KIAMESHA LAKE – On March 25th, 1968, 10 days before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at the annual Rabbinical Assembly Convention at the Concord Hotel.
One of the rabbis who invited him to Sullivan County was Everett Gendler, who joined King previously at civil rights events. Fifty-six years after King’s appearance at the Concord, Rabbi Gendler’s daughter, Dr. Tamar Szabo Gendler, will be one of the speakers at the Borscht Belt Historic Marker Project’s historic marker dedication at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday at Resorts World Casino in Monticello.
The Concord and other Kiamesha Lake locales will be celebrated, and the marker will pay tribute to King, who gave his last interview to Rabbi Gendler on that March evening at the Concord. King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was 39.
“Dr. King was always a name that was fascinating from school, but also because my parents had a personal connection to him,” said Dr. Gendler, the Dean of the Faculty and Arts and Sciences at Yale University. “I remember my dad always talking about how powerful it was to be guided by a moral vision and to better the world around you. My dad was greatly influenced by Dr. King and Gandhi and he participated in many non-violent protests.”
Rabbi Gendler, who was active in the civil rights movement, died in 2022 at the age of 93.
The Borscht Belt Historic Marker Project is comprised of a group dedicated to identifying and commemorating the history of the Borscht Belt, a nickname for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains, including Sullivan County, which had its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
“I grew up in Sullivan County, so this project is a labor of love about the land that I love,” said Marisa Scheinfeld, the founder and director of the Borsch Belt Historic Marker Project. “The Borscht Belt is a story, and this project is a further extension that preserves its history and cements its legacy.”
Thursday’s event is free and open to the public, but registration is required (rwcatskills.com/borscht-belt-historical-marker-project-rsvp/). It will be held in front of the Alder Hotel.
