Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JEWS WITH

  THE BLUES

  One autumn Friday night I took a sentimental journey to my old temple in Pontiac, Michigan. Predictably, the visit was a disappointment—everything was smaller, shabbier, and less familiar than I had imagined. The people I had grown up with were gone, and the congregation that night was made up of strangers.

  Only the rabbi’s sermon was the same. He was a new man, but his talk that night was a set piece right out of my boyhood. It was divided into two parts. The first was its American message—that the prophets had all been liberal Democrats who would have supported the ERA, gun control, school busing, and a cutoff of aid to the contras. In my day, the prophets were Hubert Humphrey men; twenty years later, they were with Mario Cuomo and Michael Dukakis.

  With the real—i.e., American—business out of the way, the rabbi turned to the obligatory “Jewish” part of his sermon. “We Jews have been persecuted throughout our history,” he told the congregation. “Titus, the Spanish inquisitors, Hitler—all have sought to destroy us; but they are gone, and we are still here. Adversity has kept the Jewish people alive.”

  If Jewish survival depends on adversity, the Jews of America are in trouble: There isn’t a single Torquemada or Titus on the horizon. But the congregation, familiar with the standard rabbinical rhetoric about oppression, seemed untroubled. Invocations of the horrors of the Jewish past are stylized bows to tradition; the Jews in a place like Pontiac have no personal experience of persecution.

  Seen from the inside, their suburban world is a warm, secure place. But below Eight Mile Road, in the inner city of Detroit, where most Jews no longer live or even visit, there is a tiny pocket of people who were left behind during the exodus of 1967. Fundraising to them means finding the rent money. They don’t go to Israel because they don’t have the bus fare.

  A few years ago the federation opened a branch of the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue was once the grand thoroughfare of Detroit, a street lined with gracious public buildings, impressive Gothic churches, and fine stores. That was before 1967. Today it lies in the center of the city like a knife wound, raw and sore—a tawdry strip of two-hour motels and porno shops, tottering winos, drug addicts, and underemployed muggers.

  Putting the Jewish Vocational Service on Woodward Avenue sent a clear message—it was there to serve the urban, non-Jewish poor. The federation wanted to do something to alleviate Detroit’s poverty problem, get a little good publicity, and provide some jobs for Jewish social workers. But when the doors opened, the staff was astonished to find dozens, and ultimately hundreds of Jews turning up for help. Some were mentally ill, others old and sick. A few were men and women on the skids, Jewish bums hiding out in flophouses, unable to face the pressures of suburban respectability.

  One person who was not surprised by the appearance of these forgotten Jews was Rabbi Noah Gamze. Gamze had been dealing with them for years at the Downtown Synagogue, the funkiest congregation in the city of Detroit.

  The Downtown is located right where it ought to be, in the center of Detroit’s once-bustling but now almost deserted business district. When I dropped by, on a weekday afternoon, the sidewalk in front of the small building was empty and there were parking spots right on the street. I rang the bell, and after being inspected through a speakeasylike peephole, I heard the clicking of multiple locks and Noah Gamze swung the door halfway open to let me in.

  Rabbi Gamze ushered me into his office, a cluttered room barely large enough to hold a desk, shelves of books, and a threadbare couch. The Downtown Synagogue was founded in the days when hundreds of Jewish merchants worked in the city and sometimes needed a place to say Kaddish or to discharge some religious obligation. In those flush times the synagogue had been solvent, even prosperous. But most of the Jewish merchants left and it has become a struggle to keep things going. The Downtown still provides a daily minyan for businessmen, but Gamze has broadened his mandate; slowly, without intending to, he has become the chief rabbi of Detroit’s outsiders.

  At first glance Noah Gamze seemed wildly miscast for the role. He is an almost comically mild-mannered little man with wire-rim glasses perched professorily on his nose and a black silk yarmulke resting on thinning white hair. I guessed he must be close to sixty, although his formal, stilted language, high-pitched monotone voice, and didactic conversational style made him seem much older.

  My first indication that appearances might be deceiving came when Gamze offered me a drink. Rabbinical refreshments generally run to tea and cookies, but he lugged out a bottle of whisky and shyly asked if I’d join him in a l’chayim toast. I got the feeling that Gamze doesn’t get much drop-in trade.

  “Isn’t it a little rough for you down here sometimes?” I asked. He shook his head mildly. “I’ve had some experience along those lines in the past,” he said. “For one thing, when I was a young rabbi in Chicago I was acquainted with Jacob Guzik. I even had the honor of presiding at his funeral.”

  It took me a minute. “Jacob Guzik? You mean ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik from the Capone mob?” Gamze smiled modestly. “You were his rabbi?”

  “Well, yes I was. And I must say, I always found Mr. Guzik to be a generous and charitable individual. Of course he wasn’t a strict observer of the Sabbath, but how many of my congregants are?” Gamze sighed theatrically. I wasn’t sure but I thought I detected a twinkle behind his thick spectacles.

  There was a knock on the office door, and a tall, stooped man came in. He was dressed in a mismatched plaid jacket and trousers of indeterminate chemical composition, and, like Gamze, wore a black silk yarmulke. With great formality Rabbi Gamze introduced him as Sam Glass, janito
r of the synagogue.

  Sam Glass is the kind of Jew that people in the suburbs don’t believe exists. In his mid-fifties, he has spent his whole life in Detroit on the wrong side of the tracks; currently, he was living in the back of a burned-out store in the barrio. He had no connection with other Jews until a couple years ago when Rabbi Gamze found him selling newspapers in front of the Coney Island on Lafayette Street. Gamze took him in, and Glass has been with him ever since.

  “This is Mr. Chafets, Sam,” said the rabbi. “He is a writer from Israel.”

  “Uh, rabbi, you mean he came, uh, all the way from Israel?” gulped Sam in a hollow, Deputy Dawg baritone, a look of the utmost concentration on his face.

  “Yes, that is correct,” piped Gamze. “He is a resident of Jerusalem, which as you know is the capital of Israel.” Sam nodded in affirmation, the pupil of a wise and learned master.

  Rabbi Gamze was eager to talk about the media coverage of Israel, and he courteously included Sam in the conversation.

  “Sam, Mr. Chafets has delved into the question of journalistic attitudes toward Israel. Perhaps you have seen some of his work on this most important subject?”

  Glass let this nicety pass and waited.

  “Mr. Chafets has examined the work of many prominent American journalists who are Jewish, such as Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel …”

  Sam lunged forward in amazement. “Uh, wait a minute there, rabbi, are you, uh, saying that Ted Koppel is Jewish?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Gosh, I can’t believe it. Jewish! I always thought he was Danish.”

  The doorbell rang and Sam, still shaking his head and muttering in astonishment, went to answer it. The afternoon minyan was beginning to arrive. It has been increasingly difficult to find a quorum in recent years. This, more than anything, is what prompted Noah Gamze to venture out into the inner city to search for new recruits. Combing the Cass Corridor, a greasy stretch of flop-houses not far from Wayne State University, he discovered several dozen down-on-their-luck Jews.