Borscht Belt Museum Opens in the Catskills

“The last town I worked in was so small the mice were stooped shouldered.” “I plugged in my electric razor, and the trolley stopped.” The one-liners may not have been born in the Catskill Mountains of New York, but you’d have to say it was certainly bred there.

Alternately called the Borscht Belt, or the Yiddish Alps, it’s more recently known as the land that time forgot. But now, there’s a new attraction coming to town: the Borscht Belt Museum, located in Ellenville, NY. About 100 miles north of New York City, the one-time epicenter of entertainment, is slated to open in late 2025.

Right now, its collection of memorabilia and ephemera is more of a coming attraction than a permanent exhibit. “The idea for a museum has probably been around for twenty years, but didn’t bear fruit until about three years ago.” Andrew Jacobs is the President of the not-for-profit board and is happy to see the cultural institution moving forward. “We’re only in our second year and I’m not going to pat our efforts on the back, but I think we’ve done an amazing job in a year to take basically an abandoned building with no roof. We have a museum. It’s not even a pop up because we have a lot there.” And a lot more is on the way.

To know the history of the Borscht Belt is to know its early pioneers. For the uninitiated, borscht is a beet soup popular in Eastern Europe. It was kept alive by emigrating Jews, living in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A steady stream of Jewish immigrants made their way to the Catskills around the turn of the 20th Century, and established bungalow colonies, boarding houses, and eventually hotels. Many were farmers in their native countries, so the agrarian lifestyle was more akin to their livelihood, especially in light of the pestilence and miasma which was omnipresent in the ghetto. The hotels welcomed Jewish clientele escaping persecution in Europe, only to find their new country rife with the same discrimination. So prevalent was the antisemitism that the Federation of Jewish Farmers published The Jewish Vacation Guide. The guide’s purpose was to steer Jewish travelers to hospitable merchants and lodgings. Some twenty years later, a similar publication, The Green Book, became a pocket reference for African American travelers who were looking to escape the similar degradation.

At its height, the Catskills, specifically in Sullivan and Ulster counties, hosted upwards of one thousand residences, split between bungalow colonies, camps, and high end resorts. Nevele, Kutsher’s, Brown’s, along with uber resorts like the Concord and Grossinger’s, featured dining rooms capable of accommodating well over a thousand patrons. Grossinger’s had its own post office, air strip, and was the first resort to manufacture artificial snow. The Borscht Belt flourished between 1945 and 1965. Top notch entertainers like Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hackett, Lenny Bruce, Phyllis Diller, and Mel Brooks, were just a few among a cavalcade of comedians, making ‘em laugh.

“The comedy from the Borscht Belt has been covered and everybody knows about Milton Berle, and Jerry Seinfeld, and Woody Allen, who got his start there. So many famous comedians. People don’t talk about the music quite as much, but pretty much everyone performed there if they were around during that era.” Gideon Evans wants to keep the legacy of the Borscht Belt singers alive. He co-produced, along with Broadway veteran Jill Abramovitz, an hour longhomage performed at this year’s Borscht Belt Fest, featuring songs by Fanny Brice, Steve Lawrence, and Neil Sedaka, among others.

While not in a big way, memories of the resorts have found themselves on stage and screen as relics of a bygone era. The 1987 film Dirty Dancing is still a fan favorite. Catskills on Broadway enjoyed a two year run on “The Great Way” in the early nineties. A more subtle remembrance can be found in 1999s A Walk On the Moon And leave it to Woody Allen to recycle a well-worn chestnut for his 1977 film, Annie Hall: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill Mountain resort and one of ‘em says, ‘Boy the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah I know; and such small portions!’” The punch line serves as the name of the current exhibition at the Borscht Belt Museum. “And Such Small Portions!” offers a broad depiction of the resort-filled Catskills from the earliest years of the 20th Century right through the 1970s, and even a bit beyond.

Fittingly, the museum is housed in the former site of the Home National Bank, one of the few institutions that would lend money to Jewish hoteliers and bungalow owners (in the early years). The current exhibit offers everything from the furnishing of bungalows to the high end hotels, and plenty in between. There’s even an open mic for former Borscht Belt visitors to record their memories. Many items, once grabbed as souvenirs like hangars, shoehorns and other tchotchkes, have been donated. The ubiquitous, oversized, keychain scopes dangle in the museum windows. Allen J. Frishman, a lifelong resident of the area and author of few books on the era, including Tales of a Borscht Belt Plumber, claims to have donated the lion’s share of memorabilia for the current exhibit. “The stuff in the museum contains 80% of my personal collection. I hate to toot my horn, but thank God I saved all these things.” The Monticello native sites three “As” as the beginning of the end for the Summer Shangri-La: Automobiles, Airplanes, and Air Conditioning. Mr. Evans puts the time perspective: “The Catskills were sort of like Hollywood and Las Vegas, but it just didn’t get the press that those places got. But it certainly was as important.”

Today, several of the former fortress hotels dot the landscape, either completely demolished or nearly so. The Concord, which had been earmarked for development, now sits rusting away. Kutcher’s has two buildings remaining. Grossinger’s, which closedin 1986, was fully leveled last year, although, according to Sullivan County officials, hardly a year goes by without someone expressing interest in the property. In Ulster county, the Nevele Hotel was bought by a development firm a few years back, but environmental issues have postponed the project. On a clear day, with a good vantage point, you can see the cylindrical multi-story hotel sticking out like a giant salt shaker among the verdant hills. Sullivan County director of communications, Dan Just, doesn’t see the level of accommodations coming back, but suggests that some locales can be developed on a smaller scale. Perhaps the resurrection of some of the hotel golf courses. “Anything we can do to develop these sites—they’re in various zones for development, we’re certainly interested in looking at and hearing more from developers as they come along.”

The Borscht Belt Museum, 90 Canal Street, Ellenville, NY. The Borscht Belt Fest returns to Ellenville July 26th and 27th, 2025. 

Featured image at the top is by Bradford R. Devins

By Tom Farkas, writer, editor, former arts editor for NY1.