Annual Report 2023

Dear Friends and Supporters,

It’s not an exaggeration to say that 2023 was the year we turned dreams into reality. After more than a decade of gestation and planning, the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum finally achieved a most fundamental aspiration: to have a home of its own.

Earlier this year we acquired 90 Canal Street, a historic bank building in downtown Ellenville that had long stood vacant at the entrance to this village of 4,200 in upstate New York.

As the former headquarters of the Home National Bank, the building has strong links to the Borscht Belt era as one of the first financial institutions to make loans to the region’s Jewish hoteliers in the first half of the 20th century.

What happened in the months that followed exceeded our rosiest expectations. We secured a $150,000 grant from  The Naiades Fund to replace the building’s leaky roof, raised additional funds to upgrade the building’s plumbing and electrical systems and launched an ambitious smorgasbord of programming that introduced our nascent cultural institution to the public.