When people ask a heimish guy like Refoel Franklin what he’s doing on a farm in upstate New York, he doesn’t even get the question. “Why would anyone want to live in the city, when you can be out here in G-d’s country?”
Photos Meir Haltovsky, Family Archives
When people ask a heimish guy like Refoel Franklin what he’s doing on a farm in upstate New York, he doesn’t even get the question. “Why would anyone want to live in the city, when you can be out here in G-d’s country?” he asks in wonder. But it’s not like he’s living in isolation (although he did once spend a year living alone in a log cabin in the Montana hills):
His slaughterhouse and dairy farm produce the only chicken and milk products some rebbes will eat
I motored many a mile through the rolling farmlands of Bethel, New York,just a half-mile from Woodstock (which supposedly defined a generation, but is now an answer to a trivia question) in search of the Franklin farmstead and home of Pelleh Poultry. Bearing left onto Happy Avenue (no kidding!) I arrive at number 522 to find Refoel Franklin — the man whose slaughterhouse and farm produce the only chicken and milk products some rebbes will eat. Decked out in work clothes, his face framed by a cap and long beard, he’s hard at work sharpening a chain saw on the back of his pickup truck.
My first question is the most obvious one, considering how long it took to get out here: “What are you doing here?” Refoel turns the question right around, asking “Where do you live?” When I reply, “Far Rockaway,” Refoel doesn’t miss a beat: “So what are you doing there? You know, we give tours, sometimes for heimishe chevreh in Yiddish. I tell them about the soil, about why we spread manure, we give milking demonstrations, we explain what we do here.
Create a free account to keep reading.
