to the community? Absolutely zero. That's what I think."
Local business leaders disagree. One Sullivan County builder, for example, estimates that 75 percent of his business comes from the ultra-Orthodox bungalow colonies. "I think all those businesses, except for those that obviously are not going to be frequented by the Orthodox, like restaurants and bars, are taking part in this economically," says Monticello businessman Kristt, whose office-supply company does strong business with the Orthodox summer camps. "Financially it's a windfall for all of us."
If anything, says Lee Bosco, director of communications for Sullivan County, the area owes a certain debt to its Orthodox visitors. "The one community that has not forsaken this area, over the times when the hotels have gone down, which was the big business here, is the ultra-Orthodox community," Bosco says. "They have returned every summer over those years and infused money and life and people into this area."
Although some Orthodox tell of experiencing anti-Semitism while up in the mountains - a "Heil Hitler" shouted out from a passing car, or a car that purposely comes too close to a group of Shabbat walkers - most feel that tensions in Sullivan County are more a clash of cultures than religion. "It's an old problem. It's been around since creation," deadpans Moshe Rosenbaum, a businessman who has run Hakol B'Sefer, the Judaica store in Woodbourne, for 23 years and who owns a number of the other shops in town. "I think if they brought any group of urban people into Sullivan County, there would be trouble. The fact that they're Orthodox Jews doesn't help."
Locals don't really know much about Orthodox practice and that can lead to serious misunderstandings, says ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Meir Frischman, director of the Association of Jewish Camp Operators, which represents some 60 summer camps that operate in Sullivan County. As an example, Frischman tells of a police registration and safety check that unwittingly took place last summer on a Friday afternoon on one of the main roads leading to a number of bungalow colonies, causing an exchange of words between the Jewish drivers and the police. "I don't have a problem with a seat-belt check," Frischman says, "but I don't think a non-Jew will understand that someone will drive on the wrong side of the road and up a ditch just to get to their bungalow colony before Shabbos."
LAST SUMMER STANDS OUT as an example of how tensions between the locals and Orthodox can erupt. It started innocently enough, with a letter of complaint written last July to one local official by another official who also owns a restaurant that borders a large bungalow colony in Monticello that was recently bought by the Satmar Hasidim. It was the Satmars' first summer running the run-down colony, and things apparently got away from them, with garbage and junk piling up at the edge of the colony, near the restaurant. In his letter, restaurant owner Bill Sipos complained about the mess at the colony, further writing: "They [the Hasidim] are not the visitors we need to attract. Once the summer is ended, they board up their colonies and return to wherever and leave an unsightly mess .... I am not certain of the future of Sullivan County, especially with this movement of visitors who care nothing of Sullivan County."
Political opponents of Sipos (he is an elected official in Forestburg, a small town near Monticello) distributed the letter to the local press. And soon the county had a full-fledged controversy on its hands, with charges of anti-Semitism flying as critics and supporters of Sipos lined up against each other. "It was a nasty mess. Nobody wanted that," says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, leader of Temple Sholom, a Reform synagogue down the road from the bungalow colony. (Monticello has a large Jewish population, which includes secular Jews as well.) "The Satmars didn't want it and, of course, the local community didn't want that. The Hasidic community that purchased the place did not do their homework. They merely were unprepared for the amount of work needed to run it."
Speaking at his restaurant, Mr. Willy's, Sipos, a large man with a bearish build and a gentle manner, seems chastened by what happened. "It opened up Pandora's Box and really lit the fireworks," he says. "There were a lot of concerns," adds Sipos, who has owned Mr. Willy's for 33 years. "It was really quite a mess they created as neighbors."
But Sipos wasn't the only one with concerns. Soon after his letter was made pub-lic, county officials started hearing complaints about the way the Orthodox drive, about how they were creating long lines at the supermarket, how they were a traffic hazard by walking along dark country roads in their dark suits. "It was going from bad to worse very quick," says county legislator Jodi Goodman. "The more I thought about it, the more I realized we were sitting on a boiling pot that could have exploded."
Using Sipos's letter as an opening, Goodman, who says she witnessed the effects of intolerance first-hand after her Jewish mother's family disowned her for 20 years after marrying a non-Jew, organ-ized a late-summer meeting between county officials and rabbis to discuss ways of bridging some of the gaps. After a few more meetings - and one being planned for Brooklyn - a task force charged with improving relations between locals and the Orthodox summer visitors has been created. "We realized we had a lot of work that needed to be done," says Goodman, a spunky 45-year-old who also works at the local hospital as coordinator of volunteer services. "When we brought to the table our complaints, such as recycling issues, our driving laws, even our safety laws, which we felt were being violated, a lot of the Hasidic leaders said, 'We don't know your laws. You assume we know them, but we're from the city, we don't know.'" Says Goodman, "We realized that we need to educate, we needed to communicate."
Goodman's task force is creating a toll-free hotline, advertised locally and in Brooklyn, to take complaints or questions regarding the summer visitors or local laws. It has also been in touch with local supermarkets, which have agreed to add more cashiers on Thursdays and Fridays so that checkout lines don't get too long. A Sheriff's Department representative, meanwhile, will visit camps and bungalow colonies to discuss safety rules and regulations. "We're looking to have the communication flow back and forth and I think this 800 number will help increase communication so people can think before it's a problem," says Goodman. "We're looking to ward off as many problems as possible."
The task force meetings have already made an impact. "Already people are talking. Now if another issue comes up, I know who I can talk to," Frischman says. But the Orthodox summer visitors also have a responsibility. "It's a bunch of little things; people from the city come up and don't realize how they affect the local people."
As summer approaches, both sides are saying they don't expect all the problems to be resolved, but by taking small steps toward understanding, maybe some of the larger issues will be. Back in Woodbourne, the Jewish owner of the store defaced with a swastika has taken his own small step, painting over the offensive symbol with a large peace sign - a message that perhaps will make it out to the rest of Sullivan County.
Jewish World
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