June 13, 1993

FOR many years Alan Berkowitz did not know about his father's life in the forest. Mr. Berkowitz, 33, a West Hartford resident, said that when he was growing up, he tried to find out how his father, who died when Mr. Berkowitz was 10, had survived the Holocaust. But whenever he questioned his grandmother, the soft-spoken woman would say in a firm voice, "The war is over." Mr. Berkowitz began to piece together his father's past on a trip to Israel during college when he met a cousin who explained how Mr. Berkowitz's father, at the age of 12, had escaped with his parents into the woods in December of 1942, two days before the Nazis murdered the Jewish people in their town or transported them to concentration camps. The family lived in the forest with partisans until the area was liberated about two year later.

It's a bit like an upscale Co-ops 'R' Us. The first thing you notice is the window. Angels, lots of angels, with gold wings, lyres and trumpets, hanging from strings, heralding from on high the delights of "full park views," "terrace in bloom," "charming CPW pre-war." Stripped in red across the glass, the list expands: "East Side"; "West Side"; "Downtown"; "Lofts"; "Town Houses"; "Weekend Retreats." A typical real-estate office? No. "Walk through apartments on video," the signs exhort, "Check out recent sales in your building," "See what your apartment is worth."

Here in this riverside city of 10,000, where gracious mansions were seized early in the Civil War by Union forces, a new invader has stormed the town. As before, the draw is real estate. With its picturesque harbor, quaint downtown and elegant homes, Beaufort (pronounced BYEW-furt) has become a favored location for moviemakers. While one production company was filming in a rural area outside town at the end of May, Paramount was scouring the city with a real estate broker, looking for just the right house.

Fashion seems to have caught up with the Jewish Museum, again. For a while, during the mid-1960's, it outshone the Modern and the Whitney and the Guggenheim as the New York institution most committed to the cutting edge in art, organizing exhibitions of up-and-comers like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, and the show credited with launching Minimalism, "Primary Structures." Then its trustees decided to turn away from a program that had little or nothing to do with Jews and Judaism. When the director of the museum, Sam Hunter, resigned in 1967, he cited as the cause of his discontent the "increasing emphasis on Judaica at the expense of contemporary art." Thereafter the museum, while becoming more central to the Jewish community, often seemed like a backwater in the bustling New York art scene; for many in the art world, it virtually ceased to exist. But now, when widening ethnic rifts shape urban politics and multiculturalism dominates intellectual debate, the institution's emphasis on ethnic identity and social history has become downright trendy. The museum that reopens today in expanded quarters in the French Gothic Warburg mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, its home since 1947, seems almost perfectly in step with the latest multicultural theories.

TURNING south from Montauk Highway onto Bay Avenue in East Moriches, drivers see mostly duck farms along the Terrell River on the eastern side of the street and one-family houses on the western side. The oldest house is the Abner Reeve House, circa 1700. Another, the Ann Smith House, was built before 1858 and is described by the Moriches Bay Historical Society as "a rare survivor of a once typical Long Island house type."