Photo exhibition 'The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland' opens in Maitland this week

There are few better compelling testaments to our old lifeways than the architectural ruins they leave behind. Today, the once-legendary “Borscht Belt” of New York State hotels stands as a marker of Jewish immigration, or as the Holocaust Museum puts it, a “tale of the assimilation of Jewish immigrants.”

Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld evocatively captures the eerie twilight of these abandoned resort ghost towns in this show. At its peak sometime in the 1950s, the New York Times claims that over 900 hotels were clustered in the Catskills, about two hours from New York City. The comedians breaking out from their stages — Sid Caesar, Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers — defined an era. That era, though, has passed.

Scheinfeld reminds us of this in shots of empty, cracked swimming pools, tattered rose-colored hotel corridors, and overgrown carved stone steps decaying back into nature. Together with her photographs, this traveling exhibit collects old lighters, letter openers, postcards and other artifacts from the hotels on display.

Hovering somewhere between poetry and archeology, this show gives one a taste of life when immigrants assimilated by building destination resorts, if only so as to escape rejection and racism. The architectural ruins may be all the more poignant when contrasted with antisemitism’s dark venom evolving today.

The exhibition runs through Sept. 9 at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, free but registration is required to attend.


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