The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas

Chapter Nine. Interior Frontiers

Led by its dynamic high-tech industry, particularly by the legendary success of Dell Computer, the city of Austin grew tremendously in the 1990s—about 41 percent according to the U.S. Census.1 “Thirty-five thousand people, the equivalent of a fair-sized town, moved here last year alone,” a New York Times reporter wrote from Austin in 2000. “And in the last five years, Austin has produced or acquired 17,000 new millionaires.” In addition to the business opportunities such a climate afforded, newcomers were drawn to the city’s vaunted quality of life. “With its bars, bands and barbecue joints, its lakes, parks, low crime and temperate winters,” the Times reporter wrote, “Austin is a lifestyle mecca that attracts all kinds.”2 Quality of life, however, is not the same for everyone. In 1995, IBM decided to transfer about 900 employees from Boca Raton, Florida, to Austin, raising serious concerns for many of the approximately 150 Jewish families asked to relocate. Boca Raton, as the Austin American-Statesman reported, had more than 116,000 Jewish residents who constituted 16 percent of the city’s population. It had eighteen synagogues; fourteen Jewish day schools and child-care centers; a selection of kosher markets and restaurants; and a public school system that closed on the High Holidays. Austin, in contrast, had only 6,000 Jews, representing a little more than 1 percent of the city’s population; two synagogues (neither of them Orthodox); two Jewish daycare centers; and no Jewish schools or kosher food stores. IBM’s Jewish employees worried about the lack of an Orthodox shul, about the distances nine  Interior Frontiers The Chosen Folks 216 between residential neighborhoods and synagogues, and about the lack of educational facilities for their children. “You meet people here who have never met a Jew or don’t know they have,” said a representative of the Jewish Federation of Austin. “That will be strange to [the newcomers].”3 The IBM transferees were part of an influx that raised Austin’s Jewish population from about 5,000 in 1990 to 13,500 in 2000.4 Congregation Beth Israel, the city’s oldest and largest Reform temple, grew from 400 member families in 1991 to more than 700, straining available facilities and forcing the Sunday School to hold classes “in every available space: the rabbi’s office , the chandeliered boardroom, even the bride’s and groom’s dressing rooms.”5 This growth, and the subsequent variety of denominational preferences , provided the impetus and the means to form new Jewish institutions in Austin such as Kol Halev, an independent, nondenominational congregation with about 120 member families, founded in 1997. The cultural effects of the population increase were also profound. Austin began hosting a Jewish Book Fair and a Jewish Film Festival, and in 1998, a large grocery chain opened a butcher shop and café offering a variety of kosher foods and meats. A Jewish day school, providing a full religious and secular curriculum, opened in 2000 at the new Dell Jewish Community Center (DJCC). The forty-acre campus, named for patrons Michael and Susan Dell, also houses two congregations and provides a wealth of activities and programs for Jews and non-Jews. During the 2000 presidential race, George W. Bush rented the DJCC for several events, running into trouble only when his campaign wanted to celebrate their Super Tuesday primary victories by serving the press corps a pork barbecue, which the DJCC refused to permit.6 These developments suggest that Austin and other major Texas cities are no longer marginal Jewish communities. Mirroring the postwar growth of other Sunbelt locales, the Jewish populations of Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston , San Antonio, and Austin are booming, and the newcomers enhance the diversity and richness of Jewish life. Numbering more than 130,000, the Texas-Jewish community is larger than those of Michigan, Georgia, Virginia , or Missouri, and Houston and Dallas have larger Jewish communities than Pittsburgh, Seattle, or Cincinnati. More Jews live in Texas today than in any other southern state except Florida and any other western state except California.7 This growing population has brought many inducements of modern Jewish life to Texas, and Texas-Jewish institutions have become more sophisticated and diverse. Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio support local Interior Frontiers 217 Jewish historical societies, and the Texas Jewish Historical Society, founded in 1980, has more than 750 member families statewide. The nation...