In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (59 page)

The next day I cruise into the town of Woodbourne, which turns out to be a three-block stretch of bustling businesses catering to the summer visitors. There is no Glatt Spot or Mendel the Tzitzis Rebinder, but there is a Glatt Gourmet, a Netzach Yisrael Take Home Food Store, and a Woodbourne Cholov Yisroel Pizza and Falafel, right down the street from picket fences and colonial houses. There are also two bookstores, one manned by young yeshiva students from New York and the other displaying posters of prominent rebbes for sale in the window like so many baseball stars.

As families push strollers up and down the main strip, I wander into a grocery store and ask an enormous Satmar who could pass as the lead singer for Canned Heat if he could tell me how many bungalow colonies there are in the area. He waves me off and lumbers over to the frozen food section. “You want to know anything, get a Hatzoloh map from the bookstore, it lists everything,” he says over his shoulder. Hatzoloh, the nonprofit Hasidic emergency service based in Brooklyn, has ambulances all over the Catskills. It operates with volunteers and does not restrict its services to Jewish clients.

The Jewish bookstore itself, besides having a healthy selection of religious texts, also has on display large numbers of memoirs, including one by an Orthodox former U.S. Army lieutenant who helped liberate Buchenwald. One of his wards was the Klausenberger Rebbe, to whom the lieutenant attributes the most moving sermon he’s ever heard.

The rebbe, who lost his wife and all eleven of his children in the war, got up on the pulpit the first Yom Kippur after liberation and listed his sins in the traditional confessional prayer, answering to each of them. We have stolen. But what was there to steal? We have spoken idle words. But we didn’t have the energy to speak, only to listen to the orders of our tormentors. We have coveted. Maybe we coveted the slop thrown to pigs when all we had to eat was watery soup. But in the end, we thank God for giving us life and continue to have faith.

I ask the proprietor of the bookstore if he has a Hatzoloh map, and he produces one. Sure enough, it lists over 500 camps, bungalow colonies, resorts, and retreats, ranging from Karnofsky by the Lake to Chai Manor, from Breezy Acres to Zupnick’s, spread out comfortably over a twenty-mile radius in and around towns like Hurleyville, Ellenville, Mountaindale, Dairyland, Ulster Heights, and Liberty, to name a few. And as if this cultural dissonance weren’t enough, different Hasidic groups that aren’t always the best of friends, like the Belzers and the Satmars, are within close proximity to each other, with the modern Orthodox and non-Orthodox European Jews thrown into the mix. Then there are the locals, whose own religious affiliations and ethnic origins span a broad spectrum in their own right. Just outside Woodbourne, for example, is Camp Emunah for Girls and Camp Shearith Hapletah for boys. Not far away, the Woodbourne Reformed Church, established 1802, stoically surveys the whole scene.

Even though Woodbourne is a small town, the influx of Hasidim has given it a congested urban feel. Windows of the Jewish establishments have inimitably Brooklynesque notices clinging to them: “Lice bugging you? We check hair and clean heads for camps, bungalows, and private parties. We are the experts fully equipped to retrieve these pests from your head. Call Avigail and Yehudis” and “Morah Chanie Kinder Palace. Your child will be loved and cared for the way you’d like in a clean, warm, friendly, and Heimishe atmosphere.” There is a leaflet advertising the services of the “Mezuzah Doctor. This doctor makes house calls.” And a political poster urges the freeing of jailed Jewish settlers. “Shmuel was arrested,” it proclaims above the picture of a fierce-looking Israeli in a knitted
yarmulke
, “under administrative detention orders by the Rabin Government. After the present additional three-month detention order, the Rabin government can renew three- to six-month orders over and over. Write to Yitzhak Rabin. Ask him why he releases thousands of convicted Arab terrorists, while Jews who have never been charged or convicted of any crime languish in Israeli jails.”

Until the Jewish stores close up shop every year around Labor Day, the town fathers who occupied the original pews of the Woodbourne Reformed Church are probably doing rotisserie turns in their graves. But maybe not. Without the annual influx of Hasidim, the local economy would fall apart.

In the center of town, one of Woodbourne’s few African-Americans, whose parents came here years ago to work at the once glamorous but now fading resort of Grossinger’s, collars me near a pay phone and asks me if I’m Jewish.

“Yep,” I reply.

“But you’re not religious. You’re like us.”

“Pretty much,” I tell him.

“You eat pork, don’t you?”

I shake my head back and forth. Then I ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim. They’re different, he says. Different from the Jews who used to come up here. “But they’re okay. They cheap, though. Always wanting something for nothing. You tell the people they cheap. But they’re good people.”

The founding families would not be the only ones shocked by the transformation that their town has undergone. Early German Jewish settlers who wanted so much to fit in, with formidable names like Baer, Lowenthal, and Lewinsohn, would strongly disapprove of the Eastern European riffraff. Most of their descendants have probably been absorbed into the general population by now, but a few of them are no doubt students at the Ivy League Torah Program I stumble on while driving out of town on Route 42. Situated on a side road called Synagogue Way, the program, run by the French-born Lubavitcher Rabbi Jacob Goldberg, takes in students from all over the world who are taking their first steps toward full observance of the
mitzvot
. Rabbi Goldberg, in his late forties, leads a class in Chassidus, or Chabad mysticism, in a deep Yiddish accent and with no small amount of humor. When I wander into the classroom he urges me to sit down.

“A mitzvah,” he is telling the class, “stays with a person always. An
averah
, or sin, if you do repentance, goes away and can be erased.” He touches on the notion of
Mitzvah HaBah BeAverah
, or doing a sin in order to perform a mitzvah, and asks for examples. Stealing an
etrog
to use for Sukkot services, someone volunteers. Stealing money to give to charity, another interjects. The teacher nods approvingly. Stealing to perform a mitzvah is worse than stealing to put it in your own pocket, he inveighs.

I decide to try my hand at this. Fresh from Elat Chayyim, I don’t lack for possibilities. What about a woman wearing a tallis on Shabbos so she can pray better, I ask. That’s okay, he replies, so long as she is wearing clothes underneath. Everyone laughs. How about playing guitar on the Sabbath to heighten the mood? I persist. Where did you hear about this, he demands. Elat Chayyim, I mumble, like Beaver Cleaver finking on Eddie Haskel. And I suppose they use microphones on Shabbos, too? Sure do, I say. He does a passable imitation of a folk singer strumming his guitar to an imaginary woman in a tallis. Everyone cracks up.
This
is a Mitzvah HaBah BeAverah, he proclaims, somewhat pleased by my example. “Playing a guitar on Shabbos, using a microphone—better you don’t go to
shul
at all.” He hits the table hard with his hand. “What is this Elat Chayyim?” he demands like an inspector administering an interrogation.

“It’s Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s institute.”

“
Oy a broch
. What a pity. Schachter was a very smart man,” he laments.

“
Meshuggeh off’s toit!
Crazier than a loon!” a Hasid in a corner of the room bellows out.

“No, not crazy,” says Goldberg, “just confused. A Lubavitcher. Ordained by us. He began on the right path. Then he started making changes. First he wanted blue tzitzis fringes, not white. That’s okay, some Hasidim have one or two blue strings on their tzitzis. Then he decided his tallis should be multicolored because in the Kabbalah there is the concept of
Tifereth
, the merging of colors. Each color has a different attribute—red is strength, white is love—and a person should balance and mix these attributes together to make a proper combination of them in the
neshuma
, the soul. Schachter took this concept and materialized it. Also okay, but a little strange. Nowhere in the law, mind you, does it say not to do this.

“Then he started descending,” Goldberg continues. “First with the finger cymbals during prayer, then mixing Jewish ideas with those of priests, Indians, Japanese. Eventually, he divorced his wife and married, I think, a Chinese girl. He ruined his family. He was a rabbi in Winnipeg and now he’s a … a …” He momentarily loses his thought.

“And what happened to his children?” someone asks.

“I don’t know. One became like a
goy
, I think. Another is totally
hefker
.” Hefker is the ultimate put-down. It means wild, unruly, outside the fold. Goldberg obviously means it as a sign of pity.

“
Neboch
,” a shame, he finally mutters. The dozen or so students, ranging from a recent Columbia graduate to a senior at State University of New York at Binghamton, with a Brazilian and a couple of Californians thrown in for good measure, listen attentively. “Okay, let’s get back to work!” he barks. I take this as my cue to exit.

Ten weeks in the Catskills isn’t cheap. A simple bungalow runs $2,000 to $3,000, not including food or transportation. And this is just a run-of-the-mill colony. There are luxury resorts like the much-talked-about Vacation Village in Loch Sheldrake, where the families of accountants and diamond merchants languidly push baby carriages along the lake. The accommodations there consist of modern townhouses. Whatever the colony, though, men usually stay in the city and come up for weekends, unless they are employed by one of the local institutions.

I drive over to Monticello, the main city of the Catskills. Off to one side is a road sign in Yiddish pointing the way to the offices of Dr. Tova Rosen. A woman doctor in a Hasidic community is not unheard of, but it is highly unusual—limited to those who have become religious. Her clinic is situated in a modest house on the periphery of a bungalow colony named Fialkoff’s, which caters to a non-Hasidic but Orthodox crowd.

Fialkoff’s has 110 bungalows and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, which Mrs. Adler, the owner, invites me to visit. It is the end of the men’s daily swimming session, and as I walk through the gate a yeshiva student from Detroit, whose parents became religious twenty years ago, blows on a whistle and orders everyone out. In the main part of the resort, families pass their time lounging at picnic tables, reading, laughing, or nibbling at food, while the younger children play in the sand or on swing sets. Across the street from the colony is a kosher pizza stand and a bakery, the latter owned by a Satmar couple who are in their mid-twenties and already have five children.