These institutions shaped American Jewish culture, enabling Jews to become more American while at the same time introducing the American public to immigrant Jewish culture. Home-grown Borscht Belt entertainment provided America with a rich supply of comedians, musicians and performers. Legions of young men and women used the Catskills as a springboard to successful careers and marriages. The hotels and summer camps of the area provided jobs to thousands of college students who relied on their wages and tips to finance the education that would catapult them (or so they hoped) into the higher reaches of American society. We suspect that Richard Feynman, the Princeton physicist, was not the only Nobel Prize winner to bus tables in the Catskills.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Borscht Belt reached the pinnacle of its history, and starting in the 1970s declined till the point where only a handful of major resorts remain. The once-teeming roads of the Catskills are largely barren, with most hotels and bungalow colonies burned, decayed, or destroyed. Many who worked and vacationed there are growing old and may not be able to provide their history in a short while. There is precious little time left for scholars, educators, artists, and others to save what remnants there are and to preserve the legacy of this monumental Jewish-American cultural phenomenon.

The Catskills Institute was created by the organizing committee of the History of the Borscht Belt conference that was held in Woodridge, New York on Labor Day Weekend 1995.

The energy and interest from the first conference has led to the formation of the Catskills Institute, an organization to promote research and education on the significance of the Catskill Mountains for Jewish-American life.

We have gotten a great start on our agenda, and have attracted a corps of members. Of course, we are looking for more, and we welcome your support. We plan to do a lot of things, and your financial and practical support can make them happen:

• Organize History of the Catskills Conferences

• Collect archival material and artifacts (photos, newspaper and magazine articles, hotel menus and brochures, home movies, personal memoirs, interviews) -- We have attracted hotel menus, mementos, and postcards, personal photos, local business papers, unpublished poetry, fiction, and memoirs, religious papers, and other items of local interest.

• Produce a newsletter to inform people about the work we are doing, beginning with a summary of the conference, interviews with people working on Catskills projects, excerpts from works in progress, and bibliographies of Catskills materials - The inaugural issue of the Newsletter will be out in April or May. We hope to make this a quarterly -- and even more frequently if membership and interest swells.

• Expand our Website to provide on-line information and research aid to both a general audience and to scholars -- We envision this as a resource as well as a source of fun and entertaining ideas, humor, jointly-written short stories-in-progress, and virtual hotels and bungalow colonies where you can wonder through buildings and rooms.

• Create a listserver on the Internet to provide interactive exchange among scholars and artists working on Catskills projects.

• Develop exhibitions at institutions such as Boston's Revolving museum, as well as the Jewish museum.

• Develop plans for a permanent facility to house our archives, hold exhibitions, sponsor lectures, serve as a resource for scholars, provide an educational location for the public to learn about the legacy of the Catskills, and make connections with Jewish research institutes, publications, educational institutions, and religious organizations in order to better link our efforts with the larger Jewish community.

• Produce mini-curriculum units that will be useful to both secular and Jewish schools.

• Plan for the creation of the Catskill Foundation, to provide financial support for others conducting research on the Catskills.

This is an ambitious agenda, no doubt. But the founders of the Catskills Institute, joined by the Advisory Board, have lots of energy for this variety of projects.

We really want your help in working on these -- get in touch!