Transcript of interview with Dorothy Eisenberg by Barbara Tabach, October 23, 2014

An Interview with Dorothy Eisenberg An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans ii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first- person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iii Preface Dorothy Eisenberg was born in 1928, a first generation American, with roots in Ukraine and Central Europe. Despite the Great Depression, she had a happy childhood in Philadelphia, surrounded by grandparents and extended family, immersed in Yiddish, and often helping at her grandparent's grocery store. Judaism was a significant part of Dorothy's life from the beginning, and both her and her brother spent many of their afternoons at Hebrew school and most weekends at Shabbat services as adolescents. When Dorothy's first husband unexpectedly died in a plane crash, she was forced to reassess her skillset in order to care for her four children. She decided she needed a college degree and soon enrolled at Temple University. While finishing school, she met her now husband, Paul Eisenberg, at synagogue; the two were married and moved to Las Vegas in 1964 to start afresh with their combined five daughters. Dorothy's passion and tenacity quickly elevated her to an influential member of not only the local Jewish community, but also more broadly in Las Vegas's community development efforts at the policy-level. Dorothy served as the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas's first female iv president. She was also actively involved in the League of Women Voters of Las Vegas Valley, including leading the organization's advocacy for school desegregation and serving as its president for two years. Her reputation for being an astute and dedicated public servant earned her several leadership positions in local government, including with: the state's Employee Management Board Relations; Clark County Education Foundation; and the Clark County Superintendent's Education Opportunities Committee. In addition, Dorothy dedicated her time to United Way of Southern Nevada, the Women's Democratic Club of Clark County as well as several environmental issues, which earned her the Environmental Concern Award from the Wildlife Federation. In 1991, Dorothy was honored becoming the namesake for one of the city's schools?Dorothy Eisenberg Elementary School. True to character, Dorothy continues to be actively involved with the school, including reading to students and organizing Hanukkah-inspired celebrations every holiday season. v Table of Contents Interview with Dorothy Eisenberg on October 23, 2014 by Barbara Tabach in Las Vegas, Nevada Preface..........................................................................................................iv Talks about family heritage; parents' immigration stories; father learning upholstery trade. Discusses childhood in Philadelphia during the Depression; everyone helping at grandparents' grocery store; leaving food packages for people in need. Describes theater with Yiddish performances; religious life during childhood; attending Hebrew school, with brother..............1-6 Reflects upon attending all-girls high school; beginning to read The New York Times upon teacher's advice; early passion for civic involvement; importance of Judaism in life. Talks about becoming a widow, with four children; deciding to attend college; graduating. Meets husband Paul at synagogue; move to Las Vegas for fresh start. Describes first impressions of city; the role of Temple Beth Sholom in adjusting; Jewish neighborhood at the time.............................7-12 Continues talking about involvement with Temple Beth Sholom congregation. Recollects political activism in high school and as young adult; anti-Semitism and racism when growing up. Takes classes at UNLV to receive teaching certification. Discusses children's adjustment to Las Vegas; experiencing anti-Semitism; spending summers at Jewish camp; visiting Israel.........13-17 Discusses differences between Democratic Party in Las Vegas and on East Coast. Talks at length about involvement with League of Women Voters; study committees to determine stance on policy areas; observer corps. Meets dear friends while volunteering at League, including Jan MacEachern, Jean Ford, Ann Zorn. Describes League's participation with school desegregation efforts; difference between League's plan and school district's with sixth grade centers.......18-22 Describes receiving bomb threat, being harassed at synagogue, because of work on desegregation; dissatisfaction with results of implemented policy; connection to cause derived from Judaism. Talks about having school named after her; continued involvement with school, including getting speakers to come out, reading to classes; bilingual learning. Explains Hannukah celebrations organizes at school. States pride for Jewish heritage.........................23-29 Talks about participating on school district committee regarding public-private partnerships for schools; fellow board members included Grant Sawyer, Judi Steele; accomplishments of board; eventually becoming Public Education Foundation. Mentions receiving Hero Award for contributions to Las Vegas education sector............................................................................30-32 Index.........................................................................................................................................33-34 Appendix of photos.....................................................................................35-42 vi vii Today is October 23, 2014. I'm sitting with Dorothy Eisenberg. This is Barbara Tabach. We are in the Oral History Research Center offices at UNLV. Dorothy, thank you so much for coming in to chat with me today. I'm very happy to be able to add anything to the wonderful work you're doing. Well, thank you. We appreciate that. You've got a lot of history and stories to share. Start by telling me a little bit about your Jewish heritage. Where did your ancestors come from and how did they get to the United States? My mother and father were not born in America. My father was born in someplace that he thought was Austria, but it had changed hands many times. His language was Yiddish first and German second. It was in that atmosphere that he grew up. He said he remembers one time seeing the Emperor Franz Joseph drive by in his carriage. So that's one of his childhood memories. My mother was born in what is now the Ukraine, coming from a family there. So I am a first generation American and always appreciated what I had. My father came to the States when he was about fifteen or sixteen. My mother came when she was twelve. My mother went to school. When she started school they put her in kindergarten because she didn't speak English. Within a year, she jumped up several grades and her English was very good after that. She did graduate high school and she was very proud of that. My father never went to school in this country, but his sisters who were here sent him to a trade school, which was for upholstery. So he was an upholsterer all his life and I think he made things. I still have a chair that is living with me that he made and it's still comfortable and warm and wonderful to see. I grew up near my grandparents and my aunts and uncles who were all in the neighborhood. So their whole families, both your parents, immigrated to the United States when they were teens. 1 My father's mother had died, but his father was here, and my mother had both her mother and father here. Where did they end up? They lived in Philadelphia. My grandparents?I'm closer to my mother's family?had a little grocery store. Everybody helped out in the grocery store. My father went to work some, but my mother helped in the store. Even as little children we helped in the store. I learned about giving and caring from my grandmother who, when Jewish holidays would start, would give me little packages and tell me to leave them outside certain doors for people who needed food. I remember that very well. I was the oldest granddaughter there, and so she sent me on these little missions to leave food for people. What would be in the package? There would be some bread, some fruit and a couple of vegetables or something like that. She made up these little packages that I would leave for them. And how were they packaged? Just wrapped up in paper, nothing fancy. And just anonymously left at the door. Actually, they were wrapped up in newspapers and I would leave them. So I think I learned about charity at that point. My grandparents spoke a little bit of English, but mostly they spoke Yiddish. Since they both worked in the store, somebody had to be there all the time. They had a Yiddish theater in Philadelphia where they had Yiddish plays and songs and everything, musical comedies, dramas, like telenovelas now, real heartbreaking stories. I would go one week with my grandfather to the show, and the following week I would go with my grandmother because they couldn't get away. 2 So I got to see the show twice. How fun. Yes. What was one of the shows? Do you remember them at all? What would they be about? They would be about immigrants coming to the country and about girls being taken advantage of; or they wrote about people working and how they were doing; or classical stories about Jewish myths, the golem, which was kind of a devilish thing; and classical kinds of things. They even had some Shakespeare shows that they made in Yiddish. Really? Yes. That must be amazing to see. Yes. So I went with my grandmother. My grandmother died when I was thirteen?so I knew my grandparents pretty well?and my grandfather two years later. I grew up seeing them a lot. Those are really entrepreneurial seeds for a family of immigrants to open up a business and have a language challenge. Yes. But they were a lovely couple, a real thing about seeing a couple married for so many years and being so caring about each other. They truly were a perfect marriage. That was just lovely to see when I grew up. They were role models because my grandmother was very learned and very smart. I remember her going to the art museum in Philadelphia and going to the library. She learned to read some English books and she really was a role model for all of us. Did they take you to those places with them? Oh, yes. We didn't have a car. We went on the trolley cars they had. There was good public transportation. My mother helped out, but wasn't well when we were younger. My father didn't 3 have a job many times because it was Depression. I was born in '28, my brother in '29, and so it was the heart of the Depression till into the thirties. So he didn't get jobs at times. He got a job in Atlantic City, which was sixty miles away, and he would take the bus to Atlantic City and work there for the week. He'd take the bus on a Sunday night and come back on a Friday night. The first check he had, or the first money they gave him, he bought me a doll and my brother a little truck and came home with them, and my mother was very angry. [Laughing] Because he had spent this money. He spent the money on the kids. But that was my father; he was very sweet. He really was. But we grew up pretty poor, but most people around us were pretty poor. Was he doing upholstery work there? Yes, upholstery work. We didn't come out of the Depression until World War II, and that is historic for most people during the Depression. We got by because we had a grocery store, so we could eat. I think we moved four different places in about six years because we couldn't afford the rent. So it was that kind of thing. My mother and father were not particularly religious. My grandparents were mostly religious, but not in your face kind of thing. They didn't complain if you changed something about kosher dishes or something. We went to their synagogue for big holidays. What kind of synagogue was that? Everything was orthodox. There was no such thing as anything but orthodox. When did that all start changing? I think after the war, after World War II. And especially with immigrants, they would be... Yes, that's all they knew. It was mostly emigrants in there. I sat upstairs where the women sat, 4 and my brother could sit downstairs with everybody, but I didn't think anything of it. I'd sit near my grandmother and it was fine. My brother and I would go to Hebrew school. Tell me about that. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. she says with a little sigh. Yes. Friday we'd go to Friday night services, and Saturday we would go to Saturday morning services. We had Sunday off. We would go to school, my brother and I. He was seventeen months younger, but he was a year behind me in school. We would come home for lunch, eat lunch, and go back to school. Come back from school, have milk and some cake or something, and then go to Hebrew school where they had a teacher and many teachers who were people who really didn't know, were not teachers. They knew Hebrew. They were probably poor people who needed a job, too. The teacher would go around with a ruler and hit everybody on their knuckles. It was not very exciting. We did learn Hebrew, but Hebrew was a dead language. We never thought Hebrew was a language; it was for going to pray. We did receive a decent education about reading and holidays and things like that. It never took too much. But that was the only thing we knew. Did girls have bat mitzvahs back then? No. But boys had bar mitzvahs? Boys had bar mitzvahs. My brother had a very nice bar mitzvah. I have a nice picture of the family all together at his bar mitzvah. While he was learning to read from the Torah and everything, I learned it, too, because he said it so many times I couldn't not learn it. After that he got religion. 5 What do you mean he got religion? For about a year. He wanted to keep Shabbat. So if he wanted to sit out on the porch, he asked me to bring out his chair because he wasn't supposed to carry it. So I would bring out his chair, and he would sit on the chair. Why wasn't he supposed to bring it? You're not supposed to carry things on the Shabbat. I guess I didn't know that part. Yes, or work or things like that. I remember resenting bringing out the chair. But gladly, it did not last too long. Did girls back then have feelings about not being able to do what the boys were doing in the synagogue? I don't remember any feelings like that. I really don't because I had such a full life. What were you doing while he was doing that, then? I was listening to him learn. You were doing it vicariously. Yes. But I still went to some Hebrew school. I had a lot of friends when we moved to the next house and the next house. I still have a friend; we actually went to nursery school together from when we were two years old. She lives in Rochester, New York, and we call each other once a month. still to this day. Still to this day. She was my first friend, my best friend. What was her name? Her name was Anna Chakov. She had a terrible upbringing. They were very poor, too; it was like 6 everybody else. I would go to the house and the father had a cat o'nine tails hanging up on the wall, and he used it on his children. She had a brother, too. I was appalled at the time. I'll never forget that cat o'nine tails on the wall. Oh, my gosh. Yes. So everybody had their standards. We were covered with love from grandparents and aunts and uncles. It was very different. Even if my father didn't have a job or whatever it was, we were still loved and that made a big difference. My girlfriend Annie is still pretty good. She lives in Rochester, New York. That's good. All these years you've been friends. Oh, yes. Part of it was I went to an all-girls high school, which I would recommend for any girl. Why? Tell me about that. You could be competitive. We didn't care?I mean we cared there weren't boys there. But it was during World War II, so most of the older boys were gone. I started high school in 1941 when the war started; I finished in '45 when the war ended. All the older boys had been drafted. There was a boys' school near us. We would kind of look around at the boys. But we could be ourselves. We could be competitive. We wanted good grades. We wanted to be something. It made such a difference that we could be who we were. I loved it. One of my granddaughters went to an all-girls school and she blossomed there. That's interesting. I would like that for almost any girl. Was it a religiously affiliated school? No. It was a regular high school in Philadelphia. They had several of those. The fact is my brother went to an all-boys' school, which was called Central. That was higher up on the scale. 7 This was for boys who were college bound or something like that. There was another school, Girls High, for girls that were college bound. But I went to my local school, which was an all-girls school. I liked it so much...we moved the year before I finished school to a different neighborhood. We finally bought a house when I was fifteen or sixteen. Before, we had rented. It was during the war. My father was doing much better. So we bought a house and it was far from the school. I would get up every day, take a trolley car, take the subway, go to the school. I wanted to graduate with my class. I loved it and I never regretted spending all that time on the subway because there was a newsstand in those days. They had newsstands. The man at the newsstand saved The New York Times for me every day because I had a teacher who was a wonderful teacher, Ms. Bergman. She said, "You people don't read enough. You don't get magazines; you don't get newspapers. You have to read." So I started reading The New York Times every day on the subway when I went to school. Wow. I can see some layers here to your future. I mean your interest in education. You were very much a good learner. Yes. My life has been on two tracks in a way, and one was religious. I've always known I was Jewish, cared about being Jewish, raising my children to be Jewish. I wasn't ultra-orthodox or anything too much, but knew enough about being Jewish. The other path was being a citizen, caring about people, about learning, going to schools and being involved in politics. It's something; I always cared about this country. When I was younger in Philadelphia all you saw was history. At least once a week I would walk over to the Liberty Bell and touch it. In those days you could touch it. How cool. Once a week I would walk to the Liberty Bell and touch it. 8 What were you thinking? I was so grateful to be in this country because...the parents didn't talk that much about the old country, but you knew there was programs, and there was hard living and people dying. So I was just?because my parents were patriotic. They always voted. You could hear...the whole neighborhood was. I remember walking on the street one day and the windows were open. I guess it was summer or spring. I walked by every house, and you could hear Franklin Roosevelt making his speech. And you couldn't miss a word because as you go house by house it was still on until I got home to listen to the end of the speech. Everybody was tuned in. It was the war. It was patriotism. It was a lot of things. But that's always been my two tracks. Your neighborhood was all Jewish or... ? Mostly all Jewish. Until we came to Las Vegas. Okay. All right. So you've got these two tracks you talk about. Right. Let's talk now?and then we'll go back to those two?coming to Vegas. How did you end up here? After my first husband died, I was rather stunned and left with four little children. Wow. How old were you at that time? I was thirty-two when he died. He was thirty-eight. It was a plane crash. So it wasn't expected. Nobody knew this was coming. I think the first year I was in total shock. After that I realized..! had not gone to college. I got married soon after I graduated school. In those days, well, I didn't learn to drive. My father taught my brother to drive, but he said, "You don't need to drive; you're always going to have your husband drive you around." And this was my father who loved me dearly. He thought nothing of it, and I didn't either at the time. However, I woke up one day and 9 said, "My God, I have no education. What do I do with my children? How do I raise them? Where am I going?" So I decided I should go to college. I applied to Temple University, which was a city school there. They accepted me. I had to go down and beg because in those days older people didn't go to college. So you're outside that normal student. Yes. And you had to beg, you said. Yes. That I wanted to go to school. I must tell you, the first semester was a disaster. But I caught on afterwards. I thought, well, I could be a teacher, because I wanted to have the same schedule as my children. I thought that this was the right thing to do. It turned out it probably wasn't, but at that point it made sense to me. So I went to school. I had class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I needed, I think, a hundred and twenty-four credits. I got exactly a hundred and twenty four credits to graduate. I meant it and I had to do it. When I started, the biggest problem was I had to take PE. Now, you've got to figure I was thirty-three. It was swimming and I do not like swimming. I tried and I came out like a drowned rat. I'd get in the car all wet to go home, and I'd be grumpy with my kids. It's like, I've been swimming. So one time I cheated, and I admit I cheated. My brother was a doctor. He had a different last name than me. I said, "Please, dear brother, write me a note." [Laughing] Oh, I love it. He wrote me a note and I didn't have to swim. So I could just take my classes. Certainly, the first semester was a huge challenge. After that I kind of hit a groove. It also helped me get over my grieving. I didn't have time for it. I knew I had to work harder to do what I had to do. The children 10 were home. They helped me with my homework; I helped them with their homework. They were how old at that time? My oldest was ten, when he died. Eight, seven and three. Oh, goodness. So it was huge. School mended many hearts; it did. I didn't really meet people there because I had nothing in common with anybody, although I have always been mistaken for younger than I was. One teacher I know asked me something or other and I said, "What are you talking about?" I told her I wasn't that age. She was like, oh, my. So I looked young. I could kind of get away with it. It wasn't that much outstanding. And I got skinnier by the day. I can't image with four kids to chase and getting them to school and all. Yes. Then I had met my now husband, Paul. We had gone to the same synagogue and known each other. He came upon the scene, and I didn't make up my mind. I just wasn't ready for anything. However, after about three years or so, we did talk about getting married. He thought it would be a good idea to start afresh. He knew somebody in Las Vegas who had gone to school with him who was an accountant. Paul's a CPA; he was an accountant. So he got a job with him and came there in April of '64 and loved it, and invited me to come down and look at it because I was home with the kids. I was rather stunned. Were you stunned with your first visit here? Yes. Describe what the city looked like to you. It was a desert. You got off the plane...there was not a real terminal; it was like a little thing you walked through. You parked out in the parking lot. He was living in an apartment with...his oldest daughter came to live with him. He took me to a show, which was nice, I guess, but I was kind of 11 stunned with it. He said, "You want to look at houses?" So we went to look at houses and I kept opening doors and opening doors. The real estate man said, "What are you looking for?" I said, "Well, the basement." [Laughing] It was totally a surprise. There were certainly no museums. There was one library downtown. It was a small town. But I decided it would be okay; it would be a match. After we got here, we got married and the kids came and the cat and we settled in. [Temple] Beth Sholom was the thing that brought us all together. So Beth Sholom existed by then. Yes, it existed. It was the one place for the community to get together. The neighborhood that you chose to live in, was it near Beth Sholom, or where were you? No. The first year we rented a house I didn't know what was right or wrong. It was up near Decatur and something out there. It was pretty far out. Then I realized I was driving children to Hebrew school every day because the first thing we did was the children went to Hebrew school. So we're renting that house. We rented it because it had like four bedrooms or so and a pool. Then I started looking for something else and we moved to St. Louis near Sixth Street, which was where a lot of people were living. But before that I was driving and driving every single day to take them there and pick them up. Was there a Jewish neighborhood, so to speak? Yes. Like coming from the East... Near Beth Sholom. It was not that Jewish, but the most Jewish in the community. The other side of town where I lived at first, at the school that Beth went to?Beth was my oldest?I think there were three Jewish kids there, Katz's kids, one of the Katz kids, Barry or something. I think there 12 were three kids up there. So the concentration of Jewish population was around the synagogue. Around the synagogue. It made it much easier for us to be a part of the activities there. Do you remember the size of the congregation approximately at that time? No, I don't. But I remember it was welcoming. Good. In what way was it welcoming? You knew people. They talked to you. They were interested in you. One of Paul's first jobs was being the CPA at the?his partner there that he came with gave him the jobs of doing the books at the temple. So Paul met a lot of the people who were there. Between us we knew we had to establish friends and make friends there, and that's what we did. At the same time that we were doing this, I was looking around for a place for myself. I liked the temple, but it was not what I wanted at that point. In Philadelphia, I had been very active in politics from the time I was sixteen. I was out making speeches at different high schools. Oh, really. What were you making? During the war. I went out with a team. I was the Jewish one, we had a black girl who was with us, and we had an Italian girl. My school was all Italian Catholic. We would go out to other schools and talk about how we should all get together during the war and [have] no prejudice because there had been a lot of prejudice. Growing up, I remember going to Atlantic City and there were signs at some hotels that said no Jews or dogs allowed. There were places, there were clubs in Philadelphia...no Jews allowed. But blacks could go? No. No Jews or blacks. But they just said no Jews or dogs. But the Jews were...okay. 13 Equated to dogs. Oh, but blacks could never go. So that was already...you knew culturally that was accepted. Yes. But Jews needed to be reminded? Yes. But blacks certainly were treated probably even worse than we were. The girl's name was Liller, just a lovely girl. We'd go out. Every couple of weeks they'd take us to a different school, an auditorium or something, and we'd make our little speeches. We thought we were...I don't know. [Laughing] And I worked. Philadelphia had a ward system. They ran their politics very strictly and I'm sure a lot of cities had that; New York had it, Chicago had it and Philadelphia had it. I got in ward politics and worked for candidates in the neighborhood. After I had a couple of kids, Stevenson was running for president and I decorated my carriage with Stevenson signs. This would be Adlai? Adlai Stevenson. I would walk up and down the neighborhood and ring doorbells with my kids in the carriage and the signs on the carriage. [Laughing] So I had been very active in politics and liked it. That's great. When I got to Las Vegas, I thought?well, after we moved, the first year I didn't do anything. I had to take classes at UNLV. It wasn't UNLV; it was another name. Southern something. Yes. They had like four buildings or something. To get a teacher's degree here. So you graduated from Temple, but you didn't have a teaching certification? I did from there, but I had to take Nevada history and a couple of other classes so I could teach here. I did student teaching at Clark High School the year they opened. Brian Cram was there and 14 Kenny Guinn was there. Wow. At the time. What did you student teach in? History, American history. I decided I couldn't handle it. I had my four kids, one of Paul's daughters Merrill came to live with us, too; five kids, some adolescents. I was just overwhelmed, especially with a new city. If I can ask?I don't want you to lose your train of thought?but your kids, were they adjusting to this big change in Las Vegas? They were pretty funny about it because they didn't have the big stores to shop in. They didn't have all the nice kind of stores that we had. We would go to Fremont Street and order from a Sears catalog, and they were certainly not happy about that. They were not happy how they were treated. My kids were all curly haired, dark eyed, and they saw blond, blue-eyed little people running around, and they felt very different here. At the schools they went to in Philadelphia there was a good population of Jewish children, and there wasn't here. So they really were struggling the first year. Did they experience overt anti-Semitism? Yes. My oldest daughter, Beth, was very out there about things and she said one of her history teachers?and I don't remember his name; I probably don't want to remember his name?gave her assignment to do and she did it. He said, "Well, that's not the kind of way we think about things here." He said something like, you Jewish people come here with different ideas. She never told me about it for a long time, but she did tell me about it and she warned her sisters not to let this guy be their teacher. 15 Very good. She established the bridge there. Everybody said, "Oh, your sister is Beth. Oh, we expect..." [Laughing] By the time it got down to the last one, she was like, oh, my goodness; I don't want to go there. But luckily, they all did well in school. They were all very bright. I was very fortunate. Paul's daughter really struggled to fit in. It was back and forth with her. But she turned out really well. We got very close