Can Kutsher’s, the Catskills’ last kosher resort, be saved?
It was a brand name
Tell-a-Friend
Print | Harry Galinsky |
“It was fun to work there,” says Harry Galinsky, a former superintendent of schools in Paramus. As an educator, he was off in the summers, he explains, and spent six weeks there in the ’50s as maitre d’hôtel. He enjoyed “a tremendous relationship with other staff members. It was a prize job for young people,” he notes, “what with being in the country and out of the hot city and making enough money to pay for college.”
A retiree who lives in Florida, Galinsky recalls that there were “always a lot of complaints by people working for hotel owners, but the Kutshers were very good to their staffs — who were very loyal” and who always spoke well about the hotel and the family to guests and others.
Galinsky said of the attempt to “save” the venerable resort, “They would be wise to reflect upon what made Kutsher’s a success and to follow some of those precepts. It was a brand name, and you came up there expecting to find wonderful food and wonderful entertainment.”
Also, “the place looked good and you felt good being a guest there.”
More on: Can Kutsher’s, the Catskills’ last kosher resort, be saved?
It’s haimish
Roz Green has been going to Kutsher’s for “at least 30 years” — and, says the Cliffside Park resident, she “will be going for yuntif this year too.”
“It’s haimish,” she says. “I like the people who come there.” She’s made many friends at Kutsher’s over the decades, she adds, “and some are still around.”
Milt (Kutsher) and Wilt (Chamberlain) — mitzvah men
Up in the Catskills, a man named Yossi Zablocki is trying to save the last blintz palace of my generation’s youth. The place is called Kutsher’s Country Club.
Once, in another world, I spent a lot of time there covering basketball players and boxers in training for their big fights and sports clinics that drew 500 high school and college coaches from all over the country for a week each summer to study under coaching giants like Red Auerbach, Nat Holman, Ara Parseghian, and Adolph Rupp.
The man who made it all work was named Milton Kutsher.
It was all good
Kutsher’s was all about people, says Ron Mintz, who spent many weekends and family vacations there while he was growing up in Paramus.
Yes, says the 35-year-old Mintz, the appeal of the hotel was multi-faceted: It was a convenient place to take the kids because of all the activities — “things kids could do and the adults would have their own diversions.” There was Ping Pong, swimming, Simon Says (for both kids and adults); a sports camp; tennis; ice skating in the winter; and shuffleboard, which is “almost an extinct pastime,” Mintz observes.
For Yossi Zablocki, it was the phone call of a lifetime.
Last February, the manager at Kutsher’s Country Club, the last kosher resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains, called him in a panic with news that owner Mark Kutsher was thinking of retiring and closing down the place.
Zablocki, 37, had spent his summers growing up at the famed resort in Monticello, N.Y., graduating from camper to lifeguard to gabbai and leader of High Holiday services. Suddenly he had an opportunity to realize a lifelong dream — and he jumped at it.
