While BME right down the street is a sign of the birth of religious Jewish life in America, the Vizhnitz shul is a living monument to rebirth and continuity. Founded by rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager in Vyzhnytsia, Austrian Bukovia (present day Ukraine), The Vizhnitz Chasidim were one of the lucky few groups of whom a remnant emerged alive from the fires of the Holocaust."The Shtetl," the neighborhood surrounding this building, is a conscious preservation of Jewish pre-war Europe. I would describe it as a town lost in time. The language they speak, the foods they eat, and the clothes they wear are almost the same as those that their great-grandmothers spoke, ate, and wore.A close friend of mine whom I used to visit in the shtetl and who used to pray in this building told me that in the main synagogue (there are more than a dozen sanctuaries/study rooms of different sizes in the building, which has grown through additions over the years.) more than 10,000 people pray on Rosh Hashana.Officially founded as an independent village in 1990, Kaser is the most densely populated municipality in New York State, and the 5th in the nation. With around 5,000 people in 0.2 square miles, it is the only municipality in the state more densely populated than New York City.

The Vizhnitzer Rebber, Rabbi Mordechai Hager ZT"L (1922-2018)

          In 1964, the Vizhnitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Hager, announced his plan to move his community of followers from Brooklyn to the idyllic village of Monsey.  He was hoping to leave behind the faced paced city life, and bring his followers to a peaceful place where they could live the lifestyle they wanted without many external influences.  While there are Vizhnitz synagogues in other areas of Monsey, and in many other towns and countries, the village of Kaser is the hub of this Chasidic group.
         

The Vizhnitz Shul - Khal Torath Chayim

The first three sites contain early Monsey history.  The next four sites depict early Jewish Monsey history.  (You may need to turn around the Google Map square to see the correct site, sorry.)

A Walking Tour of Historic Jewish Monsey 

The Tenures were among the first settlers in America. The land in this area was at one point a part of the precinct of Haverstraw. In 1791, The town of New Hempstead was formed, and in 1829 the name was changed to Ramapo. In an 1807 tax list, this farm was recorded as being 95 acres with five cows and five horses. That would have been typical for a subsistence farm in the area. The farm grew a number of subsistence crops like corn, cabbage, oats, potatoes, and buckwheat. There was an apple orchard, and the family made cider and applesauce. In order to feed the pigs, cows, chickens, and rabbits on the farm, the family grew hay and sold the surplus. Children hunted rabbits and went sledding in the winter.   Cornelius and Irving joined the Union Forces on August 21, 1862. They served in the 135th Regiment of the New York Volunteers, renamed the New York 6th Heavy Artillery. Letters that mostly Cornelius wrote home gave many details about battles but even more about daily life in the camps. After being wounded he wrote about his impression of the hospital.  When their father, Michael, died in the autumn of 1863, the farm fell on very hard times. Cornelius sent back as much money as he could, but it was not enough. In letters, his mother would ask him to return to the farm to help with all of the necessary work, but of course, he could not just leave the army. Mrs. Tenure leased part of the farm to Stephen Coe and allowed a Mr Oatley to sharecrop on the land after 1863. I have been in this house numerous times and it is beyond lovely. One gets a sense of its age when one crosses the threshold which is about five and a half feet tall. The smell of the old wood of the house and the narrow staircase carry a person back in time in a delightful way.

This beautiful sandstone house was built in 1756 by Zachariah Ferguson, and it is still standing today.  On March 11, 1795, Michael Tenure bought 100 acres on which this house stood for 600 pounds.  The Tenure family farmed the land for three generations.  Two Tenure brothers fought in the Civil War and sent letters home, giving a rare description of daily life and other aspects of the war.  At over 250 years old, this house is among Monsey's oldest features.  

The Ferguson House - Tenure House ,  1756

James Veith of Suffern, NY, a prospector of Native American sites, felt that the caves near the stream were so likely a former home of native people that he dug his own test holes. After finding more and more artifacts as he dug lower, he got in touch with William Carr, the director of the Bear Mountain Trailside Museum. In 1936, James Burggraf, Richard Koke, and James Veith excavated a section of this park for the Bear Mountain Trailside Museum. The largest rock shelter they found was 49 feet long, 6 feet deep and 6 feet high. They found refuse bone, charcoal, and a number of other artifacts in the soil in front of the shelter. Underneath the soil that contained the artifacts, they found a large sandstone slab. It turned out to be the fallen remnant of an overhang that used to make the shelter even larger. Underneath the stone slab, a darker layer of soil held a cache of much older artifacts.  Mr Burggraf wrote that it is extremely rare to find a place where two communities lived in the same place but at different times marked so clearly. Two feet of stone separated the later Algonquin artifacts associated with the Woodland Indians, who lived from around 1000 B.C.E. until European takeover, from the earlier Algonquin artifacts. The layer of artifacts underneath included arrowheads and tools that were more than 3,000 years old. These included one Levanna Point, another side-notched point, a base drill, and a pitted hammer-stone, two pottery rim shards that were cord-malleated, knives and other points.Some of the more than one hundred artifacts can be seen today at the Bear Mountain Trailside Museum. The Sandstone near the creek had been quarried since the 18th Century. The Tenure House is built of Sandstone quarried from this same stone that the Minsi Indians chose for their homes. Other residents in the area used this stone for fireplace mantles and tombstones. In the mid-19th Century, the Piermont Branch of the Erie Railroad was built along the Northwest border of the park. The track is still there though there have not been trains on it since the 1970's. No one seems sure who carved the stairs into the sandstone in a natural amphitheater. Was it carved by Native Americans, quarry workers, or later to facilitate ladies in their long dresses exploring the area? In the early 20th Century, the "clearing at the head of the glen" became an annual seasonal campsite for wandering Roma people. William Heidgerd, whose parents owned the surrounding land and who lived in the "glen house" (burned down in 1988), remembers how colorful the Roma people's clothing and wagons were. It was an irresistible temptation for the children to visit the wanderers, though the farmers kept an extra watch during the season the wanderers visited. I spent countless hours in this park as a child and adolescent. The wonder of the "Indian Steps" and the "caves" fired my imagination and the quiet calm of nature restored me.

Down a dirt path, along a spring fed stream, one can walk today along the oldest inhabited path in the area.  The stream used to be much more forceful and it carved out small caves in the sandstone in what is now Monsey Glen County Park.  In and near these caves, the first inhabitants of Monsey lived: Members of the Minsi (Wolf) tribe of the Lenappe (Delaware) Indians.

Monsey Glen County Park  - Minsi Indian Encampment - Quarry Glen

Eleazar Lord was the founder and president of the Manhattan Fire Insurance Company. He heard from his nephew about the experience of riding on a train and decided to try to create a train line from New York City to Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie. However, going through New Jersey was not an option, so Lord had the idea to run the train to Piermont, where passengers could take a boat across the Hudson River and join the railroad line on the East side of the river to Manhattan.  Levi Sherwood owned much of the land in this area including this building which was a store with an apartment above it, and still is. He was made station master in 1857. The Store was owned and run by Mr. Pierson for many years. To give a sign of how busy the early Monsey station was, it is said to have had as many trains coming through in 1842 as in 1930, or does that give us more of an idea of how slow business was in 1930? In 1851, the inaugural trip was made from Piermont to Dunkirk. At 447 miles, the Erie Railroad was the longest in the World. President Fillmore, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and other notables waved to amazed people at every depot. Webster rode on a rocking chair fastened to an open flatcar.

In 1842, Eleazar Lord, founder of the Erie Railroad built a platform on the main line between Piermont and Harriman. The area around the train station was first named Kakiat, but later changed to Monsey.  Minsi was the word for wolf, which was the totem of the tribes of Leni Lenape who lived here.  The train depot was in large measure responsible for the growth of the area which was farmland.


Monsey Train Depot - Sherwood's Building - Pierson's Store

Yaakov Kamenetsky (May his memory be blessed) was born in Kalushkove in 1891. His family soon moved to Dolhinov. During his youth he learned in Minsk. As a young man and adult, he learned in the famous Slabodka Yeshiva for 21 years. In 1926 he became the Rabbi of Tzvitavyan. In 1937 he came to America. He worked as a rabbi in Seattle and then moved to Toronto where his family was able to join him from Europe. In 1967 Rabbi Kamenetsky moved to Monsey. He gave classes in his home, in the local synagogue, and in the local school. In these classes, he would often treat the listeners to innovations he had personally come up with.He was so well esteemed that there were weekly reverse-commutes where his students who knew him from his time in Brooklyn drove all the way upstate to Monsey to learn with Reb Yaakov on Sunday mornings. Rabbis as great as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost expert of Jewish Law of the generation, would travel to Monsey to visit Reb Yaakov. Sometimes, young rabbis would "serve" him, following him around for a few weeks to learn from his pristine qualities and thought-out mannerisms before they would serve as leaders in communities around the World. A story is told by Mechel Tauber that his father, rabbi Ezriel Tauber, bought land on the corner of route 306 and Viola Rd., which he donated to Yeshivat Ohr Somayach (my alma mater). The gentleman at the Ramapo Planning Department did not seem eager to help the school get itself legally set up. That was until the mother of this gentleman from the planning department met Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky on the street. The sage greeted her with a smile and a blessing, as he was known to do to those he met on the street. It brought up this old woman so much that she changed her walking schedule to try to sync it up with Rabbi Kamenetsky's routine. The elder mother told her son about her remarkable change in attitude, and the son changed his attitude about rabbis and yeshivas.

Does the history of a place change with the physical face of the land?  Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, like his house, is no longer here, but his influence and positive affect are still felt.  In 1967, Rabbi Kamenestsky retired as the Rosh Yeshiva (head scholar) of Yeshivat Torah Vodaath in NYC and moved to Monsey.  Had he not come, it is difficult to say if or when Monsey would have become what it is today.

Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky's House

The beginning of Jewish Monsey is intimately connected to the beginning of Jewish education in the United States. Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz was the principal of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath which opened in Brooklyn in 1918 and was the first Jewish educational institution of its kind in the U.S. It was Rabbi Mendlowitz's dream to create a system of Jewish day schools that could serve every orthodox community in the country. Such an ambitious system would need teachers in high quantity and also quality. This building would become the high school and the college for promising students, and it indeed produced a significant part of the educational leaders of the generation. Mrs. Bracha Halberg, an anomaly for being a Sabbath Observing real estate agent, not to mention a female one, in the early 1940's, heard that R. Mendlowitz was looking for a rural location for his college, and helped him find this property. There was one problem. Mr Heidgerd, the owner, was not willing to sell his house to a Jewish person. Well, Mrs. Halberg was not one to be outmaneuvered. She arranged for her non-Jewish lawyer, a Mr. Crane, to buy the house and flip it to R. Mendlowitz. Mr. Heidgard may have been disappointed to learn that the house he wouldn't sell to a Jew would become the first of more than a hundred Jewish educational institutions in greater-Monsey.

In 1943, Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, established Beis Medrosh Elyon, and moved the Aish Dos Teacher's Training Program to Monsey, NY.  The high school and college were an extension of the Manhattan-based school Yeshivas Torah Vodaath, the first real Jewish educational institution in the country.  The school bought this building on the corner of Main Street and Maple Avenue and created the most important seed that would eventually grow to become the rich Jewish community of Monsey, NY. 

Beis Medrosh Elyon - Rabbinical College

Before the founding of Yeshiva of Spring Valley, Jewish families sent their children to public school and had them tutored in Jewish studies by Mr. Bolgatch. In 1943, Yeshiva of Spring Valley started in the basement of rabbi Soloveitchik's synagogue with four or five students learning from rabbi Shapiro, the town shochet (ritual slaughterer). The school spent one year in BME, and then rented space in rabbi Weinberg's chicken factory on "the Jewish Hill", Ewing Road and surroundings. Its next home was off of Union Road until this structure was built on the corner of Main St. and Maple Ave. There were not many families in the area who cared about a Jewish education. Harry Halberg, the son of Bracha Halberg who sold BME to rabbi Mendlowitz, would go door to door asking Jewish families to please send their children to the school. He brought his daughters along to show the families that children who received Jewish education could read and write English well and speak without an accent.  Rabbi Hershel Mashinsky is an example of the way BME and YSV were loyally tied. A student of Torah Vodaath from Kindergarten, through Aish Dos, through BME, he felt naturally drawn to helping educate the next generation of American Jews. He taught at YSV all of his life, becoming a guidance counselor there in his "retirement". Reb Dov Greenberg, the son-in-law of Rabbi S.F. Medlowitz was the principal of the school for many years. He used to open the telephone book and dial the number of any family whose name sounded Jewish. He would proceed to ask them to join the school, offering tuition breaks for those who needed it.

As Spring Valley and Monsey transitioned from a Summer bungalow destination to a year-round home, the fledgling Jewish community needed education for their children.  Yeshiva of Spring Valley was created in 1943, before Beis Medrish Elyon, and it became the cornerstone of the community.  For more than 75 years it has provided Jewish education, and it continues to do so today in a new building on West Maple Road.

Yeshiva of Spring Valley

While BME right down the street is a sign of the birth of religious Jewish life in America, the Vizhnitz shul is a living monument to rebirth and continuity. Founded by rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager in Vyzhnytsia, Austrian Bukovia (present day Ukraine), The Vizhnitz Chasidim were one of the lucky few groups of whom a remnant emerged alive from the fires of the Holocaust. "The Shtetl," the neighborhood surrounding this building, is a conscious preservation of Jewish pre-war Europe. I would describe it as a town lost in time. The language they speak, the foods they eat, and the clothes they wear are almost the same as those that their great-grandmothers spoke, ate, and wore. A close friend of mine whom I used to visit in the shtetl and who used to pray in this building told me that in the main synagogue (there are more than a dozen sanctuaries/study rooms of different sizes in the building, which has grown through additions over the years.) more than 10,000 people pray on Rosh Hashana. Officially founded as an independent village in 1990, Kaser is the most densely populated municipality in New York State, and the 5th in the nation. With around 5,000 people in 0.2 square miles, it is the only municipality in the state more densely populated than New York City.

A Walking Tour of Historic Jewish Monsey

The Vizhnitz Shul - Khal Torath Chayim

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources