Tracing Arizona’s ‘Jews of the Borderland’

ELLEN BRAUNSTEIN

The city of Tucson has elected five Jewish mayors dating back to Charles Strauss, who was in office from 18831884. Two Jewish brothers, Isaac and Jacob Isaacson, founded the Arizona border town of Nogales. And famed lawman Wyatt Earp of Tombstone married Josephine Marcus of the NeimanMarcus family.

These are just a few examples of the little-known Jews of the Southwest who are the subject of a documentary series by award-winning filmmaker Isaac Artenstein of Cinewest Productions. A Mexican-Jewish director, he lives in Tucson and San Diego with his wife and co-producer, Jude Artenstein. Another producer is Paula Schwartz, former director of the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society.

The “Jews of the Borderland” series on Tijuana, Santa Fe, San Diego and El Paso is complete. Still to be finished, and in need of funding, is the episode on the Jews of Arizona, Artenstein said.

Tucson Artist

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 in Arizona, she moved from Santa Fe to Tucson in 2015.

She started making refuah shleimah , healing scarves, to represent “the essence of the Jewish Mi Shebeirach prayer said aloud in direct recognition of those in need, in pain, in suffering.”

The first one was a request from a former tallit client who had a friend who had lost her hair due to chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Surdut made her a headscarf to wear.

Most of the people she’s made healing scarves for have fully recovered from their illness or injury and went on to wear and enjoy the scarf for many years. She had two dear friends, however, for whom this was not the case.

She met Lynn Saul when Saul was running a writing group at Congregation Bet Shalom in Tucson and asked Surdut to co-team it with her. Miriam Blum joined the writing group and she and Surdut became fast friends.

Blum had numerous health issues; she had open-heart surgeries and was on dialysis six days a week.

“She was writing and was cheerful, bright and funny,” said Surdut. “I would shlep her places in her wheelchair and we would go on adventures together.”

Surdut had made a refuah scarf for

“People of the Crossing: The Jews of El Paso” airs in February on PBS.

Artenstein’s projects on the Jewish experience in the Southwest feature archival footage and family memories told by present-day relatives. The films deliver new insight into an important missing piece of the narrative of the Southwest, he said.

“With the help of the Jewish History Center in Tucson (Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center), we’ve done extensive interviewing in Arizona with a lot of descendants of pioneers and people that were historically significant in Jewish Arizona,” he said.

For Artenstein, 66, the project is personal. His family migrated to Mexico in the 1920s from Poland and Turkey. His parents met in Tijuana and came to San Diego in the 1960s. Spanish is Artenstein’s first language.

“I got tired of explaining how an Artenstein like me comes from Mexico. I felt this urge to reveal that the Jewish

Blum with hummingbirds on it and after she died, nobody could find the scarf.

One day, Surdut was talking to Blum’s husband, Bennett, and he asked why it was so important to her, besides the fact that it was beautiful and she had made it, that he find the scarf. “And I said, ‘Because I made it with kavanah (intention) and it was just for Miriam,’ because my life is guided by paying attention and intention.”

He called Surdut about two hours later to tell her he found the scarf. When she asked him where it had been, he told her, “As soon as you said kavanah, I had a feeling I knew where it was. She had tucked it into her tallit bag.”

“That was very beautiful to me,” she said.

When her friend Lynn Saul was in the hospital, Surdut picked up the book of Saul’s poetry, “In Our Language: Collected Poems,” looking for inspiration. The first poem in the book is about hollyhocks, so she painted a scarf with the flowers on it to bring to Saul the next day.

“I walked into the hospital — it’s the first time I put one of my scarves on a dying person — and I put it on her shoulders and she looked at me with these beautiful blue eyes and said, ‘This will help,’ and we both knew what that meant,” said Surdut.

Surdut told Saul’s daughter-in-law to leave the scarf on and not to take it off unless Saul wanted her to. She told her, even though it was silk, not to worry if it got wrinkled, dirty or torn. Surdut said that when Saul was in hospice, the daughter-in-law took the scarf off to wash it. Saul had been in and out of consciousness, but when she woke up, the first thing she said was, “Where’s my scarf.”

“I think we all don’t want to see the people we love in pain and sorrow,” said

Surdut. “We wish we could wave a magic wand to clear it all away. This is as close to a magic wand as I can get.” JN presence is not just in New York or Los Angeles. There are wonderful, interesting Jewish communities throughout the Southwest,” he said.

Artenstein relied on Jewish history already well-documented by local historians, books and museums and the archives at the Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center, housed in the first synagogue built in the Arizona Territory in 1910.

“This documentary on Tucson is very fascinating to me because it is the one that encapsulated the magic of the Old West, especially of the border towns like Tombstone.

“There was a Jewish presence there and the cemetery actually has a Jewish section. There’s a memorial there that speaks to the relationship between the Jewish community and the native populations,” Artenstein said.

Jewish merchants also settled in the old mining towns of Bisbee and Douglas.

“The other thing I find fascinating about Arizona is that there is a direct line. You start in El Paso with the Jewish experience, then New Mexico, Arizona and California, and you find that the families in these places are related.”

In the 1830s, Solomon Spiegelberg came to America and became the first Jewish merchant to travel the Santa Fe Trail. Bringing family members to the Southwest, the Spiegelbergs opened dry goods stores in different cities that grew into department stores. “They would bring cousins from the old world or the east and start them up in business. The relationships go all across the Southwest. They’re really fascinating stories.”

Rabbis traveled on a circuit timed for the High Holidays, weddings and brit milahs, Artenstein said.

The series demonstrates the great lengths Jews went in order to preserve their traditions in a vast and sparsely populated terrain.

Much has been documented in a book called “Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West” by Harriet and Fred Rochlin. It chronicles the lives, experiences and contributions of the Jewish men and women who helped shape the American frontier. Before she died at age 90, Harriet Rochlin served as an advisor on Artenstein’s film project.

The completed episodes of the documentary series include “Challah Rising in the Desert: The Jews of New Mexico.” The documentary tells the story of Conversos, who converted by force to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. In the Southwest, they secretly maintained Jewish practices. The documentary also features German Jewish pioneers of the Santa Fe Trail up to the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

“To the Ends of the Earth: A Portrait of Jewish San Diego” highlights Jews arriving by wagon train and steamship starting in 1850. San Diego was a small pueblo in the remote Southwest corner of the U.S. It was the end of the line for frontier Jews in a border town that boomed.

“Tijuana Jews” is a personal exploration of this community that blended Jewish and Mexican cultures and customs in an unlikely place and time.

“I’m inspired by untold stories and being from the Southwest myself, the story of the Jewish experience really rang true with my own experience,” Artenstein said. JN

For more information or to view trailers of Artenstein’s documentary series, “Jews of the Borderlands,” visit cinewest.net.

Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

He was making a Talmudic reference in one of his stories without any explanation. It was so familiar to him and friends who had grown up as he had that it never occurred to him that there were Jews who didn’t know it. But his nephew, an Orthodox rabbi, told him that many people, even many Jews, aren’t going to understand that joke because they haven’t been to a yeshiva.

“So I said, ‘OK, I get it now.’ I’m a comic with a religion-based Jewish upbringing, presenting a cultural Jewish show, for the most part. When I slip back into my religious persona, I make sure everybody understands what I mean,” he said.

He knows he’s something of a rarity in the world of comedy, and warns people who might be troubled by someone who isn’t easily labeled that they might find him unsettling.

“Among the uncommon people, I am considered very uncommon,” he said. That hasn’t hurt him though. He was even one of the very few comics in the country who booked a lot of jobs during the early period of the COVID19 pandemic. With restrictions varying by state, Barany, who often works in country clubs instead of comedy clubs, was still able to perform. About 80% of his performances are in country clubs.

He also owns a comedy agency, KB Entertainment, that works with others who do PG-rated comedy.

During the pandemic, Barany moved to Logan, Utah, a small city with a tiny Jewish population. After living in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, he discovered that even Salt Lake City was a little too big.

He hasn’t performed in a comedy club in some time but he occasionally goes to support other comics, especially at open mic nights. What many people don’t know about comics, he said, is that “laughing is kind of off the menu.” They sit at the back of the room and break down the jokes as each comic delivers them. It’s really just another day at the office. JN

To register for Comedy Night with Keith Barany, visit vosjcc.org/comedynight.