LAS VEGAS -- Penny and Marshall Klein were
ready to turn right around and head back to Skokie almost as soon
as they arrived here in 1991.
Marshall Klein's job had moved them from metropolitan Chicago
to a strange land dominated by neon where buying a kosher chicken
was virtually impossible and the young man who took a shine
to their 19-year-old daughter said he had never met a Jew.
"It was horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible," Penny Klein
recalls.
"There was no kosher bakery, no kosher butcher. The community
spirit wasn't Jewish. But it is now."
Or, at least, it's rapidly becoming so. The tsunami of humanity
pouring into the Las Vegas Valley has made it not just the nation's
fastest-growing region but also North America's fastest-growing
Jewish community, according to national and local Jewish leaders.
There are now 18 synagogues, a kosher supermarket and a robust
Jewish Federation that expects more than 5,000 people to attend
an Israeli Independence Day celebration in May. A congresswoman,
the mayor, two of the most prominent casino owners and the publisher
of one of the major local daily newspapers are Jewish. Restaurants
in two major casino-hotels even added Passover items to their
menus last week.
'A real community'
"Jews come here for the same reason everyone else does, for
affordable housing, great weather, no state income tax, lots
of opportunity," said Rabbi Jeremy Wiederhorn of Midbar Kodesh,
a synagogue that grew from six families to more than 300 in
the past decade. "Now we are starting to get the reputation
of having a real community."
An estimated 80,000 Jews live in the Las Vegas area, which
is about 5 percent of the overall population of 1.5 million
people and double the number from a decade ago, according to
a population study by the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. About
600 of the 6,000 people who move to Las Vegas each month are
Jewish, federation Chief Executive Meyer Bodoff said.
"What's happening in Las Vegas is part of [the national trend
in which] Jews are moving from the Northeast and the North to
the South and Southwest," said Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz, research
director for the National Jewish Population Survey, a Jewish
census published last year by the national umbrella group for
Jewish federations, the United Jewish Communities. "When word
gets out that a population is growing, that in turn will attract
other Jews."
That already is happening in Las Vegas, said Rep. Shelley
Berkley (D-Nev.), who is Jewish.
"Even in Israel, when I tell them I'm from Las Vegas, everybody
from the taxi driver to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon all know
about it and they love it," Berkley said. "It is going to be
one of the places people think of when they think of a Jewish
community in the western United States."
That would be a dramatic shift from where things were when
Berkley and her family arrived in 1962 from New York. Then,
there was just one synagogue, Temple Beth Shalom, and the most
famous Las Vegas Jew was mobster Bugsy Siegel.
Fast-forward to 2004 and the Jewish Federation, an umbrella
organization for groups and causes in the city, expects its
annual budget to exceed $2 million for the first time. Former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak headlined at February's fundraising
gala. And the federation offices are home to a Holocaust museum
and library frequently visited by groups from public schools
and churches.
The Jewish community also has seen an increase in available
products and services. The Kosher Mart, a supermarket, opened
last year, and several conventional supermarkets now provide
kosher meats and a selection of boxed goods. Every Krispy Kreme
doughnut shop in town is kosher, as are a pizzeria, a Mediterranean
restaurant and a Chinese eatery called Shalom Hunan.
Two hotels, Four Seasons and Rio, have kosher kitchens available
for private functions and conventions, and most other properties
will bring in kosher foods made elsewhere, even if they usually
bar outside catering.
"It's a very good thing to have as far as being Jewish-community
friendly," said Tamir Shanel, the Four Seasons' food and beverage
director, who said the kitchen cost $400,000 to install. "They
know we understand the process of kosher and that they can have
their events here."
At Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant at Caesars Palace, the
menu sometimes includes kosher roast chicken and matzo-ball
soup made from a century-old recipe from executive chef David
Robins' great-grandmother.
Challenges remain
Still, as advanced as Jewish life has become in Las Vegas,
the community faces challenges.
Only about 10,000 of the city's 80,000 Jews belong to a synagogue,
a rate of unaffiliated that the Jewish Federation's Bodoff said
may be the highest in the nation.
"Part of that seems to be that people who come here as retirees
come with an attitude that they've been associated with their
old synagogue all their lives and they're not interested anymore,"
said Robert Mirisch, president of Temple Beth Shalom, a synagogue
that has grown from 120 families to 700 families since 1997.
The local Jewish Community Center, typically the linchpin
of an active community, offers programs but lacks a recreation
facility or a campus. And the Four Seasons' Shanel and the Rio's
catering manager Darlene Williams said their kosher kitchens
are seldom used.
"We already have about as many Jews as Cleveland, Detroit
and Baltimore, but those cities have had 100 years to grow into
what they are," Bodoff said. "We've had about 10."
To counter that--and to compete with all the distractions
of a place dubbed Sin City--the federation is getting creative.
In December it held an adults-only Hanukkah mixer dubbed the
Vodka Latkes Party at OPM, a trendy Strip nightclub owned by
Puck, where the drink du jour was a "Hanukkah martini" that
contained rum, brandy, butterscotch schnapps and eggnog.
But the most cutting-edge event looks to be this summer's
Kosher Poker tournament, a private event at the Sunset Station
casino put on by the federation's young adults group.
Bodoff admits he hesitated about whether to support Kosher
Poker, then decided it was clever in an only-in-Vegas sort of
way.
"We have the same job as any other Jewish Federation in the
country, to build a Jewish community--except we have to do it
in Las Vegas," Bodoff said.
"We try to be unique in the way we approach it because this
is the most unique city in the world."
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