In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (60 page)

Dr. Rosen’s house at Fialkoff’s is a whitewashed double-decker with a modest gate in front. A downstairs window, adjacent to her examining room, also has a sign with her name in Yiddish. It lights up. I walk into the office and find a
balbatische
—a person of healthy proportions—woman in a navy blue denim dress propped on a swivel chair talking on the phone. She motions to me to sit down. After she hangs up, she begins to talk to me as if she’s known me all my life. She’s a doctor in Williamsburg most of the year, she tells me, but this summer she’s experimenting with an office in the Catskills. In the city, most of her customers are Satmars. She herself is a
ba’alat teshuvah
, having become religious in the distinctively unfashionable period of the early sixties when she was barely in junior high school, well before the phenomenon took off later in the decade. She went to live in Brooklyn with some religious grandparents, leaving her nonobservant parents on the Upper West Side behind. After attending Bais Yaakov girl’s high school in Boro Park and getting a B.S. from Long Island University, she went to the University of Tampico in Mexico, where she got her medical degree. It was a pigsty, she tells me. The anatomy lab was a cesspool—you’d rather use a fish hook to retrieve organs than to touch them. Then she came back and opened a clinic in Williamsburg.

She praises the Satmars, even though she isn’t one. “They’re really into
tzedakah
, charity,” she says, and when it comes to taking care of the sick, “to strangers they’re better than family.” As she goes on and on about the Satmars, a Hasidic woman stands in the doorway shaking her head. The phone rings and Tova answers it. “Don’t listen to her,” the religious woman, apparently a patient, says. “My sister married a Satmar and they treat women like
lochs
, holes. They walk all over them. Into tzedakah?” she asks rhetorically. “They’re into screwing the government!” She relates a food stamp counterfeiting scam for which the perpetrator was sentenced to several years in prison but ran off to Israel instead. “Now he sits, he learns, on his $3 million. He’s waiting for the—what do you call it—the statute of limitations to run out so he can return.”

While the doctor is busy on the phone, she continues. “I never met one who didn’t take advantage. Food stamps, ADC, Section 8 housing, you name it—and that’s just the millionaires. They own eight houses but they get welfare. Taxes? They don’t know the meaning of the word. They put all their assets in one big kitty—a yeshiva fund—and borrow on it. That way they avoid income and inheritance taxes.” I’m glad Dr. Rosen is on the telephone, because if she heard this it would no doubt set off a huge verbal conflagration. “They have black Jews—
Schvartzes
, they call them. They’re not really black. They’re Satmars. Black sheep is what they are. They smash windows, overturn buses.”

“How come?”

“Who knows? Who knows what they fight about? They use the black Jews to collect money from each other.”

As she finishes off with the dramatic flourish that there is no law in Williamsburg, that Satmar is the law, a delivery man from UPS walks in with some medical equipment and hands it to Tova. She hangs up the phone and thanks him. “You better get ready for the onslaught,” he says. “They’re expecting 250,000 kids up here next weekend. They say the parking area alone will be twenty-five square miles.” Tova assures him that she intends to spend Woodstock weekend in Boro Park.

As he leaves and the woman in the doorway disappears, a well-dressed matriarch in a queenly turban comes into the office and sits down. “Ah, Mrs. Polakoff,” Tova greets her. “I have the IV ready.” Mrs. Polakoff is here for a vitamin infusion for her Epstein-Barr. Her husband, now retired, was one of the administrators at a Satmar camp up the road. There are four camps, actually, serving thousands of Satmar children. Her camp alone prepares between 2,000 and 3,000 meals each day, four or five times a day.

The children sit and learn from nine to noon and from three to six. Otherwise, they play. “Baseball?” I ask. “Heavens no, maybe the Vishnitzers, but not us. They sit, they swim, there is a creek for fishing.” “They fish?” I am somewhat taken aback. “Not exactly,” she replies. “They watch the goyim fish.” As she is having her IV hooked up, she tells me that camp tuition is according to income, that there are no TVs or radios present, but there is air-conditioning and telephones. Everyone studies: not just the children, but also the staff and visiting parents.

Dr. Rosen talks about the lice problem at the camps. As Mrs. Polakoff sits there, vitamin solution dripping into her hand, blissfully oblivious to my conversation in English with Dr. Rosen, three boys walk in who don’t know a word of English either. They won’t begin to learn English until they are eight, Tova tells me. They are the children of the Satmar couple that run the bakery across the street.

The doctor treats only women and children. Occasionally, a man comes in, and she’s willing to see him, “but most wouldn’t see me for more than a hangnail. Something like prostates is out of the question.” She does a lot of fertility treatment and deals with communicable diseases that arise from the close proximity of her patients to one another. Hepatitis is a perennial problem, as is salmonella. Eighty or 90 percent of the clients are on Medicaid, but she won’t accept their cards. It’s too much of a hassle. So she deals mostly with insurance companies. Much of her time is taken up with paperwork because she doesn’t even have a nurse or assistant. The season starts on June 28 and everyone goes home on Labor Day, with the exception of some yeshivas in South Fallsburg, Mountaindale, and Woodridge, which are open all year round. After the season, she will go back to Williamsburg, where much of her services are performed on credit, and she has an accounts receivable list that would be the envy of most small businesses. But being a woman has its problems. A male physician tried to bully her into sharing office space with him, and the husbands of some of her patients lean on her to alter invoices, ostensibly to inflate their insurance settlements, but she steadfastly refuses.

Mrs. Polakoff, her treatment complete, gathers her purse and prepares to board a cab back to her camp. I ask her where it is. Outside Ellenville, she says. Ellenville, isn’t that where the Nevele is? Oh yes, she replies, but in the forty years she’s been at the camp, she’s never been to it. “But I do remember one thing. Years ago, thirty, maybe forty, President Johnson and his wife slept there.”

On my way out of the mountains and back to New York, I stop in Monsey, the biggest suburban year-round settlement of Hasidim outside the city, a town with perhaps 20,000 Orthodox of every stripe. It started with a single
kollel
in the early fifties. I decide to pay a visit to Rabbi Moshe Tendler, one of the leading figures of modern American Orthodoxy, much criticized in some Hasidic sectors. He is a professor of biology at Yeshiva University, a well-known bacteriologist, a leading bioethicist, and the head of a congregation in Monsey. Taking the shot-in-the-dark approach, I call him from a few blocks away and he agrees to meet me at his home the next day.

When I arrive, his son, a bearded Yale law school graduate, leads me into the basement study. After about ten minutes, Rabbi Tendler appears. I tell him I’m here to gauge the modern Orthodox response to the explosion, both demographically and qualitatively, of Hasidism in this country, and to ascertain, exactly, what is the difference between the two groups. Amid books on the ethics of medical experimentation, euthanasia, and the Talmud, he tells me there is no such thing as modern Orthodoxy. “There are only the halakhically observant and the nonobservant,” he says, “and we are just as observant as Hasidim.” But, he concedes, “for survival purposes, you can’t top the Hasidim.” He relates a little-known phenomenon that the only Orthodox in the Soviet Union who retained their practices were the Lubavitchers. “They kept their coats, their hats, their tzitzis. They drank only Cholov Yisroel milk and baked their own bread. Can you imagine doing that for several generations? And you know why they survived?”

“Why?”

“Because people thought they were crazy. Stalin didn’t bother with them. The Talmud says not to pay any special attention to a crazy person. And Stalin,
takeh
, for sure, ignored them. So when
perestroika
dawned it turned out that there were several thousand Lubavitchers, all over the Soviet Union, and they came out of the woodwork.”

Tendler admits that there are differences between the two, the modern Orthodox and the Hasidim, but they are rooted in custom rather than law. “In the Midrash, it is said that the Jews managed to survive 210 years in Egypt without losing their identity for two reasons: because they didn’t change their language and they didn’t change their dress. They had portable ghetto walls. Today it’s Yiddish and long cloaks.”

To Tendler, this is the crux of the difference between the modern Orthodox and their ultra-Orthodox brethren. But what about the study of secular subjects? The modern Orthodox, after all, are perhaps more disproportionately represented in the professions than any other group in America.

“Satmars come to me with ethical questions—issues of fertility, for example. They need professional advice. And I myself asked Rabbi Aharon Kotler just who will fill these roles if the Orthodox won’t? We are the doctors, lawyers, and ethicists for the Hasidim.”

Yeshiva University offers degrees in the humanities, but relatively few students major in them. For future lawyers, it’s political science, for others, it’s the physical or biological sciences, or the rabbinate.

“A Hasidic girl will willingly enter into
shiduch
with a boy from Yeshiva University, but only if the boy wears a hat,” he says, referring to the black-rimmed Fedoras of the Hasidim, not the knitted yarmulkes of the modern Orthodox. And apparently, more and more of the modern Orthodox are donning this sartorial symbol of unflappable piety. Moreover, only a distinct minority of Yeshiva University students, according to Tendler, go to movies anymore. A decade or two in the past, movies were much more acceptable, as they still are with older modern Orthodox Jews.

Other outward indicators also point to a shift to the right. The wearing of tzitzis by men outside the pants, once a spotty practice among the modern Orthodox, is more common than ever, and wigs among married women are prevalent.

The move to the right is even reflected in a narrowing of disparate birth rates between the Hasidim and the modern Orthodox. Even though a large number of modern Orthodox find birth control pills acceptable—the rationale being that it doesn’t involve a blocking of sperm traveling to the egg because with the pill there is no egg—average modern Orthodox family size is climbing steadily. Whereas a generation ago the modern Orthodox would consider it a novelty for an older couple to have, say, thirty grandchildren, today this is far from uncommon—Tendler himself has forty-six, at the relatively tender age of sixty-eight.

What are some of the other differences between the modern Orthodox and Hasidim, aside from the former’s involvement in the professional world? I ask.

The real difference, according to Tendler, is of an ethical nature. “When Hasidim get into trouble, when they do something against the law, they hurt all Jews. If you’re going to look like a Jew, if you’re going to dress like a Jew, then act ethically,” he says, assuring me at length that there are plenty of ethical Hasidic businesspeople, but the few rotten ones make everyone look bad.

The other major criticism of Hasidim by the modern Orthodox involves Israel. “Hasidim don’t send their children into the army,” he complains. “Halakha demands you defend Eretz Yisroel with your life. Israel feeds and protects the Haredim. The aggressive denigration of a country that does this is wrong. Even Rabin and Peres, who are far from being heroes in our eyes, have helped Torah study to flourish. We owe the Israeli government just like we owe the United States.”

Tendler has no doubt about the future of Orthodoxy in America—to him it is onward and upward. But as for the rest of American Jewry, the other 90 percent, he is not nearly so optimistic.

“The Reform thought they’d dance on our graves, but sadly, we’ll dance on theirs.” I express doubt over this, saying that the majority of Jews in America have not been religious for over seventy-five years, yet they have retained their identity. He reminds me that intermarriage poses new obstacles. “The Reform did one thing wrong. They abolished
gittin
, the Jewish divorce. This makes the offspring of all second marriages into
mamzers
, and mamzers and the descendants of mamzers cannot marry Jews who are not mamzers. Everything will be mixed up, we won’t know who is who, and the two groups—the Orthodox and the Reform, will be forever separated. They have cut themselves off from the rest of the Jewish people.