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Pictured above is
Kaaterskill Falls located very close to the popular Frum
Jewish summer vacation spots of Tannersville, NY and Hunter, NY.
Kaaterskill Falls is
a two-drop waterfall located in the eastern Catskill Mountains
of New York, on the north side of Kaaterskill Clove, in Greene
County's Town of Hunter. The dual cascades total 260 feet in
height, making the falls the highest in New York. |
Brief history of the "Catskill
Mountains" also know as the Borscht Belt.
The “Catskill
Mountains” is a traditional vacation land with many summer
resorts and camp grounds. During the first part of the 20th
century, many ethnic groups (Germans, Czechs, Jews, etc)
established summer resorts in the nearby Shawangunk Mountains,
located south of the Catskills near the town of New Paltz.
However, since the Shawangunk name was both hard to spell and to
say, those resorts cleverly adopted the Catskills as their home,
thereby capitalizing on the strong reputation the area already
enjoyed. The resorts together became known as The "Borscht
Belt," a collection of Jewish resorts (Brown's, Grossinger's,
etc) in this region.
Borscht Belt is an informal term for the summer
resorts of the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan and Ulster
Counties in upstate New York which were frequented by Ashkenazi
Jews. Borscht is a kind of beet soup popular with people of
Eastern European origin. The term Borscht Belt can also refer to
the Catskill region itself.
Borscht Belt hotels, bungalow colonies, summer
camps, were frequented by Jewish New Yorkers, particularly in
the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Because of this, this area was also
nicknamed the Jewish Alps and Solomon County (a modification of
Sullivan County), by many people who visited there. Well-known
resorts of the area included Brickman's, Brown's, The Concord,
Grossinger's, Granit, Kutsher's Hotel and Country Club, the
Nevele, Friar Tuck Inn, The Pines, Raleigh and the Windsor.
With changes in demographic and travel patterns,
caused partially by the wide-spread adoption of air conditioning
that made the cities less unpleasant in the summer, the area has
declined as a major vacation destination. Perhaps the single
biggest factor was the decline of discrimination or
"restriction" in the hotel and travel industry by the 1960s.
Prior to that time, many resorts and hotels, implicitly or
otherwise, did not welcome Jews. The replacement of old travel
routes such as old New York State Route 17 (superseded by an
express highway of the same name, now in the midst of an upgrade
to Interstate 86), had left the area with a veritable museum of
abandoned or decaying travel-related businesses from the Borscht
Belt's heyday.
Today the region is a summer home for many
Orthodox Jewish families, primarily from the New York
metropolitan area. It has many summer homes and bungalow
colonies (including many of the historic colonies), as well as
year-round dwellers. It even has its own year-round branch of
the Orthodox Jewish volunteer emergency medical service Hatzolah.
A few resorts remain in the region, (Kutsher's Hotel, Villa
Roma, Friar Tuck, to name a few). |
