Drive the back roads of Mount Freedom on a July evening and the ghosts almost introduce themselves. The Jews in Randolph, New Jersey, are heirs to one of the strangest and warmest chapters in American Jewish life: a Morris County hill town that once drew ten thousand summer visitors from the Lower East Side, packed eight kosher hotels and forty-five bungalow colonies into a few square miles, and called itself, only half-joking, the Borscht Belt of New Jersey.
The Place
Randolph is a township of roughly 27,000 people in the rolling iron-country hills of Morris County, about forty miles west of Manhattan. It was incorporated in 1806 out of Mendham Township and named for Hartshorne Fitz-Randolph, the Quaker who bought a thousand acres here in 1753. New Jersey’s first iron mine opened on these slopes in 1713, and the ore that came out of them armed the Continental Army.
Today the iron is long gone and Randolph is something else entirely: an affluent, leafy commuter suburb that Coldwell Banker once ranked the number one town in Morris County, with a 2010 median household income around $123,000 and a high school regularly counted among the state’s best. Within its borders sits the unincorporated village of Mount Freedom, and that is where the Jewish story begins.
How It Became Jewish
A two-day wagon ride from the Lower East Side
The first Jews did not come to Mount Freedom for the country air. They came to farm. According to Linda Forgosh’s history “Jews of Morris County,” Yetta and Max Levine arrived in 1903, leaving the crowded Lower East Side by horse and wagon on a journey that took two full days. The Saltz and Elgarten families followed close behind.
The farming did not pay. The land was thin and stony, and these were garment-trade people, not growers. So by about 1905 they did what struggling farm families with spare bedrooms have always done: they took in boarders. Word travelled fast through the tenements that there was a Jewish place in the New Jersey hills where you could breathe, eat kosher, and hear Yiddish on the porch.
The garment maker who saw an advertisement
In 1917 a wealthy New York garment manufacturer named Bernard Hirschhorn spotted a real estate advertisement in The New York Times offering land at Mount Freedom. Two years later he bought a hundred acres and built the area’s first true bungalow colony. The boarding houses were becoming an industry.
Through the 1920s, 30s and 40s the colony multiplied. The Levine boarding house grew into Sains’ Hotel on Brookside Road by 1929. Ackerman’s opened on Calais Road. Saltz’s, the grandest and most enduring of them all, anchored the whole scene. At its peak the area held eight kosher hotels, around forty-five bungalow colonies, children’s camps and swim clubs.
The Jewish Alps of New Jersey
For perhaps half a century, Mount Freedom was to New York Jews what the Catskills, the famous “Jewish Alps,” were to others, only closer. As many as 10,000 visitors crowded the hills each summer. The hotels booked the comedians and crooners of the era, and local lore counts Phil Silvers and even Frank Sinatra among the performers. Boxers including Max Baer and Rocky Marciano are said to have trained at Sains’.
Crucially, almost everything was built within walking distance of the synagogue, so that Orthodox guests could keep Shabbat without a car. That synagogue was the Hebrew Congregation of Mt. Freedom, founded in 1923 by thirteen immigrant families from Eastern Europe. They built a sanctuary with seating for 524 worshippers at a time when they numbered only about fifty families: an act of pure faith that more Jews would come. They were right.
From summer world to year-round suburb
The resort era could not survive the highway. As the New York Thruway and the Garden State Parkway made the larger Catskills resorts an easy drive, and as cheap air travel opened up Miami and beyond, the Mount Freedom hotels began to fade through the 1950s and 60s. Rising land values and suburban zoning finished the job. Saltz’s, the last of the eight, closed in 1978, and the last bungalows were demolished around 1982.
But the Jews did not leave. They simply changed seasons. As Morris County suburbanised after the war, the summer families who had loved these hills bought houses and stayed all year. The synagogue that once filled with vacationers became the spiritual home of a permanent suburban community. The hotels died; the congregation did not. The Hebrew Congregation took the name Mount Freedom Jewish Center in 1986 and celebrated its centennial in April 2024.
The Landmarks
Mount Freedom Jewish Center, 1209 Sussex Turnpike. The oldest synagogue in Randolph and the literal heart of this story, founded in 1923 and now Modern Orthodox. Peer behind the stained glass in the sanctuary and lobby and you can still see the walls of the original simple wood building, encased like a relic inside the larger shul that grew around it.
Gottesman RTW Academy, 146 Dover Chester Road. Formerly the Hebrew Academy of Morris County, this coeducational Jewish day school serves roughly 225 children from nursery through eighth grade and has earned a National Blue Ribbon. It was renamed in 2014 after a $15 million gift from Paula and Jerry Gottesman, with “RTW” honouring the founding Rubenstein, Turner and Wertheimer families.
Chabad of Randolph, 48 West Hanover Avenue. Led by Rabbi Avrohom and Chava Bechor, the local Chabad house carries the Lubavitch tradition into Randolph’s everyday life with holiday programming, classes and a warm front door. It is the newer face of a community that no longer empties out each September.
The site of Saltz’s Hotel. Saltz’s was the grandest and the most stubborn, the last kosher hotel standing when it finally closed in 1978. There is no plaque, but older residents can still point you to where the dining hall and the swimming pool stood, and where ten thousand summers worth of guests once gathered.
The old Sains’ Hotel grounds, Brookside Road. Born as the Levine boarding house and grown into a hotel by 1929, Sains’ is where the boxers are said to have trained. Like the others it is gone, swallowed by suburban lots, but the road still carries the name and the memory.
Camp Deeny Riback, 208 Flanders-Netcong Road. Just over the township line in nearby Flanders, this JCC MetroWest day camp on 35 wooded acres keeps the summer tradition alive in modern form, drawing Jewish families from across Morris and Essex counties exactly as the bungalow colonies once did.
Adath Shalom, 841 Mountain Way, Morris Plains. A short drive from Randolph, this Conservative, egalitarian congregation rounds out the local landscape, giving Morris County Jewish families a non-Orthodox option and underscoring how a one-shul summer colony became a full denominational community.
Where They Came From
The founders of Mount Freedom were Eastern European immigrants, the same Yiddish-speaking wave from the Russian Empire, Poland and the surrounding shtetls that filled the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century. Some had been farmers in the old country; most had landed in the garment trade in New York.
Their migration to Randolph was a two-step journey typical of American Jewish life: first the crossing from Europe to the tenements of Manhattan, then the slow climb out of the city into the green. For decades that second step was only seasonal, a summer reprieve from the heat and crowding.
What made Mount Freedom distinctive was that it was never a resort built for Jews by outsiders. It was built by the boarders themselves, immigrant families who turned their own failed farms into hotels and rented rooms to cousins and landsmen from the same villages back home. The result was a summer colony that felt less like a getaway than a transplanted neighbourhood, with its own shul, its own shopkeepers and its own rhythms of observance. When those families finally settled in for good, they were not strangers to the place; they had been coming for two generations. After the war it became permanent, part of the broader suburban movement that carried Jewish families from Newark and the city out to West Orange, Livingston and the Morris County hills.
Randolph Today
Randolph today is a comfortable, high-achieving suburb where the Jewish community is woven quietly into township life rather than concentrated in a single visible quarter. The grand hotels are gone and so are the bungalows, but the institutions that outlasted them, the Jewish Center, the day school, the Chabad house, the nearby camp, give the community a continuity that few suburbs can claim.
It is a different kind of Jewish place than it was in 1950. There are no kosher hotels, no comedians on a Saturday night, no porches full of city families. The pattern echoes the wider arc of Jewish suburbanisation that reshaped towns like Short Hills, Tenafly and Englewood across northern New Jersey. What there is instead is permanence: synagogues that fill in winter as well as summer, children who grow up in the same hills their great-grandparents farmed and failed to farm, and a centennial congregation that, in 2024, looked back on a hundred years and forward to the next.
The summer world is gone. The community it accidentally founded is still here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Jews in Randolph, New Jersey?
The Jewish presence in Randolph began around 1905, when Eastern European immigrant families who had tried farming Mount Freedom turned to taking in summer boarders instead. That grew into a major Jewish resort area, and when the hotels closed the families stayed on as a year-round suburban community.
What was the Mount Freedom resort era?
From roughly 1905 to the late 1970s, Mount Freedom in Randolph was a Jewish summer-resort district with eight kosher hotels and about forty-five bungalow colonies drawing up to 10,000 visitors a summer from New York. It was sometimes called the Borscht Belt of New Jersey, a smaller cousin of the Catskills.
What is the oldest synagogue in Randolph?
The Mount Freedom Jewish Center at 1209 Sussex Turnpike is the oldest, founded in 1923 as the Hebrew Congregation of Mt. Freedom by thirteen immigrant families. It is now a Modern Orthodox congregation and celebrated its centennial in April 2024.
Is there a Jewish day school in Randolph?
Yes. Gottesman RTW Academy at 146 Dover Chester Road, formerly the Hebrew Academy of Morris County, is a coeducational Jewish day school serving about 225 children from nursery through eighth grade and is a National Blue Ribbon school.
What happened to the Mount Freedom hotels?
Highway construction and cheap air travel pulled vacationers toward the Catskills and Florida, and rising land values made the properties more valuable as suburban lots. The last kosher hotel, Saltz’s, closed in 1978, and the remaining bungalows were demolished around 1982.
How large is the Jewish community in Randolph today?
The Jews in Randolph, New Jersey, number in the thousands and are served by the Mount Freedom Jewish Center, Chabad of Randolph, the Gottesman RTW Academy and nearby Conservative congregations such as Adath Shalom. The community is now permanent and year-round rather than seasonal.
If your family’s story passed through Randolph, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a two-day wagon ride out of the Lower East Side to a hundred-year-old shul in the Mount Freedom hills, to wherever you are now.