Photographs by Penny Wolin Boom and bust for Jews in "Hell-on-Wheels" Jewish country singer Kinky Friedman once observed, "the only thing Jews and cowboys have in common is they both wear their hats indoors." But according to photographer Penny Wolin, the connection goes far beyond headgear, and in a new exhibit touring the American West, she is demonstrating it.
Wolin, the ex-official photographer of the Cheyenne Rodeo, lives in Santa Monica, California, but she grew up in Cheyenne among dozens of other Jewish children raised, she recalls, to walk tall. The idea of a thriving Jewish community taking root in Cheyenne, a town once nicknamed "Hell-on-Wheels," never struck her, as it does so many other Jews she has encountered since leaving Wyoming, as particularly incongruous.
And it was to refute this widely held perception that Wolin, now 35, returned to her home state six years ago to begin documenting the faces and recollections of Wyoming's Jews. Her exhibit of photographs and oral history, "Fringes of the Diaspora: The Jews of Wyoming," is now on display at the Hebrew Union College's Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, even as it hangs in the Wyoming state capital and tours the Rocky Mountains.
In 70 photographs, Wolin depicts a community which, like the West in which it took root, has known its share of boom and bust. During its boom period, before the 1920s, Cheyenne had a population of 40,000, 1,000 of whom were Jews. The territory's first Jews arrived during the period between 1840 and 1880, most of them from Germany. Most settled into traditional occupations, becoming peddlers, clothiers and frontier merchants, and they were largely accepted by their fellow pioneers. The attitude prevalent in pioneer cultures, says Wolin, was live and let live.
Penny Wolin did not stem from such "yekke" (German-Jewish) stock. Her grandfather, like the majority of Wyoming Jewry during the community's heyday, was a Russian immigrant fleeing pogroms and persecution. Abraham Wolinsky turned up on the frontier with his eldest son in 1910, recalls Wolin, having left his wife, pregnant with Penny's father, and four other sons behind in Russia, to be sent for later (they eventually reached America in 1916).
"He came to New York, looked around, and didn't see anything there for him," she relates. "So he went to Omaha, worked in the meat-packing plants there, and heard they were giving land away in Wyoming under the Homestead Act."
"To most Jews fresh from Eastern Europe," wrote one former Jewish resident of Wyoming to Wolin, homesteading "sounded like paradise. Jews could not own land in Russia. However, very few of them trusted themselves to such an environment. The prospect of building a house, digging a well, planting a cash crop frightened them so much that they did not dare respond to the challenge."
Those who did, notes Wolin, were a group of Jewish pioneers, mostly craftsmen, who believed that if they shared their much-needed knowledge and talents with their neighbors, they would be taught how to dig a well and plant a cash crop.
"There was a hitch, though," says Wolin. "You couldn't farm the land. God intended it for grazing cattle. After struggling for the seven years they had to live on the land to gain title to it, my grandfather sold his to a livestock company and moved into town."
The Jews of Wyoming soon made their mark as successful tradesmen. Most settled in Cheyenne, where they built a synagogue ornate enough to compete with anything in Beverly Hills in 1920. Others, though, turned up in more exotic places. In Huntley, where would-be Jewish farmers were dispatched by Baron de Hirsh's Jewish Agricultural Society, there were so many Jews that the local schoolhouse became known as "Der Yiddishe School."
Most never made it as farmers some even died of starvation. Wolin and her Jewish classmates were spared such privations. "We were bred to be these super-achievers," she says. "We were expected to get educated, to leave the state, find mates and succeed." Until they trickled away, recalled Wolin, she and her Jewish classmates led fairly charmed lives. There was occasional anti-Semitism, she acknowledges, but the Jewish kids were fighters. And for the most part, she says, "our neighbors liked and respected us. They were really sad when we left."
Wolin sometimes thinks that the Jews' desertion of Cheyenne was the community's greatest, and perhaps only, failure. The Jews of Wyoming achieved something memorable in forging a genuine Jewish existence in so inhospitable and unlikely a setting. Six miles from the main road. These Jewish ranchers were asked:
"How does it feel to be Jewish out here?" Said one: "If you read Genesis, about Abraham and Isaac and all those stories, you get a sense of people who are just out there alone in the desert with nobody else. And that's what it's really like out here." Huntley Homestead. The Jewish Agricultural Society, organized in 1900 with a trust fund of $ 2.5 million from philanthropist Baron de Hirsh, attempted to turn Eastern European Jews into Wyoming farmers. Their children, seen here in a 1910 photograph, had a Yiddish-speaking teacher. Western Ranchman Outfitters. For three generations, these Jews have been making saddles, boots and all the cowboy accessories. Says the proprietor: "People would ask me, 'Are the boots comfortable?' and I always told them 'Boots are the most comfortable thing in the world,' but I could never find a pair of boots that I could wear myself." Penny Wolin Mark Hanauer Cheyanne's only eligible Jewish bachelor