Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

PANAMA / YOUNGSTOWN / FLORIDA

by Bert Stratton

 
Yiddishe Cup’s violinist, Steve Greenman, flew back from Panama City, where he recently played a wedding gig. That’s class and must be noted. Steve is one of the world’s top klezmer violinists.

Then a couple nights later, he played — with Yiddishe Cup — a gig in Youngstown, Ohio, a town that gets  an end-of-the-world rap. But note, Youngstown has a Classic Reform shul built in 1915. Congregation Ohev Beth Sholom. It’s like a miniature The Temple, Cleveland (now the Maltz Performing Arts Center).

Elyria, Erie, New Castle, Sharon, Warren, Canton, Lorain, Akron. Yiddishe Cup has played them all. Many of these Rust Belt shuls are history.

Youngstown’s Ohev Beth Sholom has about 300 families, down from its peak in 1967 when it had 710 families and 395 kids in the religious school. There are a lot of yahrzeit plaques on the walls there.

At Yiddishe Cup’s Ohev Beth Sholom gig, a former Shaker Heights resident described her move to Youngstown as a “reverse exodus.” She said, “You can get everywhere here in eight minutes. Friendly people, too.” She married a doctor from Youngstown.

Yiddishe Cup’s most successful Y-town gig was more than 30 years ago at Temple El Emeth. The rabbi at El Emeth went on to become the head rabbi at a Boca Raton synagogue, and he brought Yiddishe Cup to Florida twice. Dead of winter both times. Nice.

Congregation Ohev Beth Sholom (formerly Rodef Sholom). Youngstown

1 comment

1 Ken Goldberg { 03.04.26 at 10:32 am }

The Youngstown synagogue situation fits right into the general pattern as to size of Jewish communities in certain size cities and the state of Conservative and Reform congregations, as you know. Even as large a metropolitan area as Buffalo-Niagara Falls follows that diminishing trend. Meanwhile, I wonder if Ohev Beth Sholom had the same architect as the former building and gem, Agudath B’nai Israel, on the edge of downtown Lorain had. It also seems to resemble somewhat, though far more modest in size, the esteemed Rodef Sholom in Pittsburgh.

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