Amid the glitz and glitter of 'Sin City,' the continent's fastest-growing Jewish community is sinking roots. The question is whether those roots can grow in the shifting desert sands of what may be America's least developed Jewish city.
Sheli Teitelbaum Las Vegas
About halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1995 biopic "Casino," legendary Las Vegas casino manager Frank Rosenthal, played by actor Robert DeNiro, is confronted by a Stetson-wearing gaming commissioner hankering to use his shiny snakeskin boots to "kick a kike's ass" out of town. "Your people never will understand the way it works out here," he tells the man who was known as the "King of Las Vegas." "You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you somethin', partner… you ain't home."
The real Rosenthal's failure to heed the warning during the late 1970s cost him his casino and, when a Mafia enforcer car-bombed him outside a restaurant, very nearly his life. Taking the hint, Rosenthal moved to Florida.
The commissioner in the movie had conveniently forgotten, of course, that if Bugsy Siegel and a few other Jewish gangsters in the 1940s hadn't recognized an opportunity in the desert, he would be hitching his mule to a trailer-park post, not playing big shot in what has become a perpetual boomtown. With tens of millions of people tapping out at the poker or blackjack tables, Sin City is raking it in, almost totally immune to the ordinary business cycle that rules the rest of America.
The city attracted 37 million visitors last year, with the town's top six gaming companies generating a combined $ 18.9 billion, up 7 percent from the year before, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal, the city's largest daily newspaper. Vegas convention centers now attract some 15 percent - $ 6.5 billion worth - of the nation's trade shows. The only dark clouds on the horizon, according to the city's boosters, are Native American reservation casinos and international competition for gambling dollars.
Another big boom of the last decade has been in the Jewish population, now 85,000 and clocking in 600 newcomers a month. "You cannot find another community, anywhere or anytime that has grown this fast this quickly," says Las Vegas Jewish Federation president Meyer Bodoff. Find me another community," he challenges, "that has tripled in size in less than a dozen years." Indeed, the fastest-growing city in America - the population has doubled since 1990 to 1.6 million - now boasts the fastest growing Jewish community on the continent. The result: a profusion of new Jewish congregations, institutions and services sprouting in the 500-square-mile Las Vegas Valley like overnight blooms of desert lichen.
A town that 25 years ago boasted only one synagogue now hosts 18 congregations (eight Orthodox, three Conservative and seven Reform or non-denominational) and three day schools (the non-denominational Hebrew Academy, the Chabad-affiliated Desert Torah Academy and a Conservative-aligned Solomon Schechter school); a fourth, the Jewish Community Day School, closed for financial reasons two years ago.
Four Chabad centers with seven rabbis serve the Valley, and the city boasts three mikvahs, a glatt kosher supermarket and large kosher departments in two other markets, a half-dozen kosher eateries and at least three casinos with kosher kitchens and catering departments. Chabad's regional director, Rabbi Shea Harlig, says there are about 100 fully Orthodox families in the city, while scores more are "traditional."
Teri "Feigel" Knight, a 43-year-old mortgage broker whose "Why Rent?" signs battle for the attention of passersby with those touting strip clubs, mothers one local Orthodox family. A native of Miami Beach who drifted away from Orthodoxy and then returned to it in Las Vegas, she has four sons, one of whom now attends yeshivah in New York. "At first," she recalls, "we had to ship kosher food in from Los Angeles, and we couldn't eat at restaurants - there were definitely challenges. But when you confront your spiritual emes (truth), there's no turning back."
And, especially now, no need to. The Knights live in Desert Shores, a planned community in the city's northwest, in a house directly across the street from the future site of an 18,000-square-foot Orthodox synagogue. They were instrumental in its conception and have donated funds for a mikvah, which will be the city's fourth. In anticipation of the new facility, Knight says, increasing numbers of observant families are moving into the neighborhood. "I teach my children ethics and values and keep them away from the Strip," she adds. "My 10- and 12-year-olds have no trouble walking down the street wearing yarmulkes. We associate with other observant Jews, and in general we have a very good life here."
Orthodox numbers are augmented by out-of-town visitors whose patronage helps Jewish businesses and facilities to survive and thrive. Indeed, a local Jewish developer originally from Canada told The Report that he is now, in collaboration with an Israel-based company, exploring the creation of housing developments near the Strip for Orthodox residents, some of whom apparently do not regard leisure-time gambling as prohibited by halakhah.
For less observant Jews, the city offers an Israeli-owned nightclub, the Seven Club, where Israeli emigres, probably overestimated by owner Eli Ezra at 10,000, like to unwind. And when they are done dancing and grinding, they can repair to Sababa's, a somewhat more upscale humus emporium than some hole-in-the-wall operations that have opened and closed here over the years.
Although no hard data exist, local observers estimate that some 20 percent of local Jews work in the gaming industry. Many of the middle and upper management of the so-called "family-run," noncorporate casinos are Jewish, and many of those who aren't directly involved in gaming make their livings serving those who come to play.
The local federation, meanwhile, recruits newcomers and younger Jewish residents with an annual "Kosher Poker" tourney and a Hanukkah "Vodka Latka" bash. Its annual Israel Independence Day festival brings in some 8,000 people - as many, according to some estimates, as attend all the city's synagogues on Yom Kippur. The town even has a Holocaust memorial honoring the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto, erected by survivors who found sanctuary here. The Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden at Conservative Temple Beth Sholom, the city's oldest and most prestigious congregation, opened in 2003. Lined with 250 cobblestones from the ghetto (supplied by the National Holocaust Museum in Washington) and with a fountain at its center, this refuge from the white stucco ticky-tacky of the surrounding landscape generated the kind of media buzz normally reserved here for the opening of a new Cirque de Soleil spectacle. Almost all the write-ups have praised the Garden while commenting on the incongruity of building a Holocaust memorial in the Nevada desert. "When you think about Las Vegas, you don't think of a repository of cultural history," Beth Sholom's Rabbi Felipe Goodman told a local paper. "I think it really sets the tone of what Las Vegas can do in the future to reinvent itself."
Reinvention has always been the name of the game in Las Vegas. And the Jews, often credited with inventing America's vice-and-dice romper room, take some pride in the changes they've gone through. In "Casino," DeNiro observed that Vegas functioned as a latter-day Lourdes, washing the sins from all who pitch their tent stakes here. Where else would a particularly notorious member of the founding generation of Jewish mobsters, Moe Dalitz, who died peacefully in 1989, be able to leave his monicker on the facade of a Jewish day school or inscribed on the ADL's 1982 Torch of Liberty award. Where else could the Jewish one-time owner-operator of a fully legal bordello address a B'nai B'rith women's group in her capacity as successful businesswoman? And where else could a hard-drinking, high-rolling Jewish former mob lawyer enjoy huge approval ratings as mayor while considering four separate offers to host a reality TV show?
But the real struggle of the city's Jews is to reinvent and maintain themselves as Jews. Jewish Vegas may be on a roll, but despite recent improvements in fundraising and communal restructuring, the community still doesn't always come up sevens. Many of its oldest members deliberately distance themselves from organized Jewish life, while most of its latecomers remain either uninterested or untouched. Half the newcomers are retirees. Many were active in their native communities, but by the time they get to Vegas, they mostly want to kick back with golf or keno, feed at the bountiful buffets and catch the latest Celine Dion show - not be tapped to fund a new Jewish community center or serve on its board.
Younger Jewish newcomers to Las Vegas don't generally join synagogues or federations or send their kids to Jewish schools and camps, and they don't necessarily worship, or network, in synagogues. There are exceptions, of course, but most newcomers, according to Bodoff, don't make their presence known; the Jewish community has its work cut out simply getting them onto mailing lists. "They need safe entryways into the community," Bodoff says. And unlike the casinos, he adds, synagogues, social services and schools can't start shaking them down for funds the minute they come through the doors. They have to be comped first with a good time or the first year's involvement, without pressure for donations.
Nevertheless, a century after the railway rolled in and 60 years after Bugsy Siegel launched the Flamingo, Jewish Las Vegas is starting to find itself. The challenge now may be to make room at the communal tables for everyone while easing the transition in leadership away from the machers who have ruled the roost until now.
In 1985, Las Vegas proper - the city beyond the Strip - struck travel writer Jan Morris as "a decent, bourgeois, conservative, even churchy western town." About the same time, when someone broached the Lubavitcher Rebbe with the possibility of taking Chabad into the Nevada desert, his answer was a resounding "Gevalt!" The Rebbe said the idea was "utterly prohibited," if not "terrifying," recounts Rabbi Harlig, 39, who - after the Rebbe changed his mind - arrived with his wife and newborn daughter in 1990, when the Jewish population of the city was less than 25,000.
For their first Yom Kippur, they stayed at the Aladdin Hotel, where space had been donated to hold services. "Our room was all the way at the back of the hotel," he recalls, "so after Kol Nidre, I had to walk through the casino in my talis, kapote, kittel and black fedora. To this day I'm sure a few people went home saying, 'Honey, I saw a rabbi at the casino gambling on Yom Kippur.'"
Even today, says Harlig, who generally wears a wide-brimmed black hat more appropriate for Crown Heights, Brooklyn, than the Las Vegas Strip, he avoids certain streets and areas, in order to spare his brood of seven children the lurid billboards touting vice. "It's doable," Harlig says from Chabad headquarters, about halfway between the Strip and the chi-chi western suburb of Sumerlin. Navigating or avoiding the lurid trappings of Sin City is something many residents do almost unconsciously.
Since those early days, Harlig has been asked to install mezuzahs on the doors of strip joints (he refused) and, only last week, to help a Jewish woman at Sheri's Ranch, which touts itself as "the finest legal brothel in Southern Nevada," find a new situation in life. Harlig says he won't add to his notoriety as the "Yom Kippur Kid" by driving out to the bordello but will try to reach her by phone.
Many in the established Jewish community reacted to the opening of a permanent Chabad center in Vegas with a resounding "Gevalt" of their own. During his initial round of meetings with Vegas mavens and machers, Harlig encountered one gentleman who told him, "I moved to the West Coast just not to see people like you." But Harlig, a friendly, likable man, established an easy rapport with several communal figures, most notably billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, founder of the Comdex computer trade show, once the biggest and most important information technology fair in the world. Adelson (see sidebar), now 71, says he was attracted to Chabad's disregard for synagogue politics and turf-and-yiches (pedigree) issues.
Harlig says he buys a ticket out of town for a tapped-out Jewish gambler at least once a month, and he's always trying to persuade those who think they have a "system" to give it up. "If you have a system," he tells inveterate gamblers, "why do you come to me asking for a bailout?"
The federation's Bodoff, who worked with communities in Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania before coming to Las Vegas five years ago, notes that in its often-fractious internal politics, Las Vegas is not unlike other Jewish communities in America. The striking difference he found, he told The Report, was that apart from synagogues, the community had almost no infrastructure, such as a nursing home or Jewish community center, both of which are generally assumed in similarly sized and even smaller communities.
Moreover, as in many small-town settings, lay leaders were used to running things their way, even if that meant running their organizations into the ground. Caroline Orzes, former editor of the federation-run Jewish newspaper, who now runs her own Las Vegas magazine, Life & Style, contends that contrary to many of their non-Jewish counterparts, those at the helm of various local non-profit organizations believed that Jewish charities and social services should function like small businesses, not like publicly accountable institutions. They did not, in short, welcome oversight, while burning through money at rates that some local Jews considered unseemly. Perhaps as a consequence, and despite significant recent progress, Jewish Las Vegas lags far behind others in terms of fundraising. In 2001, for instance, the Cleveland community raised 18 times more money than its similarly sized Nevada counterpart.
In such a cash-poor communal environment, organizations like Jewish Family Services and even the Hillel at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, found themselves competing ever more acrimoniously for resources that the mostly unaffiliated community was unwilling to raise. Beth Sholom's Rabbi Goodman, a Jewish Theological Seminary graduate who came to Las Vegas from his native Mexico City seven years ago, says that as a result, "the Jewish community center here functions without a building. We have no Bureau of Jewish Education. We have no effort in the organized community to improve the quality of Jewish education. We have a federation where everybody gets a fancy title - CEO, COO, CFO - but we see no results. The big machers, who could have been the big donors, perceive the community, I think, as having no credibility whatsoever." In a published article, Orzes accused organizations under the federation umbrella of wasting resources by replicating services that could be shared, including "fundraising, public relations, secretarial services, agency programming, not to mention tax, legal, and accounting responsibilities."
Fixing the federation meant replacing senior management, including an oversized and largely dysfunctional board of directors. Toward that end, Bodoff and a few others set about identifying up-and-comers who might replace the deadwood, then got the board, in excess of 60 members, to resign en masse. This was accomplished - against complaints of heavy-handedness - at a weekend retreat in September 2003, where the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas voted to replace itself with a new entity, the United Jewish Community (UJC) of Las Vegas. However, the local Jewish Family Service, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Hillel and the Jewish community center refused to participate, objecting to the absence of a business plan from the new UJC. Bodoff believes the real issue was loss of autonomy and the new requirement for fiscal accountability. (Hillel later joined the UJC, Jewish Family Services did not; the JCC remains in negotiations.)
Bodoff, who believes that the structural change will benefit the community, may also regard the lack of infrastructure he encountered in Las Vegas as in part fortunate. The community is too large and too dispersed, he says, to throw scarce funding into the lavish buildings or high-overhead endeavors that other, more established communities can indulge in. The newly revamped community's funding priorities remain unclear, but Bodoff reports hopefully that discussions for future programming and infrastructure improvements are "on a whole different order from what went on before."
Despite a recent upsurge in skinhead activity, mostly flyers at high schools and graffiti on highway signs - and despite the fact that in "Casino," Rosenthal/Rothstein is pejoratively peppered with the word "Jew" at least a dozen times - serious anti-Semitism has seldom registered as more than a blip on the communal radar screen. The latest Scorsese biopic about Howard Hughes, "The Aviator," glosses over the reclusive tycoon's anti-Semitism. Most Jewish Las Vegans know about it, however, and also remember with little fondness Imperial Palace casino owner Ralph Engelstad, who in the mid-80s threw a pair of birthday parties for Hitler in a private shrine festooned with Nazi-era regalia. One of the paintings hanging portrayed Engelstad in an SS uniform. After a public outcry, Engelstad apologized to the Jewish community, paid a $ 1.5 million fine imposed by the Gaming Commission for besmirching the city's otherwise sterling reputation and donated his collection of Nazi-era memorabilia to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
In general, however, most Jewish old-timers insist they've never detected any whiff of anti-Jewish hostility from their fellow Las Vegans. The city's Jewish mayor, former mob lawyer Oscar B. Goodman (who plays himself with relish in "Casino" and who once served as president of Temple Beth Sholom), told The Report that apart from a single anonymous letter, he has never, since driving in from Philadelphia in 1964 with his young wife and $ 87 in savings, suffered a single anti-Jewish slur. Recalls Orthodox businesswoman Teri Knight, "I used to hear comments, but not so much any more. I think Las Vegas has simply become a more welcoming and accommodating place."
For Jews as Jews that may be the case. But there's another side to the picture: Since 1995, Vegas has suffered the highest aggregate crime rate of any American city with over 250,000 residents. It also suffers the highest alcohol consumption, divorce and suicide rates in the United States. It ranks well ahead of comparable cities, moreover, in unwanted pregnancies, abortions and unmarried teen mothers. The public school system has the highest high-school dropout rate of any major American metropolis.
Still, it is now possible to live an authentic, entirely self-sufficient Jewish life here. The most observant component of the population misses an Orthodox high school and, for the next few years at least, will have to send their high school-age children to Los Angeles or the East Coast to attend yeshivah. Rabbi Harlig, who says he knew he was buying a one-way ticket when he came, is not sorry that he did. But - though always prepared to be of service to any Jew - he is not quite prepared to encourage anyone to come. Then again, with the city and its Jewish community both on the ascent, he doesn't have to.
And as for gambling, what can you do - stop playing dreidel on Hanukkah? Although recreational gambling may not be entirely consonant with the spirit of Judaism, anyone living here must ultimately come to terms with its omnipresence - and rare is the religious leader who will direct thunderbolts at the gaming industry. After all, it would be unseemly to offend either those constituents who rely on it for a living or those congregants whose winnings help bankroll community services and building funds.
Struggles of the World's Richest Jew
In December, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson took his company, Las Vegas Sands, public with an initial offering that opened at $ 36 a share and soared, before the day was out, to $ 53. This catapulted Adelson, ranked 60 in last year's Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, up to No. 19 this year, with an estimated $ 15.6 billion in net worth, making him probably the world's richest Jew.
The funds are easily now in hand to complete the 3,000-room Palazzo hotel-casino he is erecting alongside his $ 2.5 billion Venetian on the Las Vegas Strip. And there's another $ 1.8 billion for a replica of the Venetian that will anchor a Vegas-style strip in the southern Chinese marshlands near Macao. It's no wonder that Adelson, 71, feels good. "The only thing I owe," he crows, "is my American Express charge for last night's dinner."
Best of all, he told The Report in interviews at his gated mansion in the west Las Vegas suburb of Sumerlin and his offices at the Venetian, there's plenty left over to support Jewish, Israeli and non-sectarian causes he deems worthy. "I want to start giving more money away," he says. Accompanied by a burly Israeli bodyguard sporting sunglasses fitted with a Secret Service-style earpiece, Adelson propels himself around indoors in an electric wheelchair. He is afflicted, he says, with a rare muscular disorder that has paralyzed his left leg.
The leg, he assures me (as his wife, an Israeli physician trained in the United States, assures him), will heal. Not so, however, the psychic wounds incurred during his decade-long residency in Vegas, where he initially drew ridicule for touting a business model that foresaw business travelers and convention attendees filling the myriad rooms and suites of an absurdly lavish new hotel in a town that already had more rooms than it knew what to do with. To critics' chagrin, the Venetian turned into a Vegas Field of Dreams, with hand-chiseled columns, Italian marble floors, floating gondolas and private wet-bars. And come they do, booking to capacity and spending like sultans.
Despite his successes, Adelson's grudges are legion. His most recent tsunami of indignation is directed at fellow Jewish casino mogul Steve Wynn, who he says humiliated him at their first meeting, soon after Adelson moved in from Boston in 1995. Wynn, despite making his own move into Macao, gruffly rejected Adelson's offer to swap some marshland for a chunk of his projected Macao strip. "Everyone says Wynn is the smartest thing since white bread," thunders Adelson. "But he's the only guy in the gaming business ever to lose his business to a hostile takeover. He cannibalized his own casinos - the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Golden Nugget - to support the Bellagio (in 1998, at $ 1.6 billion, the most expensive hotel in town). Who does that?"
Adelson, a Republican and an ardent supporter of Israeli right-wing politics, is said to have provided $ 100,000 to Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996 electoral campaign. In contrast, say Jewish communal leaders, staying carefully anonymous, appealing to Wynn for support for Jewish causes is like drawing blood.
The builder of the (in its day) magnificent Mirage and, more recently, the opulent Bellagio and eye-popping Wynn Las Vegas casinos, Wynn, 63, who grew up in Utica, New York, is widely credited with selling America on the concept of a family-friendly Vegas by promoting amusement park-style attractions and escapist, but ultimately wholesome, theme-centered hotels that appealed to families looking for appropriate vacation spots, in part by offering options other than gambling for under-age kids.
In 1967, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and marrying a former Miss Miami Beach, Wynn returned to Vegas, where, allegedly with several mob-wired associates involved in hidden ownership and skimming schemes, he invested in the Wild-West-themed Frontier Hotel. He lost the casino a year later in a state-instigated buyout by Howard Hughes. The state believed that it would be better for the city's image for corporations to take over the casinos founded and run by supposedly shady businessmen. But Wynn used the contacts he'd developed - and the subsequent backing of casino bankroller E. Parry Thomas and junk bond king Michael Milken - to launch himself on the trajectory that won him first place in the Las Vegas Review Journal's 1999 series, "The First 100," about the "people who had major impact on Las Vegas over the city's first century."
According to community insiders, Wynn joined Temple Beth Sholom not long after returning to Vegas. A self-proclaimed agnostic now rumored to be enamored with the teachings of the Dalai Lama, he eventually withdrew from the congregation and distanced himself from institutional Jewish life. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Adelson's indignation also extends to Jews who sided with the hotel workers union that, in 1999, tried to muscle its way into the Venetian. When it couldn't make any headway, picketers chanted anti-Jewish slogans and defaced his home and hotel with anti-Semitic graffiti (the culprits were never caught). And indignation, still livid and festering, bursts forth against Temple Beth Shalom, the city's oldest and most prestigious Conservative synagogue, for supposedly taking the union's side. Adelson still supports the Las Vegas Jewish Federation, although he denigrates it as "a joke." He gave a million dollars recently to establish an exhibition space for Holocaust art in the new Yad Vashem museum, and he continues his support for Chabad. His wife supports a pair of drug addiction clinics, one in Israel, the other in Las Vegas. He is a major contributor to AIPAC and to the Republican party. When President George W. Bush paid his first official visit to Vegas late in 2003, he spoke at a Venetian-hosted fundraiser.
Adelson's greatest indignation, however, contains some heartfelt sorrow - a missed opportunity to turn Israel into the world's second foremost gambling attraction. He says he has begged successive Israeli governments for the opportunity to build a Vegas Strip replica, like the one planned for Macao, in Eilat or maybe even the Negev's forlorn Mitzpeh Ramon, recently dubbed by Israeli Los Angeles filmmaker Avi Nesher "the end of the world."
So far, it's been no dice. "The project would have cost between $ 10 billion and $ 15 billion, which Israel doesn't have and which no single Israeli can put up. I said never mind, I'll put up the money. And not just for one casino, but for at least four or five, which is the minimum you need to become known as a casino destination. In Macao, we're building 24 hotels, each with 3,000 rooms. But Bibi (Netanyahu) told me he had to give the business to Israelis. Never mind that Israelis in the casino business don't have the best reputation - or so I hear. Bibi turned me down, Arik (Sharon) turned me down, Rabin turned me down, Peres. So in the end, who built a casino? Arafat!"
"My heart is in Israel," Adelson says. "But I can't do business there. There's just too much protectionism. You cannot be an honest businessman there and survive. If I go to Israel, I'm leaving my money behind."
S.T.