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9 232 0 14 Few better represented the struggle to maintain a Jewish identity in rural Nevada than Morris and Lina Badt. All their children were raised Orthodox in San Francisco schools, spending summers and holidays in Elko. Milton counted Hebrew among his several languages and abstained from pork but never affiliated with a synagogue. All the Badt children promised their mother to marry Jews. Milton, however, received a dispensation. He and his Christian wife, Gertrude Nizze Badt, raised their children, Nancy and Milton Jr., in a household that observed Jewish and Christian holidays. “On Passover,” Nancy recalled, “we lit candles and had matzohs and easter eggs.” When Milton Jr.’s son married a Jewish attorney, he publicly rejoiced at another Jewish lawyer in the family.1 It was a rare example of a return to a tradition, unobserved for a generation, because Milton Badt kept alive the spark of Judaism, which he practiced quietly and in his own way. Badt was appointed justice of the Nevada Supreme Court in 1947 and then elected for several terms. He and the family moved from Elko to Carson City, where they resided until his death as chief justice in 1966. David Zenoff from Las Vegas served on the state supreme court from 1965 to 1977. Zenoff recalled that Chief Justice Badt asked him in 1966 to be one of the ten men required to have a Jewish service. The necessary tenth member of the minyan was to have been Dr. Stanley Kline. The group gathered, but Kline could not leave a sick patient. The service had to be canceled because they knew no other Jewish man in Carson City to take his place.2 Such was the sorry state of Jewry in Nevada’s capital. From “No Minyan” to a Reform Congregation at South Lake Tahoe The next thirty years brought a small in-migration of Jews to the Carson City and South Lake Tahoe areas. Their backgrounds, educations, and professions were indistinguishable from those of the general population. In 1981, Dr. JefThe Varieties of Religious Observance 1974­–2005 The Varieties of Religious Observance 9 233 0 frey Applebaum was holding together a Jewish group of six to ten families on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. Charna and Allen Silver joined them in 1983 and, with Applebaum, crafted articles of incorporation for Congregation Bat Yam. The unaffiliated group was “hanging by a thread” until it affiliated with the uahc and qualified for the services of a Reform student rabbi from Los Angeles Hebrew Union College. In 1988, Oren Postrel gave the congregation the lifeblood it needed to grow and stabilize at about sixty-five families—including forty-five children. The congregation later purchased a multipurpose structure on four acres for its growing constituency near the California-Nevada state line.3 In the meantime, Jews in Carson City, nearby Genoa, and Minden to the south formed the Chai Sierra Havurah—a fellowship group. It numbered about forty adults who celebrated life-cycle events over a potluck dinner and organized hikes and Passover seders. The havurah was not intended to have a religious focus. The people had found, for the time being, diverse ways of being “Jewish,” and showed little interest in joining Temple Bat Yam at the lake. Over time, however, the group dwindled, as newcomers were less interested in socialization.4 A few joined Temple Bat Yam at South Lake Tahoe, even though the travel time—in good weather—could be an hour each way. In the summer of 2000, ten couples and single persons who resided as far as forty miles apart met at the Carson City home of Judith and Norman Greenspan to share stories about Jewish roots. Some had taken refuge with their parents in Shanghai with the approach of World War II, where Japanese occupiers consigned them to the ghetto. Others told of peddler parents on New York’s Hester Street and rabbinical grandparents in Poland. Family histories were peppered with the litany of anglicized name changes—from Olchevski to Olson and Rosenberg to Rowen—the stories themselves garnished with Yiddish.5 These people were part of Bat Yam’s core membership, and their hostess became its president that year. The congregation hired its first full-time rabbi, Jonathan Freirich, in 2004, and membership immediately swelled to more than one hundred families. Trained in the Reconstructionist tradition, Freirich accommodated himself to a diverse congregation. More than half of the one hundred adults were married to Gentiles, who...

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