Wanderers - The Jewish Standard

We like to roam around the world. It has been a pastime since we were married and we’ve covered a lot of our earth’s most beautiful places. We trained our offspring to do the same.

The other day, a few short days ago, our son and family checked in with us from a ski resort in Hokkaido, Japan, a place where the skiers glide into the hotel’s lobby on a magical carpet of brilliant white snow. No ski lifts needed.

Alas, we are not skiers, so this is not for us!

Other family members are in other places. A huge crew, including eight great-grands, and six parents and grandparents, are wandering the well-heated streets of Israel, enjoying lots of ice cream and water play and begging the climate bosses to let our people cool. Just being together in the precious streets of Zion is momentous and energizing for all these day-schoolers and their preschool siblings.

Our granddaughter Stella is loving Hawaii on a long leisurely trip with friends.

Another large contingent of our family, eight strong, very recently spent beautiful days at a magnificent villa in southern Italy, followed by a spectacular African safari.

Then there were our family members who experienced Brazil; fabulous lively Rio and huge Sao Paulo, minus the intrusive jet lag of other continents.

Of course summer also means Camp Ramah, where we were represented in absentia! Zimriyah happened without us.

Thus, feeling a lot lonely and definitely missing out on all the adventures, we decided to do a minor jaunt ourselves. Minor was definitely the operative word, but while we traversed very little geographically, the trip back in time made it worthwhile. We went to Ellenville, New York, not exactly on the New York Times list of places to go but definitely featuring cooler weather than sizzling New Jersey and hosting and boasting of lots of fond memories.

No doubt you’ve already figured out that we went to the Borscht Belt Museum. But before I tell you about the museum, I am compelled to digress and tell you about borscht. This must not go unsaid. Borscht is definitely, emphatically, not the gross sweet reddish concoction that comes in a jar in your supermarket’s kosher section, to which some add sour cream and then have the utter chutzpah to identify this mess as borscht. My friends, trust me. This is not borscht, even if your very own mother called it that. To her, I apologize profusely and respectfully, but it’s still not borscht! And lest you feel I am being unreasonable, my very own mother-in-law was known to serve that jarred chilled red sugar drink and identify it as borscht.

If you are a descendant of Ukraine or Poland or Russia or perhaps some other Eastern European land, you know what borscht really is. It is a somewhat sour beet soup, with lemon juice generously added, often sweetened with sugar, featuring fatty chunks of flanken floating around to give the soup its heft and taste of ambrosia, or maybe it is manna! At the end of the cooking process, my mother, a world class borscht maker, would beat in egg whites. Right now, in the midst of this summer heat wave, I still crave that extravagant creation. It is simply delicious and it will never ever come in a jar or near a container of sour cream.

The museum in Ellenville bears the name of the soup because of the ubiquitous alignment of Jews and borscht. Back in the olden days, the Jewish mountains, as they were often called, began to bear the name the Borscht Belt, an explosive phenomenon, a historic place annually bringing tens of thousands of New York-area Jews to the endless resorts, hotels, bungalow colonies, and kuchaleins that every summer from the turn of the 20th century until approximately the 1970s became an enormous Jewish enclave where Jews played games and sports, danced to live music, swam, ate endless kosher food, especially at the many hotels, and often met their “basherts.” That moment in time is now over, with the exception of a large influx of charedim who are breathing new life into what were defunct bungalow colonies. The period is now memorialized by the museum, which is filled with memorabilia and is growing rapidly. It is nostalgia at its best and a worthwhile visit.

The museum has also been behind a series of road markers in most of the towns that comprised the Borscht Belt. Personally, I was one of those asked to speak last October when a marker was permanently placed in Parksville, a town close to my history and heart.

When we entered the museum, we were greeted by a friendly ticket seller who immediately recognized us from our picture, which is hanging in the museum lobby. We had participated in a remembrance for couples who met at the Borscht Belt. Our little story and our attached wedding picture are right there on the wall!

The museum can be toured in a half hour. It’s a work in progress, capturing the spirit of the halcyon days with a lot of growing yet to come. It often hosts special events and festivals. Look for its compelling publicity.

From the museum we retraced our history a bit more and drove to the site of the Nevele Hotel, where we honeymooned in 1960. We saw nothing but weeds. No buildings at all. That was clearly a disappointment, but it was not unexpected.

Next door was the Fallsview Hotel, which is now operating under the name Honors Haven. It looked decent but the food is not kosher. The parking lot was impressively full, so it is trying to keep the Borscht Belt alive. I would imagine that kosher meals might do a lot to bring back some of the former area clientele. Certainly it would bring us back! Should I tell them that? If you think that’s a good idea, please feel free to send me an email and I will forward it to the hotel. Maybe we can make something happen! rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

Our little journey was short and sweet. Now we need to plan a more elaborate trip!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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