In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (7 page)

By 1892, the Gerson family was in Glen Wild, near Woodridge, in Sullivan County. They began with an abandoned farm and built a boardinghouse and a successful dairying operation. Abe Jaffe, with his father and later with his brother, farmed property across the road from what he describes as the old Gerson place. According to Jaffe, the Gerson boardinghouse of tiny rooms and two porches burned in 1925. Today, a small section of a dam walling and a few concrete steps remain, next to a small stream. Like their Christian neighbors, the Gersons produced the area’s specialty, iced fresh milk for New York City. The Midland was the first railroad to move bulk milk, drawing it initially from old, established farms along its Bloomingburg to Middletown run, where a farmer in 1871 put ice in a can of milk, shipping it on a passenger train. Shortly thereafter the Midland built a business of shipping iced milk, moving 900 cans (presumably of 20 gallons each) a day from Liberty to Middletown and then to New York City. Soon afterwards, the Midland built creameries to buy, pasteurize, and separate milk at most stations along its main tracks on both the Ellenville and Oswego branches. Gerson probably dealt with the Liberty creamery on the Oswego branch. Bankrupted by the Panic of 1873, the Midland curtailed the milk operation, but the dairy farms and their Catskill towns were so dependent upon the milk operation that one town, Ellenville, in 1877 raised a significant tax of $1,000 to give to the railroad in an effort to restore their service and hence their milk deliveries. The milk operation resumed and was flourishing by 1892.
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Not only was Gerson considered the first Jewish farmer in the area, but in 1899 he published one of the first advertisements for a “Jewish Boarding House.” His advertisement, which appeared in “Summer Homes” in 1899, said: “
J. GERSON
—Rock Hill Jewish Boarding House. 5 miles; accommodate 40; adults $6, children $3; transients $1; discount to season guests; transportation free; new house, newly furnished; prepare our own meats; raise our own vegetables; scenery unsurpassed. Jewish faith and customs throughout; 1/4 mile from Post Office; good road to station; fine shade; good airy rooms.”
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The Gerson household history illustrates a typical Jewish Catskill family combining farming and boarding. When the 1900 census was taken, John was forty-six years old; his wife, Annie, was forty-five; their two sons, Alex and Benjamin, were twenty-three and twenty-one, respectively; and their two daughters, Esther and Rebecca, were sixteen and thirteen, respectively. Alex was listed as having been married three years. Also in the household was Emma Gerson, aged twenty-eight, listed as John’s sister-in-law. John’s four nieces—Ettie, eight, Celia, six, Sarah, three, and Fannie, one—and a nephew, Nathan, three, also were in the household, although the census indicated that no more than three of the five children were children of Emma the younger. Bringing the household to a total of fourteen were Ida and Abram Block, listed as “servants.” Emma the younger and the Blocks were born in Russia, and the five children were born in New York. Emma came to the United States in 1892, and the Blocks had come only the year before, in 1899. With fourteen people in the household, at least John and Annie Gerson had help on the farm and in the boardinghouse. John Gerson later moved to Fallsburg, and in partnership with family members operated a boardinghouse, the “New Prospect.” John later lost his fortune when he signed a note for a bakery that went bankrupt. He died in 1935 at age eighty-one, leaving a legacy of having been a very religious person.
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Contemporary with Gerson, immigrant Jews by the hundreds yearly had bought or built boardinghouses and farmhouses in “the mountains” (as the clientele of their Christian predecessors in the resort business had spoken of the area), settling independently of the Hirsch philanthropies. Legal records, local newspaper accounts of property sales to “Hebrews,” and the increase of listings of “Strictly Kosher” and “Hebrews Only” in the Ontario and Western’s “Summer Homes” boarding advertisements show the transfers of Catskills farms and boardinghouses from Christians to Jews around the turn of the century.
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Many of these new residents had come to the mountains first as summer guests and returned later to settle.
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Unlike the New Jersey settlements, the Catskill Jewish farm settlement was unplanned. Paradoxically, the Catskill settlements were on rocky land harder to till and less fertile than that of the New Jersey colonies or of the settlements in Connecticut, Ohio, and the western states. Some of the Catskill land had been cleared, farmed, and then partly abandoned to reforestation in the course of the nineteenth century before Jews bought it. Jews bought some of the farms at exorbitant prices, setting themselves up for failure. As Herman Levine stated, “They started out behind the eight ball. They started out with a neglected farm, overpriced and on terms that doomed them.”
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“Let us bear in mind,” he wrote, “that even most of the natives, with no mortgages to worry them, hardened by the rugged lives they led, and with generations of farm experience behind them, also found it difficult to eke out a living from farming alone. They, too, kept boarders and worked off the farm to earn a livelihood. The climate and soil were unfavorable to agriculture; poor transportation and marketing facilities made farming very unprofitable.”
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When German-speaking visitors had begun going to the upper Catskills in the 1870s when the railroad had expanded in that area, religion generally was not important to them. Most were Protestants, many were Catholics, and some were Jews, but all stayed in the same boardinghouses. By the end of the 1880s, however, successful Eastern European Jews were frequent guests in the upper Catskills, and boardinghouses began to be segregated into Christian or Jewish houses. Some of the segregation was voluntary, as many visitors preferred to stay with others of similar backgrounds. This seemed to be particularly true of less-educated visitors.
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The visitors separated not only by religion but also within religious groups by national origins. Russian Jewish, Polish Jewish, and Hungarian Jewish boardinghouses developed.
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Even some Jews—especially German Jews—criticized the behavior and lack of sophistication of some of the Eastern European Jews.

In the late 1880s many boardinghouses began to post signs and print advertisements saying that they did not accommodate Jews, regardless of their values or economic or social status. The exclusion was mainly due to prejudice against Jews, and in 1889 the
New York Times
referred to “the anti-Hebrew crusade” in the Catskills.
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The
Times
concluded that most newspapers in the Catskills spoke out against discrimination and that the discrimination was not as extensive as reported. By 1889, the anti-Hebrew crusade had failed for economic reasons, but most small boardinghouses remained segregated by religion.
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As the Jewish farms and boardinghouses increased in Sullivan County and in southern Ulster County around Ellenville, the northern Catskill boardinghouses became less attractive to Jews. The southern Ulster-Sullivan area was closer to New York City, was blessed with the O&W railroad, and offered largely Jewish resort areas in which prejudice was less likely to be encountered on a daily basis. The mountains in Sullivan County and southern Ulster County were not as high as those in the upper Catskills, but to Jews who knew no mountains in Russia or Poland, they were high enough to have scenic beauty and cool breezes. There were also more lakes and streams, and less pollution from tanning, in the lower Catskills.

One Jewish writer described the beauty of the lower Catskills area: “Embraced between the Shawangunk and the Catskill Mountain ranges is a sketch of land which nature in her pleasant moments graced and beautified—an area that is a succession of sunkissed hills and verdant dales. Here countless streams rush from the hillsides and ripple along through vale and meadow. Here are lakes of entracing beauty dotting the landscape like jewels in a golden setting. Here, indeed, is a countryside, the charm and beauty of which have inspired the brush of an Inness and the pen of a Burroughs. And, adding bounty to bounty, nature has also blessed this region with an air that is invigorating and a climate that is health-giving. It was natural for such richly endowed regions to become attractive spots for the seeker after health and recreation.”
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For the Jewish visitors, compared to the Christian visitors, socialization was more important and communing with nature less important, a fact that also decreased the appeal of high mountains. Esterita Blumberg’s descriptions, although written of a later time, also apply to this time period. She acknowledged that they used “high flown” names for their hotel accommodations, that “our ‘Pine Lodge’ was formerly a chicken coop, ‘Deluxe’ described nothing at our hotel, and we called any two spaces ‘A Suite.’” She noted that they countered these conditions with the sales spiel that little time was spent in the rooms anyway because of all the activities offered the guests. Blumberg concluded that “the funny thing was that we were right. We were giving wonderful value at affordable prices—the rooms were the least of it. Summer in the Catskills became a way of life, with a population that returned year after year.”
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Around the turn of the century, sizeable numbers of Jews began to farm in the Catskills. Some farmed for only a short time, then gave it up for other callings. Others farmed for decades, frequently combining it with summer boarding. Most were born in Eastern Europe and spent some years in New York City before going to the Catskills, but patterns varied. The Weinberger brothers and their father, for example, arrived in Leurenkill in 1900 and began to farm. They were all shoemakers by trade, however, and one year of farming persuaded them to switch back to their first vocation. Samuel H. Berger settled in Ellenville in 1900, later moved to a farm in Kerhonkson, and during World War I moved back to Ellenville to operate the Fountain Hill House. Samuel Jacobwitz went to the Catskills in 1901 and became a farmer. He then turned to peddling meat and in 1907 opened a butcher shop in Ellenville.

Kalman Goldman became a farmer in Greenfield in 1902, after immigrating to the United States from Russia when he was sixteen and living in New York City for fourteen years. He spent two years in Greenfield, building and operating the Grand Hotel as well as farming, and in 1904 moved to Ellenville. Max Rosenberg came from New York City in 1903, and became a farmer and owner-operator of the West Orchard House. He continued a combination of farming and hotel-keeping at the West Orchard House and at the Echo House for many years, finally switching to hotel operating only. Benjamin Cherney began work as a farm laborer in Pataukunk in 1903. His European fiancée soon joined him and they married, but she was “unprepared to meet the hardships or manage the chores of a farm-hand’s wife,” and they moved to Ellenville where he became a grocer.

Hyman Levine had a peddler’s route between Ellenville and Kingston from 1880 to 1895, lived in Ellenville from 1895 to 1903, and in 1903 purchased a farm on Cape Avenue. The Morris Kinberg family bought a dairy farm and boardinghouse in Leurenkill in 1905, raised ten children there, and moved to Ellenville in 1920. Israel Rosen farmed in Mountaindale and Spring Glen before settling on a farm near Ellenville in 1905, but later he became a builder of bakers’ ovens. Jacob Benenson was a bookkeeper, but, after arriving from the Ukraine in 1906, he spent only one month in New York City before deciding that he wanted a farm. He was the first Jewish settler in Honk Hill, and for years he operated a farm with summer boarders there. In addition to these examples, there were numerous other Catskill Jewish farmers too numerous to discuss. As these examples show, some gave up farming and moved into towns, but many others stayed on the farm.
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By 1907, when the founding of the Ellenville Hebrew Aid Society marked a milestone in Catskill Jewish settlements, the increase in the number of Jewish farmers and nonfarmers was “shifting into high gear.” The Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society found that by 1908 there were 684 Jewish farms in New York state, 500 of them in Sullivan and Ulster counties.
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That count was based on second mortgages the society issued. Not all Jews on farms in New York state took those mortgages, however. Financing was in most cases arranged privately, usually through a personal lender, and not recorded. Another estimate was higher. A triangular area with sides of about twenty miles each, with route 209’s Wurtsboro through Ellenville and Kerhonkson on the east and Woodbourne through Woodridge (Centreville) and Mountaindale on the west, was said to have supported one thousand Jewish farm households. With easily five hundred more to the northwest, around Monticello, Liberty, Hurleyville, Loch Sheldrake, and Parksville, on the O&W main line, Sullivan and Ulster counties had three tenths or more of all the Jewish farmer households in the United States around 1911.
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