The Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Community Collection is comprised of organizational records, photographs, event programs, and ephemera donated by members of the Southern Nevada Jewish community as part of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas University Libraries’ Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Materials document the history of the Jewish community and Southern Nevada from 1941 to 2017. The collection provides information about family life, religious rituals, community events, and local businesses and organizations.
Inside the San Pedro Saloon. Men sit at tables or congregate near the bar. Inscription with image reads: "Table 1st at right was in Underhill home when Lee Phillips took residence in 1965."
The Bet Knesset Bamidbar is an adult-only Traditional Reform Congregation that was founded in 1990. With over 500 members, it’s one of the largest congregations in Southern Nevada. They hold their Shabbat Services twice a month, they observe many ritual holidays, there is a choir that sings at each service, and they make sure to cater to the senior communities with various activities and clubs.
Rabbi Mel Hecht was born July 8, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of five, his family moved to Miami, Florida where they had a large, extended Jewish family, complete with relatives who were hazzans and mohels. Soon after moving to Florida, his parents bought a hotel in Hialeah, a city 10 miles outside of Miami, where Hecht spent the remainder of his childhood.
In this interview, Mimi Katz discusses growing up in the Boston area and her schooling, and moving to Washington, D.C. working as a physiotherapist. She returned to Boston and met her husband, and she talks about moving to Las Vegas and adjusting to life here. They became involved at Temple Beth Sholom, and Mimi worked as a conventions coordinator at the Sands and the Sahara. She discusses moving around in Las Vegas from an apartment to a house in the John S. Park neighborhood, working for the Jewish Federation, and helping to develop the Holocaust education program with Edythe Katz, conducting oral history interviews with survivors. She continued working at the Convention Center in the 1980s, and is involved in the Lou Ruvo Center.
Everyone knows her as Mimi. She was born Miriam Green to immigrant parents in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1926. As a youngster she danced, excelled at school and enjoyed an abundance of sports. To pay for her higher education at Massachusetts School of Physiotherapy she worked at Raytheon Manufacturing. In 1957 she married George Katz who swept her away to their honeymoon in Las Vegas. It's a story that she loves to recall-they never left. She sent for her things and energetically settled in to her new hometown and marriage. Mimi found employment with the Clark County School District, began having children (three daughters), and making fast new friends. Many of these friends were from the founding days of Temple Beth Sholom, which roots her to the history of the local Jewish community. In addition, for a decade she worked in community relations for the Jewish Federation. She valued community activism and volunteered over the years for many organizations; such as Easter Seals, Jewish War Veterans, Parent Teachers Association and the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, and many more organizations over the subsequent decades.