LAS VEGAS New Jewish exodus leads to City of Sin

From 1995 to 2000, the Jewish community grew by 35 percent.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LAS VEGAS -- More than 3,000 years after the Exodus, the Jews have returned to the desert.
This is Lost Wages, Sin City, the U.S. capital of the gambling and sex trades. It is also home to the fastest-growing Jewish population in the United States.
Hundreds of Jews pour into Las Vegas each month, primarily to feed a shortage of doctors, teachers, accountants and other professionals created by the transformation of the once-small tourist town into the fastest-growing metropolis in the United States.
The Jewish community grew by nearly 20,000 residents, or 35 percent, to 75,000 from 1995 to 2000, according to the American Jewish Year Book, and is estimated to have crossed 80,000 this year.
Las Vegas has kosher restaurants, two Jewish newspapers and two Jewish grade schools. It has a Jewish mayor, a Jewish congresswoman and a cadre of rabbis who cater to the town's 24-hour wedding trade. Several real estate agents specialize in finding homes for observant Jews within walking distance of any one of the community's 20 synagogues.
A new life
When pediatric gastroenterologist Howard Baron moved to Las Vegas a decade ago, his wife, Bonni, joined a co-op of several observant families to order kosher meat shipments from Los Angeles and Phoenix. Today Bonni can get just about any food product locally.
Baron, 42, came to Las Vegas because it was a city of opportunity. After finishing a fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, 10 years ago, he could have returned to his home state of Minnesota to join a medical partnership making $80,000 a year. Instead he accepted a $120,000 offer from a practice in Las Vegas, a salary made even more attractive because Nevada has no state income tax.
Initially Baron wondered if his family could settle into the type of Jewish life he and Bonni had grown up with in Minneapolis. The family attends religious services at least once a week and keeps Friday nights clear, reserving the evening to light the traditional Sabbath candles and say the ritual blessings over wine and the braided challah bread.
"To be observant here presents challenges compared to other cities where generation after generation of Jewish families have lived," said Baron, who helped found his neighborhood synagogue. "You have to be a pioneer. Your children can't just show up at youth activities; you have to create the youth group."
Development
Almost from the beginning, Jews have played a role in Las Vegas' development. A century ago, a handful of merchants were the first to arrive. A second migration of a Jewish band of mobsters with Mafia ties in the 1940s built hotels and casinos and persuaded their cronies to run them. But the Jewish Mafia faded as the gambling industry was taken over by outsiders. The original influx of Jews died off, and for years Las Vegas was viewed as a pariah city by parts of the Jewish community. It was a place to visit but not to live.
Siberia yes, Las Vegas no, was the long-standing policy of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the charismatic "Rebbe" of the ultra-orthodox Chabad movement. Schneerson barred his rabbis from venturing to the city despite their global mission to bring unobservant Jews back into the fold.
But even Schneerson could not resist the opportunities waiting in Vegas. Prior to his death in 1994, Schneerson understood the demographic changes taking place in the Nevada desert. In December 1990 he directed one of his students, Rabbi Shea Harlig, to move to Las Vegas as Chabad's shliach, or emissary. His orders: Get assimilated Jews to reconnect with their religion and find wealthy donors to fund the project. Harlig did both. Within a decade, three Chabad centers and an elementary school were built.
Building a community
For most of the Jews who now live in the desert, the mob reign is nothing more than a curiosity. Still, the gambling and sex trades gives a good deal of discomfort to the devout Jews who are trying to coexist.
"There still is a stigma to Las Vegas and all that it is built around," said Harlig.
A survey by Chabad of the local synagogues found that just 10 percent of the community attended Yom Kippur services last year. Harlig estimates that at best just 4,000 to 5,000 residents are active participants in Las Vegas Jewish organizations and that most of the population is nonreligious.
"People who are willing to pack themselves up and move to Las Vegas are rarely searching for spirituality," said Harlig.
The more religious of the newcomers will find that Las Vegas is still missing many of the institutions people expect in older communities, said Meyer Bodoff, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas.
There is no Jewish community center, no Jewish home for the aged or assisted living services, no Jewish high school, he said. "In truth, we are not the fastest-growing Jewish community in North America; we are the fastest-growing population. Now we have to build a community," said Bodoff.