Music brought Jay Poster to Las Vegas for a brief time in 1974. Jay wanted to pursue a musical career and his cousin was a professional musician with the Nat Brandwynne Orchestra at Caesars Palace. To Jay?s disappointment, within a few months his cousin Jack Poster left Las Vegas for a road tour. So Jay decided his best strategy was to return home to San Diego and his studies at San Diego State University. It would be over a decade later before Jay returned to Las Vegas to live and this time it became permanent. This time it was not for music. For beyond his musical talent, Jay had a gift for connecting with people of all of ages and walks of life. He was good at sales and his day job selling office furniture offered him the opportunity to transfer to Las Vegas in 1986. Within a few years, however, it was a recruiter for Palm Mortuaries who introduced Jay to his defining career moment and to Allen Brewster, a prominent Jewish leader and founder of King David Cemetery and Mortuary. It was 2001. Jay has been King David?s ever since and is the General Manager. In this interview, Jay describes his personal and spiritual growth through his career in funeral services and his respect for the Jewish traditions of burial and grieving. In addition, his passion for music has also soared and he talks about his participation in the Shabbatones at Congregation Ner Tamid and Desert Winds, a community based performance organization. He shares his love of traditional Jewish klezmer music and the Meshugginah Klezmorim.

In 2015, Todd S. Polikoff was named the President & Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. (The organization is now known as Jewish Nevada). Todd is a graduate of Stockton University and earned his MBA at Cleveland State University. He has three children: Samuel, Shira and Jordan. Born in 1971 to a steelworker and hairdresser, Jack and Judy Polikoff, Todd grew up in Philadelphia, became a bar mitzvah there, and shocked his mother when he explained he was putting college on hold to move to Israel. In addition to stories about these life memories, Todd also traces his career path to decision-making to a meaningful trip to Moscow a where a defining moment helped him understand his own relationship with Judaism. To the time of this interview, Todd has invested over twenty years in leadership of Jewish Federation and AIPAC in states that include New Jersey, Delaware, Texas, Ohio and Nevada.

Interview with Rabbi Shea Harlig by Barbara Tabach on March 5, 2014. In this interview, Rabbi Harlig discusses the Chabad movement of Orthodox Judaism and establishment of Chabad centers in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. Rabbi Harlig talks about the property he has acquired for Chabad, and its outreach programs, including supervision of kosher kitchens in hotels. This interview was conducted for the Ward 1: West Charleston Neighborhoods oral history project, and therefore includes zoning and neighborhood discrimination issues, and a tour of the property.

Rabbi Shea Harlig arrived in Las Vegas in 1990 and settled in the Artesian Heights neighborhood of Las Vegas. As Director of Chabad of Southern Nevada, Rabbi Harlig focuses on religious outreach, education and social services, and has helped establish seven Chabad locations throughout the community and also built a school and educational program of the highest standards.

Interview with Gil Cohen by Claytee White on August 5, 2015. In this interview, Cohen discusses growing up in Las Vegas and attending University of Nevada at Reno. He returned to Las Vegas to join the management training program at the Stardust. He talks about his friendships with Moe Dalitz and Carl Cohen, and his interest in golfing. He also discusses corporate ownership of casinos, unions, and his experiences working at different Strip hotels.

Gil Cohen came to Las Vegas in 1957, when was ten years old, when his father, Yale Cohen, was recruited by Moe Dalitz to work at the Stardust Hotel and Casino. Cohen graduated from University of Nevada Reno, and started working at the Stardust through the management-training program. In 1975, he was made hotel manager, his first of many leadership positions in Strip properties, which have included the Dunes, Aladdin, Hacienda and Monte Carlo, where he currently works as a casino host.

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.

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.

In this multi-part interview, Louis Wiener, Jr. discusses coming to Las Vegas from Pittsburgh at a young age, attending Las Vegas High School and University of Nevada Reno. He attended law school at University of California at Berkeley and passed the Nevada State Bar in 1941. He established a practice, Jones, Wiener and Jones, with Bob Jones and Cliff Jones and later with Herb Jones. He had another practice with Neil Galatz and Dave Goldwater, retiring in 1988. Wiener had other business ventures that allowed him to do pro bono work as a lawyer. Wiener discusses his family, including former spouses, his children, and various aspects of his career as an attorney in Las Vegas, representing hotels in the Greenspun antitrust lawsuit, and as an attorney for Bugsy Siegel. He says of his success, "I'm just lucky. I was here at the right time and I picked the right people to help."