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AUGUST 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER5,29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Moving To Monticello An Inside Peek into a New Upstate Year-Round Community BY MALKY LOWINGER
I
magine being a young Chassidic couple with two or three kids living in a high-rise building somewhere in Williamsburg. You know it’s time to move out of your cramped 2-bedroom apartment with the laundry room in the basement and the elevator out of service much of the time. So you start to look for housing only to discover that there’s barely anything available and that the prices are sky high, not just in Williamsburg but also in Boro Park, Monsey, and Monroe. You’re basically stuck in this little hovel staring out the window at the asphalt and the crowded sidewalks. Unless you are willing to consider moving to Monticello. Yes, Monticello. Located in the center of Sullivan County on 4.1 square miles of land, the village of Monticello boasts a population of close to 7,000 as well as a county jail, a local radio station, and the Monticello Raceway. In its heyday, Monticello
was the center of the Borscht Belt entertainment district with trendy shops and boutiques lining its main street, Broadway. But those days are long gone, and much of Broadway has become derelict and abandoned over the past few decades. Today, there’s a thriving summer-focused community in the area with tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews spending the summer (and increasingly the spring and fall) in the various bungalow colonies, developments, resorts, camps, and hotels in the area around Monticello and beyond. It’s a thriving, pulsating bed of activity from June through September, and the construction never seems to end. But you knew all that already. What you may not know is that an increasing number of mostly Chassidic young families are deciding to make the town of Monticello their yearround home. And the trend is catching on, quietly but steadily.
WHEN the Chassidic community recognizes an opportunity, they do what they have to do to make it work. And with the housing market in traditional areas all but maxed out, they look for alternative solutions. So began the renaissance of the Monticello Jewish community. By now, an estimated 80-100 families have moved in. Year-round Orthodox communities in the Catskills are not a new concept. A small yeshiva community is based near the South Fallsburg Yeshiva and is comprised mostly of kollel yungeleit. An established Vizhnitz community is located in Kiamesha on the site of the old Gibber’s Hotel. A Breslov community currently exists in Liberty. And pockets of frum Jews live in the towns of Woodridge, Mountaindale, and beyond. A coordinator for Catskills Hatzolah comments on the growing year-round population in Sullivan County. “Just five years ago,” he said, “we had one Hatzolah ambulance stationed upstate for emergency situations. Today, we have four, plus a full-time paramedic who is stationed all year in the Raleigh Hotel.” He estimates that there are about 500 families living in the area year-round, with an increasing number of shops and stores open all year to accommodate them. I visited the Chassidic community in Monticello, located off Broadway, behind Fialkoff’s Pizza. Cruising around the area, I saw groups of young Chassidic girls playing jump rope and boys riding their bikes while a non-Jewish neighbor looked on from his own porch across the street. The houses are modest but there’s a front lawn and a backyard and gently sloping tree-lined streets. Compared to the asphalt sidewalks of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, it’s a slice of Heaven. The community was born four or five years ago when ten brave young Chassidic families decided to move upstate mostly because it was easier to obtain social services there than back in the city. These families rented their homes, and, to be honest, most of them eventually moved back to Monsey and Williamsburg. Winters were hard, chinuch was complicated, and family was a hundred miles away. But one family decided to stay. They liked the peace and quiet, the front lawn and the backyard and the crisp clean air. And of course, they were thrilled with the cost of housing. Rabbi Yakov Mandelovics lives in the burgeoning Monticello community, and he says the average home in the area is being sold for $160$180K. No, that’s not a typo. He says his neighbor purchased a home on a two-acre property for $234K. And another neighbor spent $129K on a beautiful brick house. As the demand for homes steadily grew, developers and investors began looking seriously at construction opportunities in the area. With a limited number of homes on the market, the community split into two neighborhoods, about twenty minutes walking distance from each other. There are already three shuls serving the
