When the daily commute to Manhattan’s Diamond District got to be too much, Zev Oster dabbled in agriculture closer to home in Rockland County

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

It was a warm afternoon in late July and the sun was already beginning to set when I pulled into the gravel parking lot of West Maple Farms in Monsey, New York. At the edge of the parking lot, a farmer’s stand proudly displayed tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic, and squash, all offset by neat rows of crops. The scene seemed more reminiscent of rural Pennsylvania than central suburban Monsey.

As I stepped out of my car, I heard the growl of an approaching engine, and then a John Deere Gator pulled up next to me, kicking up dust. In the driver’s seat, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, with sunburnt skin and muddy khakis, was the man I had come to meet.

“You’re late,” Zev Oster said with a smile. “Get in.”

Zev is the owner and driving force behind the farm, and he seems as comfortable on the land as Old MacDonald himself. But full-time farming is actually a relatively recent development for Zev, who spent more than 20 years working in the Diamond District on 47th Street in New York City.

But his days of rushing to make the Monsey bus to Manhattan are over; these days, Zev works locally. After Shacharis, he rushes to see to his roosters, emus, and ostriches. As the day progresses, he tends to the crops and harvests the honey in blazing heat, all the while welcoming a steady stream of visitors.

FULL-TIME FARMING As a bochur, Zev Oster spent summers enjoying the nature Monsey had to offer. These days after Shacharis, he visits his ostriches and tends to his crops

Call of the Wild

The school years, and the formal structure they mandated, presented a formidable challenge to a young Zev Oster.

“I went to every school until my parents realized that it wasn’t the school that was the problem,” he says. “Beis Dovid, Bais Mikroh, Chofetz Chaim, and then back to Beis Dovid. I was like a ping-pong ball. Most kids came to yeshivah, sat, learned, and played during recess. I just came for recess.”

He spent his summers enjoying the nature Monsey had to offer, hanging out in the woods, climbing trees, and getting paid a few cents to pick raspberries for the now-defunct Van Riper’s farm, which was only a bike ride away from his home.

He was 20 years old when he married Rivky Goldbrener, from Brooklyn.

“We met through a shadchan,” Zev confirms. “It wasn’t like I was milking a cow and my wife saw me and said, ‘Who is that guy?’ ”

After getting married in 1997, he needed to make a living, and his father, a self-employed wholesale diamond dealer like his father and grandfather before him, offered to help his son Zev join the family chain. He accepted and began the daily commute to Manhattan, but his heart wasn’t in it.

The young couple settled in Monsey and life became blessedly busy. Five children joined the family, two boys and three girls, and Zev would commute daily to 47th Street while his wife ran a jewelry store they had opened together in Monsey. He also founded magazines that achieved wide circulation — Diamond Pulse Magazine and Lab Grown Magazine. Both were business-to-business ad-based publications, with the former focusing on genuine diamonds while the latter on lab-grown ones.

Zev’s passion for the outdoors, which he maintained through various hobbies, had to be relegated to any extra time — when he wasn’t commuting or at work. He found the traveling difficult, but he kept at it nevertheless.

“I would wake up and take the Monsey bus,” he recalls. “Sometimes, if you missed the bus, you would have to wait half an hour or 45 minutes for the next bus, and sometimes it was standing room only. I would get to the city all farmattered, and if it was hot, I came into the office like a shmatteh.”

The industry itself was stressful.

“You’re walking around with a ton of goods on you, and anything can happen at any time,” Zev explains. “Also, I’m not a sitting guy, and I used to sit the entire day. The work just took a toll on me.” He shudders as he remembers it. “It wasn’t for me.”

Zev’s annual reprieve was the camping trip he took with his kids each year in the first two weeks of July, when the jewelry industry is closed. “The deeper in the woods, the better,” he remembers. “It was therapy for me. Doing these things was how I detoxed and unwound from work.”