As summer nears, many Hasidic communities in Brooklyn are beginning to prepare for holidays in New York’s Catskill Mountains, long the preferred destination for religious families looking for a reprieve from urban life. Yet amid the rolling green hills and low-slung bungalows, live ticks — tiny creatures that have infected many vacationers with Lyme disease,…
From the 1970s to my [last] stay at Kutsher’s in 1997, I remember it as a heymish Shangri-La — starting with the check-in welcome by owner Helen Kutsher. A post-breakfast line-dance workout, then – trying to avoid the droppings of the resident Canadian geese on the lawn — a solo rowing session in a boat…
Kutsher’s, the fabled Catskills resort hotel, is set to be demolished later this month. The 1,300-acre property near Monticello, N.Y., was sold last year for $8.18 million to Veria Lifestyle Inc., which plans to turn it into a health and wellness resort. Pre-demolition work already has begun with the clearing of trees and brush, and…
It was all about tale telling at the Society of Illustrators’ “From the Borscht Belt to Seinfeld: The Evolution of Jewish American Comedy.” With welcoming comments by Society’s executive director Anelle Miller, panelists included Yiddish scholar and Jewish comedy maven Prof. Edward Portnoy, “comedy writer Tom Leopold (“Seinfeld,” “Cheers”), Drew Friedman, whose amazing caricature illustrations…
FBI agents have descended on properties owned by Orthodox developer Shalom Lamm in the upstate New York village of Bloomingburg, according to eyewitness accounts and a report in the Time Herald-Record, a local newspaper. Between 50 and 60 FBI agents have swarmed the town, with 20 FBI vehicles parked outside the Bloomingbug headquarters of Lamm’s…
One night in January, an Orthodox Jewish real estate developer brought a handgun to a planning board meeting in a small upstate New York town. The gun was on the waist of one of the two uniformed security guards accompanying Shalom Lamm, who may be the most hated man in the town of Mamakating. The…
In the mid-1980s, Eleanor Bergstein returned to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where she had vacationed as a child during its heyday, to research her screenplay for “Dirty Dancing.” One night, she got a call from Hollywood. “While I was on the phone,” she told the Forward, “the operator broke in and said: ‘You better…
Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld pointed to a pile of rubble at what’s left of the famous Catskills resort hotel the Concord — once a glamorous beast of luxury with 1,200 rooms, three golf courses and a 3,000-seat dining room. “Over here was the outdoor pool, which was a tremendous, Olympic-sized swimming pool that I worked at…
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