Every Summer Thousands of Hasidic Families Leave Brooklyn for the Same Mountains — Here's Why

Every summer my house joins thousands of Hasidic families driving from Brooklyn up to the same Catskill mountains, and I finally ask why we keep going back. I trace the pull to the old Borscht Belt years, when more than a million people filled bungalow colonies, camps and hotels, and as many as five hundred resorts stood in Sullivan and Ulster counties. I show why the grand hotels mostly closed by the nineteen seventies while the plain bungalow colonies held on, and what my family packs into the car for Shabbos each year. By the end I tell you what a house like mine is really protecting when it drives north every summer.