Those Summer Days

By: Larry Gordon

It might be the most coveted and enjoyable season of the year depending on which part of the world you reside in. Although it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, it’s winter in locations like Melbourne, Australia and Johannesburg, South Africa, but nothing like your typical New York winter.

With Tishah B’Av now behind us, baruch Hashem, even though we still do not have the promised third Beis HaMikdash, we are still confident that it will no doubt happen soon. Last week, I mentioned Hashem’s infinite patience and how He expects us to display the same amount of patience, but there’s an imbalance in that equation that will hopefully someday be rectified.

In the meantime, we have no choice but to wait and of course, be patient. Last week’s Tishah B’Av fast was the longest fast day on our calendar and is challenging and often difficult.

In the course of that day—our low point on the calendar—I recalled the father of a friend of mine who was once sitting directly across from me in shul. I think it was a Shabbos morning at this time of year. He was in Auschwitz for two years during the war. In our conversation, he mentioned that in the camps, the Nazis would serve extra good food on days like Tishah B’Av and Yom Kippur, when they knew the Jewish prisoners of these evil monsters would most likely abstain from eating in observance of the day.

He said that the next day after the fast, they served them no food at all. I asked him what he and the others did about that and he just looked at me and said, “We fasted for two days.”

I thought about him last Thursday afternoon when I was just a little hungry as the day progressed. I thought of him and how silly it was of me to feel this way. And then I thought back to a more recent event when over 200 Jews were held captive underground in Gaza, forced to exist on a sparse diet as they were tortured by the modern-day Nazis of Hamas. There was evil in the world back then as there is evil in the world today. But the questions remain of how much and for how long?

Then again, summertime for many is the most cheerful time of year. How do I figure that? When I think back to the 1960s and early 70s, many of our families in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust tried to find a way to make life normal again any way they could.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law lost their parents to the Nazis along with a combined 20 siblings, some of whom were murdered in front of their eyes. But for the most part and for the benefit of their children—the new generation—they managed to keep it all inside and remain silent.

As I’m sure I mentioned in the past, my mom was born here in New York and my dad was born in Belarus, which back then was known as White Russia. He and his family arrived in New York in 1934. I think about them in the summer more than any other time of year because unlike the rest of the year, we spent so much time together up here in the mountains.

We were in a bungalow colony for a number of years with people named Halberstam, Twersky, Rokeach, Rubin, Safrin, and others. They came from Rebbeishe families, many of which lost everything in the Holocaust. We shared bungalow porches in those days so we became automatic neighbors and friends. Our porch mates or next-door neighbors was a family by the name Levertov.

Menashe Levertov, the father, looked to be in his late-50s. He was a Schindler Jew, saved by ending up on the list of the factory workers shielded from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler. He was also Schindler’s Rabbi, so to a speak, and is prominently featured in both the book and the movie “Schindler’s List.” I know his grandson Menashe, who now lives in the Five Towns.

The Levertovs were also our next-door neighbors on Montgomery Street in Crown Heights. Rabbi Levertov was a friendly man who always flashed a smile at us. He survived being executed in Majdanek near Lublin twice. Once, the would-be executioner’s gun jammed and the other time a wild dog began to bark wildly and the killer shot the dog instead.

Once settled in Brooklyn with a new wife and two daughters, Rabbi Levertov was walking home from shul one rainy Friday night in 1966. He was hit by a speeding car and killed instantly. I was a very young child at the time, but I still tried to grasp what had taken place. It was only in later years that I learned his story, and years later when I visited Poland and went to see the Schindler factory in Lublin. In the window of the factory were photos of the men and women Schindler saved, among them his Rabbi, Menashe Levertov.

I’ll never forget the end of the book and the end of the movie when the Schindler factory had to close as the Allies were closing in and anyone associated with the Nazis had to flee. Oskar Schindler was inconsolable, murmuring to himself, “I could have done more, I could have saved more.”

Oskar Schindler is buried in the non-Jewish cemetery on the southern slope of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and bears the honorific title, Righteous Among the Nations. He was a righteous gentile who saved so many and is responsible for the existence of so many Jewish families today, but felt all along that he could have saved more.

Sometime between the aftermath of the Holocaust in 1945 and the 1960s, the survivors managed to discover summer life in the Catskills. Many had lost everyone and everything but they still thirsted for something resembling normalcy. Now, in retrospect, it seems that their resilience was remarkable. The desire to survive is apparently very difficult to suppress.

I think that today’s Catskills has mostly forgotten about its genesis and how it once provided an escape for many to try to see life differently. Today, it has evolved into a Shangri-La and an escape, not from the bitterness of torture, death, and murder but from the good life that so many have built into an even better and more luxurious lifestyle, surrounded by those same winding roads, sharp turns, and hills that dip and rise not unlike a rollercoaster.

There are still deer in the woods and every now and then you get to see a bear rummaging through the post-Shabbos garbage for something good to eat. Rarely are they disappointed, so we need to be careful.

During the Covid summer, when we rented a house in Ellenville because all the summer camps were closed there, we were just a few miles away from our old bungalow colony in Ulster Heights, a short distance from the rundown town of Ellenville. There’s a big shul in Ellenville on a large property with very few people even on Shabbos. To make sure there was a minyan, we walked up and down those steep mountainous hills without fail.

One day, curiosity got the better of me and I hunted down our old bungalow colony in Ulster Heights. It was called Pine View Hill back in the day and as far as I can recall, we had a great bungalow on top of a steep hill. We had a front porch and a back porch in addition to two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

It was the summer of 2020 and I tried to mentally reconstruct what once was. But more than half a century had passed. As I drove up the steep hill, it all looked so desolate. There were very few buildings still standing. I recognized some steps that led up a hill to what was the main building. I think attached to this building was a grocery store where we could buy fresh milk, bread, and butter every day. I was out there early one morning and accidentally tipped over a box of cottage cheese. It was a mess, but I didn’t admit it to anyone, at least not until today.

I have a lot of bungalow stories that I’ve collected over the decades. There was a yeshiva in Brooklyn that one year had a strict policy that anyone who spent their summer at this nameless bungalow colony could not come back to that certain yeshiva in September. There were times that such a policy could be a forerunner of a crisis of sorts. But not in this place and not in that year. The owners got together and decided to change the name of the bungalow colony. Anyone who was asked if they had attended the XYZ Bungalow Colony that year was able to honestly answer no.

Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. In some ways they did and in some ways they didn’t. Either way, I don’t know about you, but I’m holding on. 

Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.