| Mountaindale | |
|---|---|
| — hamlet — | |
| Downtown Mountaindale | |
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Mountaindale
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| Coordinates: | |
| Country | United States |
| State | New York |
| County | Sullivan |
| Elevation | 1,010 ft (308 m) |
| Time zone | Eastern (EST) (UTC-5) |
| • Summer (DST) | EDT (UTC-4) |
| ZIP CODE 12763 | |
| FIPS code | |
| GNIS feature ID | 957939 |
Mountaindale is a hamlet in the town of Fallsburg in Sullivan County, New York, United States. Situated at an altitude of 1,010 feet (308 m).
Mountaindale changed drastically in character from being the rural farming hamlet it had been, beginning with the arrival of the New York Ontario & Western Railroad, and the name change of the local post office, in December 1880, from Sandburg(h) to Mountain Dale. Around that time a number of farmhouses that were more hotels than farms opened, and beginning in 1899 the ethnic character of the area began to change from predominately gentile to predominately Jewish.
By the time of the crash of 1929, several Jewish welfare organizations were engaged in resettling Jewish families whose breadwinners were unable, due to health reasons, to make a living in the New York City sweatshops, onto subsistence farms in the Mountaindale area. While good-hearted this effort may have been, in some cases it simply replaced urban poverty with an even more extreme form of rural poverty.
Helen Brown, Principal of Mountaindale High School in 1931, told stories of children being sewn into their long underwear in October to be cut out in April, and one particularly poignant story of a young man who played on Mountaindale High School's basketball team who broke a leg going up for a rebound when her husband had taken them to New York City to scrimmage the Columbia Freshmen. The broken leg simply did not heal. Ultimately, it was discovered that the young man's diet at home did not contain any of the necessary nutrients—in fact, it consisted of little more than flour and water. Discovering that the poverty in the homes of most of the basketball players was equally dire, they undertook the practice of feeding the basketball team each Friday evening at their home in Liberty.[1]
The Hamlet is also famous for the prestigious school called Yeshiva Zichron Mayir of Mountaindale which was founded by Rabbi Yehuda Davis in 1960 and was passed down to Rabbi Rothenberg, which is now the active Dean of the Yeshivah. The yeshivah was known for coining the term Trailer Park Yeshivish[2] a Phenomenon that yeshivish people can live like hippies in a trailer park and study the talmud all day and night with no disturbances.
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