Description provided with image: "L-R: Harold Erickson, UNLV Library; member of Las Vegas B'nai B'rith, Hal Tuchman. President of the Las Vegas Nate Mack Lodge of the B'nai B'rith looking over the more than 50 volumes of Judaic literature that the organization has donated to the University of Nevada Las Vegas Library."
In this interview, Joyce Mack discusses meeting her husband, Jerry Mack, in Los Angeles,their early life as a couple, and moving to Las Vegas at the suggestion of Jerry's father, Nate Mack. She discusses how Jerry met Parry Thomas and their banking and real estate investments. Mrs. Mack talks about the opening of the Thomas and Mack Center at UNLV, and the development of the strip hotels, and discusses her children.
Joyce Mack: wife to Jerry Mack and matriarch of one of the most influential families of Las Vegas history. During this oral history conversation, she begins by tracing her family ancestry from Kiev to New York to Omaha and then Los Angeles, where she was born and raised. At a UCLA fraternity party in the early 1940s, a teenage Joyce Rosenberg was swept off her feet by her older brother's friend Jerry Mack. Jerry was from Boulder City, Nevada and had attended school in Las Vegas. In 1946, the couple married and took an extended honeymoon throughout the United States and Cuba. Soon afterwards, Jerry's father Nate Mack, a businessman and real estate developer encouraged the newlyweds to come to Las Vegas. She tells of Jerry sharing his vision of the valley's future. Thus began a successful journey that traverses decades of Las Vegas history and breathtaking growth in which the Macks were active participants and leaders. Joyce recalls the people the first met, who they raised their children side-by-side with and became lasting friends. These people were other Las Vegas pioneers including the Greenspuns and mostly importantly her husband's partnership with Parry Thomas which created the Bank of Las Vegas. It was their partnership she explains that reduced the presence of the mob element. As members of the small Jewish community of the late 1940s, the Macks would participate in the founding of Temple Beth Sholom.
A group photograph of past presidents of Temble Beth Sholom in Las Vegas, Nevada. From left to right, the men standing are identified as: Melvin Moss, Jack Entratter, Harry Wallenstein, Al Goot, David Zenoff, and Jerry Mack. From left to right, the men seated are identified as: Nate Mack (Jerry's father), Mike Gordon, and Lloyd Katz.
Sam Friedman was a Jewish business owner in Las Vegas, Nevada during the 1930s. He owned a popular clothing store on Fremont Street, which he sold to Nate Mack in the late 1930s or 1940s.
Marschall, John P. Jews in Nevada a History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008.