Back to the Borscht Belt! Celebrating the golden era of Jewish vacationland in the Catskills

Bigger establishments, such as Kutsher’s Country Club, The Concord Resort Hotel and The Nevele Grand Hotel, had thousands of rooms, nightclubs, indoor pools and ski slopes, and in the case of Grossinger’s, the resort that supposedly inspired the film Dirty Dancing, its own airstrip and post office.

World-class entertainment was also a big draw for holidaying Jewish families at a time when they were excluded from the resorts of the Atlantic coast and before the advent of cheap air travel. Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Jerry Seinfeld and Sid Caesar all cut their teeth in front of tough Catskills audiences.

As did, you can bet your bottom dollar, any other Jewish stand-up comic of that era.

However, by the early 1980s, most of the Catskills hotels had closed their doors for business, and have since descended into decay. Foreign travel had become easier and Miami Beach had been born. Kitschy summers in the Catskills had lost their allure.

This weekend in Ellenville, in the Catskills, the first of what will be an annual festival seeks to recapture the glory days of America’s Jewish vacationland.

The Borscht Belt Fest pays homage to the Jewish Catskills and its enormous contribution to American culture with a festival of stand-up comedy, live music, art, movie screenings, street fairs and, of course, food including, one assumes, borscht. And by 2025, the world will have its first Borscht Belt Museum.

Its home will be in the former Home National Bank, a 1928 Neo-Georgian building on Canal Street, in Ellenville, which back then was one of the few financial institutions willing to lend to the region’s Jewish hoteliers and bungalow colony owners.

For the time being, the museum is a pop-up.

Robin Cohen-Kauffman knows the Jewish Catskills like the back of her hand. She holidayed there as a child, went on to work as a camp counsellor and met her husband at the holiday resort.

In 2019, she organised a weekend-long reunion for people who had also worked in the Jewish Catskills and more than 200 people showed up.

As a result, the president of the burgeoning museum asked her to become involved. Now its vice president, she explains the genesis of the Catskills hotels.

“In the 1920s and 1930s most of the Jews who left New York for the Catskills went to find work.

"They thought they could be farmers, but the truth is the land wasn’t that fertile and when they realised this, they starting advertising rooms in their homes as bed and breakfasts, with farm-fresh eggs for breakfast, to people who were passing through.

“Bit by bit, they added features to their properties, slowly turning them into hotels. Or in the case of Grossinger’s, until it became a huge hotel.”

Cohen-Kauffman’s memories of childhood and teenage years in the Jewish Catskills are vivid.

“Getting dressed up every night was very exciting at a time when people didn’t normally get dressed up. I loved getting ready to go down to dinner and walking into the dining room. I wore dresses every night and we’d take pictures before dinner.

“My parents usually sat with their friends, and we would sit with children our age.

“During the day, we were kept very busy with swimming, ice skating, canoeing, bowling, and arts and crafts. We were taken from one to the other by counsellors and when I became a teenager I became a counsellor myself. The experience taught me a lot about life.”

After dinner, their parents would go and watch the funny Jews on stage while they slept in room with unlocked doors. “It was safe environment.”

Saturday nights were her favourite.

“My parents would let us skip dinner with the kids and go to the Saturday night cocktail party with the adults. Before that night’s show, there would be dancing. One of my favourite memories is dancing with my dad and stepping on his feet.”

She met her husband during a weekend stay with her girlfriends. “We were seated at the same table for dinner at the Concord. Irving Cohen, who was the maître d’ there, was known throughout the Borscht Belt at that time as a matchmaker.

"He would sit people who he thought were a good match together. We met on July 4 and got married on July 2 of the following year.”

Dr Peter Chester is treasurer of the Borscht Belt Museum and lives in Monticello, in the Catskills. His father and uncle both survived Auschwitz and his mother came to England on the Kindertransport. “My parents’ story is interesting because it parallels what happened with other survivors and a lot of immigrants who came to America.

“Jews, the Irish, and black people from the South all found their way to the Borsch Belt. There was prejudice and antisemitism in other parts of America, but the Catskills was a centre of tolerance.

"Black entertainers would join the guests at dinner whereas in other parts of the country they would have to use a separate entrance just to go on stage.”

Dr Chester and his family would holiday at the Grand Mountain Hotel every year and when he was eight he worked as the hotel’s newspaper boy.

He says: “I would set up a little table in the main lobby with the sign Peter H Chester News Dealer.

"The papers would be delivered to the hotel in the morning and I would get up at the crack of dawn and set it up before the papers were delivered to the hotel. If guests wanted room delivery, and they were good tippers, I would [do it].”

Unsurprisingly, food was important in Jewish vacationland. Dr Chester added: “Some of the hotels were strictly kosher but most were kosher-style.

"But they stayed within the dietary laws insomuch as there was separate tableware for milk and meat. I don’t remember seeing frozen food in any variety until 1967 or 1968 and even then it was very, very rare.

"It was farm to table, three meals a day, and you could eat Jewish delicacies such as lox, pickled herring, schmaltz herring, and baked herring.

“At breakfast, everything was cooked to order. You could have eggs any way you wanted, hot and cold cereals and every kind of baked goods.”

Friday night dinner was a glorious feast.

He continued: “You would start with filled California cantaloupe melon, followed by gefilte fish, which was made there, not from a jar. Then you would have chicken consommé with mamma’s matzo balls.

"There would be coleslaw and pickles and relish trays, all made in the hotel. In the middle of the table there’d be a freshly baked challah and bottle of Manischewitz wine.

“For the main course, there would be a choice of Vienna loaf (baked meatloaf), roast caponette (roast chicken), Philadelphia Fowl (boiled chicken), or fried beef flanken.
You could have a slice of potato kugel. And if the wine wasn’t sweet enough you would have carrot tzimmes. Dessert was honey cake and sponge cake, also made on the premises.”

One of his father’s “scars”, as he puts it, from the death camp, was that he’d eat a lot and fast. “For him, the hotel was like a culinary Disneyland where you could eat non-stop.”

Although the hotels had ballrooms, golf courses and outdoor pools, compared to today’s hotels with their en suite facilities, luxurious they were not. Most guests had to share a bathroom on their floor.

A better room meant sharing one with the person next door. Only the rich could afford deluxe modern rooms with an en-suite bathroom, wall-to-wall carpeting and newer furniture.

Sometimes those deluxe rooms were occupied by stars who didn’t perform at the hotels. Eddie Fisher came here with his bride Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis and President John F Kennedy stayed at Grossinger’s and the so-called gold coast VIP section of the Concord.

Dr Chester remembers meeting then-President Lyndon Johnson. “It was 1965, I think at the dedication of the hospital in Ellensville. He spent the night at the Nevele Grand Hotel.”

Although some of the hotels in the Catskills have been left to rot, some Jews are slowly breathing new life into them.

“Many religious groups have settled in the Catskills,” says Professor Phil Brown of Northeastern University, who has written several books on the area.

“Not far from what was the site of the Laurel Park Hotel is the Yeshiva Gedolah Zichron Moshe, which is home to 40 families. Orthodox and Chasidic Jews have taken over many of what were the bungalow colonies. They run glatt kosher and bakeries and shops, religious bookshops and restaurants serving knishes. They have made the Catskills their own.

“These are people who want to cluster together in a community of Orthodoxy without judgment. In a way, it’s like the original Catskills settlers who wanted to escape the antisemitism prevalent at the time. The Borscht Belt was born of bigotry. At the turn of the last century, hotels elsewhere would displays signs saying ‘No Hebrews Allowed’ and ‘Gentiles Only’.”

But there are differences, of course.

“The mainstream Jews of the Borscht Belt era brought humour, cooking, style and romance to the area. They brought a sense of upward mobility, of sending the first generation to college. The Chasidim are not like that.”

This weekend’s Borscht Belt Festival will evoke those bygone times, those leisurely days of poolside lounging, and of nights of entertainment that was often hilarious, sometimes risqué, and always memorable.

It promises to have you laughing until you cry and crying until you laugh, and that’s not the chopped liver talking.

borschtbeltfest.org