In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (8 page)

They inherited from Christian predecessors the general farm, with some field crops and some poultry raised for meat and eggs. The major farm income for these Jewish farmers came from dairying, selling to outlets serving the New York City milk market, and shipping on the O&W. If they did not buy such a farm, they built one like it simply because there was a ready milk market in New York City, because crops and poultry could be sold locally to the summer trade, and because the farmer could (at least in theory) eat off his own land.

Nearly all of the Jews who moved into the area were part of the largest migration in U.S. history, which began in the early 1880s and basically ended with the advent of World War I. As noted, the majority of these immigrants settled in New York City.
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A small percentage of these Eastern European Jews, but a large number, as well as many Eastern European Christians and Italian Catholics, went up the Hudson River and fanned out into surrounding areas. In Ulster County in 1900, 10.5 percent of the people were foreign born, increasing to 15.5 percent in 1910. In Sullivan County, the figures were 9.4 percent in 1900 and 13.3 percent in 1910.
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Based on an analysis of given names and surnames, it appears that most of the residents born in Russia or Poland were Jewish and that nearly all of the Jewish immigrants were from Russia or Poland.
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But most of the 1900 foreign-born in Ulster and Sullivan were not from Russia or Poland and were not Jewish.

The years 1900–1910 were the first period of great growth in numbers of Jewish immigrants. For example, in the Ellenville area (Wawarsing township) in 1900 there were only three heads-of-household born in Russia with apparently Jewish names. One reported that he was a farmer, another that he had a boardinghouse on a farm, and the third that he had a store and tin shop. By 1910, this same area had 166 apparently Jewish families of Russian or Polish background (plus a small number from other areas of Eastern Europe). Of the heads-of-household, 110 were famers and 56 were not. The farmers averaged 4.9 people to the family, the nonfarmers 4.8. The Jewish immigrant heads-of-household overall were young or middle-aged, most still in the years for having children: two were under twenty; nineteen were in their twenties; seventy-five in their thirties; forty-eight in their forties; seventeen in their fifties; three in their sixties; and two in their seventies. Of the 153 who indicated when they came to the United States, seventy-three had come since the beginning of 1900, fifty-six had come in the 1890s, twenty-one in the 1880s, and three in the 1870s. The farmers did tend to have been in the United States fewer years. Whereas 40 percent of the nonfarmers had come since 1900, 51 percent of the farmers had come in that period. Of the nonfarmers, 25 percent had been in the United States for at least twenty years, but only 11 percent of the farmers had been.
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Few of these Jews came with the skills needed to farm successfully. In the century before the mass migration began, there was great movement in Eastern Europe from villages to towns to cities, in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to escape persecution and poverty. In 1793, for example, Lodz had 11 Jews; it had 98,677 in 1897 and 166,628 in 1910. Warsaw had 3,532 Jews in 1781 and 219,141 in 1891. Many Jews changed their occupations in an attempt to survive. Fewer than 5 percent of Eastern European Jews were farmers, although, for those who remained in villages or small towns, agriculture frequently was a supplementary source of income. One writer noted that “in the villages almost every Jewish family owned a cow or goat, often the sole dependable source of income, as well as some fowl. Jews cultivated their own gardens; they raised the ‘Jewish fruits’—beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, garlic, and horseradish; and, despite restrictions, many rented orchards on a seasonal basis from neighboring peasants and gentry.”
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Some of the new Jewish Catskill farmers probably could harness a horse and milk a cow, but those skills alone were no guarantee of profitable farming. The society noted in this time period that one of its problems was that the vast majority of Jewish immigrants, who comprised nearly all of the Jewish farming community, had little or no farming experience. A random survey of Jewish farmers in the United States taken years later indicated that 63 percent had chosen farming because they liked it, 20 percent because they were dissatisfied with city life, 7 percent because they had to for health reasons, and only 10 percent because they had previous experience as farmers in Europe.
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Noting that these new farmers came from a great variety of occupational backgrounds, having been “tailors, merchants, carpenters, butchers, vegetable and fruit store operators, workers in shops and factories, peddlers, and odd-job laborers,”
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the society concluded that “most of our applicants, therefore, are of necessity obliged to establish themselves upon their farms first and acquire their agricultural experience afterwards—a process not only tedious and expensive, but involving considerable risk.”
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As U.S. census entries for 1910 indicate, many of the Catskill Jewish farmers spoke and read only Yiddish and so could not read English-language books about farming techniques and New York State Experiment Station bulletins or, a decade later, gain instruction from English-speaking county agricultural extension agents. Catskill Jewish settlers who knew how to read English, however, could gain such technical knowledge from encyclopedias and handbooks on farming.

The society’s Long Island Test Farm, the 500-acre King’s Point training school operating from 1904 through 1911, placed its first group of immigrants on the farm in the spring of 1905. But by the fall of 1908 the society had decided that the results did not justify the expense and discontinued the experiment. Under private management, test farmers were placed on the farm for several more years. Of the total of fifty-eight potential farmers placed on farms by the test farm, twenty-nine were graduated and provided with farms. Of these twenty-nine, nine gave up after “a more or less protracted struggle.” Even in the cases in which it was successful, however, the test farm focused on preparing young urban Jews for work and subsequent settlement on the New Jersey colonies or Long Island, not on training those who had already settled and certainly not on training the Catskill Jewish farmers who could easily slip from a farmhouse to a boarding economy.
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The society was interested in proving that Jews could farm, not run resorts. It realized, however, that in order to survive many Jewish farmers also had to have summer boarders.

While the process of converting a farm into a boardinghouse sometimes was necessary for survival, it was not easy. As Jonas Nass remembered, “We had to build a mile of our own utility poles for electric light and power, and install plumbing to make it habitable for city folk.”
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But, once converted, the rural setting of the boardinghouse seduced the city people. A typical advertisement for a hotel, which, although not a farm boardinghouse, gave city visitors a taste of their farm, read: “The proprietor keeps a dairy of Guernsey cows, noted for rich milk, butter, eggs, poultry, maple sugar and vegetables.”
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Some of the farmers who started boardinghouses in this period were to become famous success stories. The immigrant Kutsher brothers came to Sullivan County from New York City in 1907 and purchased a farm because one of the brothers was frail and thought country living would be healthy.
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Like many other Jewish farmers, they took in summer boarders in order to help meet their expenses. Kutsher’s Country Club would later become one of the Catskills’ major resorts. Selig and Malke Grossinger were restauranteurs in New York City but, encouraged by the society, moved to a farm in Ferndale in 1913. The Grossinger farmhouse, opened in 1914, would grow into the famous Grossinger’s Hotel and Country Club.
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Charles Slutsky bought a farm in Leurenkill in 1901. His wife and three sons were still in Europe, and for two years Charles tended the farm without any family help. His daughters and another son worked “in New York City to supplement the farm income and make possible the immigration of the other members of the family in 1903.” Morris Slutsky, brother of Charles, settled in the area in 1904, and other relatives followed. The Slutsky family in Ellenville would see their Nevele Falls Farm House grow into the Nevele Hotel and Country Club.
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Other hotels associated with the Slutsky family included the Fallsview, Arrowhead Lodge, Evergreen Manor, and Breeze Lawn.

Max Levinson came to the United States in 1891, and bought his farm, later the Tamarack Lodge, in 1903. Mrs. Ben Miller and Daniel Roher described its beginnings: “Today’s well-known summer resort was then only a small, down-at-the-heels farm, stocked with a small herd of cows and a horse past retirement age. Mr. Levinson played the plural role of farmer, hotelman, and tailor to his children in those early days, and like many other farmers of the period, left for New York City each fall, after the departure of the last guest, to help meet the mortgage payments and taxes, while Mrs. Levinson and the family remained to carry on the farm chores through the Winter months.”
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And so a kind of spontaneous colonizing developed in the Catskills, aided but not initiated by the society. The rural colonies were like a series of shells around small established operating towns whose economies included Jewish artisans, craftsmen, merchants, food vendors, farm suppliers, farm produce buyers, barbers, tailors, glazers, mechanics, and physicians. Jews lived with their rural Christian counterparts as in the Russo-Polish shtetls. In 1908, the society stated that “some of the bustling villages, such as Centreville and Parksville, have an almost exclusively Jewish population. Nearly every one of them has its physician, dentist, druggist, and all that goes to make up a typical Jewish rural settlement in the Old Country, but so unlike the native American village.”
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The Catskill settlements differed from the beginnings of the planned Jersey and midwestern colonies and from self-segregated religious communities like the Amish, Mennonites, or Shakers. The little Catskill towns possessed the social amenities such as synagogues and Jewish businesses that the society found it had to bring to the New Jersey colonies to keep people there. For example, in Ellenville, in addition to the Hebrew Aid Society, which had been founded in 1907, a synagogue was dedicated in 1910, and a Workmen’s Circle was founded in 1911.
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Comparing the New York settlements to other areas, as early as 1906 the society could state that “in New York, however, there is a large number of Jewish farmers of whom we never hear except by chance as our investigators run across them. They do not need our aid and do not ask for it.”
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By 1906 there were forty-five Jewish farmers’ associations in the United States, eleven of them in the lower Catskills. The Livingston Manor Jewish Farmers’ Association had sixteen members, the Parksville Jewish Farmers Association sixty-six, the Hebrew Farmers’ Association of Ferndale and Stevensville seventy-eight, the Hebrew Farmers’ Association of Fallsburg and Hurleyville one-hundred-forty, the Monticello Jewish Farmers’ Association fifty-seven, the Jewish Farmers’ Association of Centreville Station ninety-nine, the Jewish Farmers’ Association of Mountaindale eighty-six, the Hebrew Farmers’ Association of Ellenville ninety, the Hebrew Aid Society of Briggs Street sixty-eight, the Hebrew Farmers’ Association of Kerhonkson and Accord fifty-seven, and the Spring Glen Hebrew Aid Society eighteen.
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Moreover ten Jewish farmers in Leurenkill established a Hebrew school for their children in 1913. The children could not walk to the Hebrew school in Ellenville, and so their farmer parents put an advertisement for a Hebrew teacher in a New York City newspaper. Ephraim Yaffe, who had arrived in the United States from Europe only a few days earlier, saw the advertisement and immediately traveled to Leurenkill to apply for the position. Yaffe fell in love with the area, was hired, and first lived in the Slutsky family’s Nevele Falls Farm House. Yaffe noted that “the farmers had no automobiles, their horses were needed on the farms, the roads were muddy after a rain, covered with snow during the winter, and it was impossible for the children to walk after school hours to the Ellenville Hebrew school and back home, in the dark, a distance of three miles or more.”
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Several years later Yaffe became a farmer, but he also taught two classes at the Ellenville Hebrew school “from 4 to 6
P.M
., five days a week for $10 per week. This was much more than I could make per hour on the farm in those ‘good old days.’”
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