Mountains and Giants

Holy Mixed Multitude

By One of the Boys

The small one-car garage that was used as a shul reverberated with many accents but with one voice

Wagon Wheel, a collection of about 20 bungalows (one-bedroom units with those extra-wide old hotel beds and the little refrigerators with a tiny freezer section inside) was the idyllic corner of the Catskills where my childhood memories of summer were formed. Located just down the road from Camp Morris (the summer home of Yeshivah Rabbi Chaim Berlin, which today is a sprawling city of its own but then was just an old hotel building housing the yeshivah and some staff) and a mile or two out of Woodridge where the famed Kamenitz Yeshivah was located, Wagon Wheel hosted an eclectic mix of European Holocaust survivors and American-born yeshivah graduates.

We kids had no day camp or organized activities, but we were never bored. The pool was always open and there were plenty of grasshoppers to catch and put in old baby-food jars. We would pick blueberries from the wild bushes near the woods and our mothers would bake them in to pies to be shared with the neighbors at the gala Shabbos Nachamu kiddush.

Up the road there was Steve’s Dude Ranch, which included a small petting zoo and horse rides on the trails cut through the woods near our colony. Steve’s father-in-law, Eli, came from the same city in Poland as my father and we would often take Shabbos walks up to “the farm” to say hello. Steve was an accomplished baal tefillah and would ride into town on his tall white horse to daven Minchah-Maariv in the Woodridge shul. We would surreptitiously pocket the sugar cubes our mother kept on hand to serve our zeide tea when he would visit (remember how it was held between the teeth as one sipped the hot tea?), and feed Steve’s horse the cubes — which he would lick up happily from our outstretched palms.