Members of the Tribe (15 page)

As a community leader, Stanley Hersh is primarily concerned with consensus and unity. When he saw me jotting down his joke about the temple, he quickly pointed out that he had been kidding.

“As Jews, we should avoid the issues that divide us, and concentrate on the ones that unite us, especially in a small town like Waco,” he said. “And Israel is the great unifier, the cause that every Jew can rally around. I happen to be a Republican, but I support liberal Democrats who are bad for my interests as a physician if they are good for Israel.”

For Hersh, who grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s, Israel is more than a tool for achieving Jewish solidarity. “It made us acceptable in this country as Jews,” he said. “The Six-Day War was the turning point, wouldn’t you say, Justin?”

Rosenfeld nodded emphatically. “Yup, Israel’s wars haff changed mah image here in Waco, no doubt about that.”

The federated Jews of Waco, like federated Jews everywhere, express support for Israel primarily through fundraising. In 1985, the community collected $650,000, not including a special appeal for Ethiopian Jewry. “On that one, we got everybody together at the synagogue and said, ‘You can save a human life for $6,000. We raised $70,000 in one night,” Hersh said proudly.

“Yeah, this Hersh is tough,” said Rosenfeld with an affectionate grin. “Every year he comes by for the UJA and if you giff him five dollahs, he asks you for fifteen. Then, ah come around for a contribution for the fire brigade dance, and the Jews in Waco make a beeline in the other direction.” It was an old joke between friends. The Jews of Waco are civic-spirited, and contribute to any number of local causes, including the Downsville volunteer fire brigade dance. And J.R. Rosenfeld, despite his lack of interest in New York Jewish organizations and the intricacies of national
Jewish politics, gives a great deal more than fifteen dollars to the community each year.

We sat around the massive wood table in Rosenfeld’s kitchen, sipping coffee and eating huge slabs of pumpkin pie. Although both Hersh and Rosenfeld are transplanted Texans, they have a native love of anecdote, and they swapped tall tales about life in Waco.

“Justin, you remember that convert we had, the one who had ten kids?” asked Hersh, and Rosenfeld grinned, anticipating a well-known story. Hersh turned to me. “See, there was this guy, a real hillbilly, he converted to Judaism. He was sort of strange and he never had a job, but he had ten kids and he was a Jew. So we helped him out, gave him food packages and money to tide him over. And then, one day he got himself a job as a truck driver. And do you know the first thing he did after he got his paycheck? He quit the synagogue and joined the Reform temple.” Both men laughed and I joined in, remembering Vernon and Mary Lou, the converts of my boyhood.

“Yeah, ah remember that feller,” said Rosenfeld. “Wonder whatever happened to him?”

Hersh shrugged. The man eventually resigned from the temple and is no longer a member of the Jewish community. And for Dr. Stanley Hersh—a federation man in a small town—a Jew without a paid-up membership is no more real than a tree falling in an empty forest.

The day after my visit to Downsville I flew out of Dallas to Las Vegas in the company of two hundred more-than-usually-optimistic Texans. The sky, rainy all weekend, was suddenly blue, Bloody Marys flowed; and the hopeful, many of whom seemed to know each other, hooted and hollered across the aisles in a camaraderie of shared expectation and greed. Some would return in an even better mood; most would lose a little and enjoy the trip; and an unlucky few would tap out and come home to Texas by Greyhound.

On the other end of the line, Las Vegas was waiting. Like Mecca, the Vatican, or any other place organized around and dedicated to a single infallible principle, it is a patient city. A
certain percentage of humanity will always want to get rich quick; greed is a constant. Once the gambling houses along the strip were owned by hoodlums named Siegel and Lansky and Dalitz. Today they have been taken over by faceless corporations. But the principle is the same, the logic of the odds just as inexorable.

Actually, there are two Las Vegases. One is the outgrowth of the original town, a frontier outpost now firmly in the political grip of the dour elders of the Mormon Church. It is a conservative place, full of playgrounds and churches, schools and libraries, built mostly from money generated by what is euphemistically called “the gaming industry.”

The other Las Vegas is the Strip—casinos and showgirls and come-on $3.99 steak dinners. This Vegas is an outgrowth of the vision of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who founded the first major casino, the Flamingo, in the late 1940s. Siegel’s dream of creating a gambling empire in the desert came true, but he wasn’t there to see it. The Flamingo lost money, a violation of the inexorable principle, and his partners relieved him of control by having him shot through the head.

Today there are approximately twenty thousand Jews in Las Vegas. Roughly eighteen thousand are residents of the Strip—gamblers, casino employees, and transients in a town where people change addresses on an average of every three months. The other two thousand live in Las Vegas proper and make up the city’s federated community.

Las Vegas is not an easy city to organize; a man like Stanley Hersh would go out of his mind chasing down the unaffiliated Jews. For years Jerry Countess had that job, and he is glad to be out of it. A wiry little man with a George Burns delivery, he came to Vegas from New York in the early seventies to run the federation. Now retired, he still keeps in close touch with the Jewish community, and he has fond memories of its glory days.

“It used to be very easy to run a federation campaign in this town,” he said. “We’d get a dozen biggies from the casinos together and someone would say, ‘Okay, this year you give twenty-five grand, you give fifty grand,’ like that. In a couple of hours we had our whole campaign. But the biggies are all gone now. How can you solicit some corporation in Cleveland? We can’t even get them to comp us for rooms anymore.”

In the sixties, when Jews still ran the casinos, fundraising in Las Vegas was not only easy, it was fun. Some of the top stars in show business were drafted and one year Frank Sinatra himself hosted the main fundraiser.

“That caused somewhat of a problem because Carl Cohen was the chairman of the campaign that year,” said Countess. I looked at him quizzically. “You don’t know who Carl Cohen was,” he said. “Well, Carl was a wonderful man out of Cleveland. And one night at the Sands Hotel, he got into a fight with Sinatra and knocked his front teeth out. That’s who Carl Cohen was.

“Anyway, Carl was the chairman of the campaign, and Frank agreed to host the meeting, so there was a problem. Somebody called up Carl and explained the situation, and he decided not to attend in order not to hurt the campaign. He was a real mensch.”

“How did the fundraiser go?” I asked.

“You mean with Sinatra? It was great. He walked in with this entourage of has-beens that he used to take care of, Joe Louis and José Greco or whoever. He was about half blitzed. He says, ‘I don’t have to tell anyone here about Israel. I pledge fifty thousand dollars.’ And then he looked over at his buddies and began saying, ‘I pledge another two thousand dollars for Joe Louis, and another two thousand dollars for José Greco.’ It wound up costing him another seventeen thousand dollars. What a night. There were biggies in this town in those days.”

The last of the biggies is Moe Dalitz, once alleged to be an important underworld figure and a partner of Meyer Lansky’s. Today he is an old man, full of good works, who spends his days dozing at a gin rummy table in one of the local country clubs. I asked Countess about Dalitz, expecting to hear a disclaimer, and got a testimonial instead.

“He just gave half a million bucks to build a new Reform temple out here. Half a million for a temple,” Countess said, shaking his head in wonderment. “And it was Mr. Dalitz who set up the annual Temple Men’s Club Gin Rummy Tournament at the Desert Inn. Believe me, out here Moe Dalitz is the Zeyde … you know, like the Godfather, only not Italian.”

I had come to Las Vegas to give a lecture at one of the local synagogues and, as he said good-bye, Jerry Countess grimaced convincingly and explained that he would be unable to attend my
talk because of a bad back. The move was well executed, and I imagined that he must have used it before; there is a limit, after all, to how many lectures a federation director can reasonably be expected to attend. He told me that I would be having dinner with several community leaders, pointed me in the direction of the Riviera casino, wished me good luck, and said good-bye.

My hosts that night turned out to be a charming, attractive widow in late middle age, now devoting her life to Jewish causes; and a rumpled, personable physician in his forties who had moved to Las Vegas from Cleveland. Neither seemed likely to have any connection with the Strip, and I didn’t want to offend them by implying that they did. To find out about Jewish life in the American Gomorrah, I adopted a strategy of wily indirection.

“I know that the Jews in Las Vegas are mostly business people or professionals, and I’m sure the community has nothing to do with the gambling casinos and nightclubs,” I said. But do you have any, ah, occasional contact with any of the people on the Strip?” I asked.

The lady chewed a shrimp from her salad in silence, and for a moment I thought I had offended her. Then she brightened. “Well, I have an example of what you might mean. A number of years ago, we had a rabbi whom some of the congregation didn’t care for and wanted to replace. They scheduled a meeting to vote on renewing his contract, and a number of us who supported him decided to do a little campaigning.

“Several of the girls from the sisterhood and I went over to the Strip and talked to some of the Jewish men there who belonged to the temple but weren’t really very active. We thought they might make a difference.” Her eyes sparkled at the recollection of this Machiavellian move, and she took a dainty sip of water before continuing.

“Well, they promised to come and vote for the rabbi, but on the night of the meeting, none of them did. The rabbi lost and we were terribly disappointed. The next day I went to one of the casinos to find out what had happened, but no one seemed to know where any of the men were. Finally somebody said, ‘Didn’t you read the papers yesterday? Frank Costello got shot in New York.’ ”

I was waiting for the rest of the story, but the lady seemed to have finished. “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t see the connection.”

“Oh,” she said, as if addressing a slow child. “You see, it wasn’t their fault. If somebody hit Costello in New York, naturally they had to go underground for a while.”

My delight in the story was obvious, and it precipitated a flood of local folklore. The doctor, who had led the temple building drive, spoke of Moe Dalitz’s generosity in the respectful tone of a Detroit physician talking about Lee Iacocca. The widow, giggling, mentioned that a local Jewish madam had given a talk to a B’nai B’rith meeting. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and the madam, a Jewish lady named Beverly Hurel, is a highly regarded businesswoman.

As the dinner progressed, the Las Vegas Respectables talked knowledgeably and naturally about the gaming business. They rarely gamble—that is a sucker’s game, and suckers don’t last long in Las Vegas—but the city’s economy depends on the casinos, and keeping abreast of developments there is nothing more than informed citizenship.

“I have several friends who are gambling people,” the physician said. “Dealers, pit bosses, middle-level management. Of course, I don’t see them much, because they work irregular hours. And if the casino is losing money, they change the shifts around, you know, to change the luck.” He explained this as if he were discussing an established scientific principle.

The widow, who had lived in Las Vegas for many years, had some vivid recollections of the Golden Era, when the casinos had been run by Jews. “Jack Entratter, for example, was very active in the community,” she said. “He was president of the Sands Hotel and Temple Beth Sholom at the same time, and he would donate his facilities for our sisterhood meetings. Jack was a wonderful man. He first came out here as a dealer, I think, or perhaps he was muscle, I can’t remember. That was in the days when the Rat Pack used to frequent the Sands. It was a different town in those days.”

The federated Jews of Las Vegas know that life is not all sevens and elevens, and living in the city imposes certain obligations. “In the old days,” said the widow, “if a Jew came to town and got tapped out, he could always get one of the downtown businessmen to loan him enough to get back home. My husband, may he rest in peace, was always bringing people home for the
night.” Nowadays, emergency assistance is handled by the Jewish Family Service, which provides a meal, a place to spend the night, and in extreme cases bus fare back home. People who require such aid are viewed as imprudent, but the Jews of Las Vegas, sophisticated about human nature, do not make judgments. “Sometimes you just get a bad run,” the doctor explained with a philosophical shrug.

Dinner broke up and we went to the synagogue, where about two hundred people were gathered to hear a lecture on Israeli politics. Sammy Davis was at the Holiday Inn Casino that night, Kris Kristofferson was playing the Hilton Showroom, and Don Rickles was working the Sands, but the synagogue-going Jews of Las Vegas weren’t interested. Here, on the inside of the great American pinball machine, they gathered to hear a little news from Eretz Israel.

From the platform, they looked like a typical American Jewish audience, middle-class, middle-aged, and intelligent. But when I began by saying that I was happy to be in Las Vegas because I was already seventy dollars up, they burst into a loud cheer. There probably isn’t another synagogue in the United States where such a boast would be met by anything but chilly disapproval. But I was supporting the local economy, and even the most straitlaced sisterhood lady could have no objection to that. And besides, I could almost hear them thinking, Israel can use the money.