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In this clip Lori Chenin Frankl discusses the role of Judaism in her childhood and growing up Jewish in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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jhp000632-001
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I agree.In this clip Lori Chenin Frankl discusses the role of Judaism in her childhood and growing up Jewish in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Well, I can't imagine ever not being part of a Jewish community. My dad was in poor health and he had other heart attacks after that. He was never supposed to live to see us start school and he wasn't supposed to live to see us bar or bat mitzvahed or married or anything. Thank God he lived to be seventy eight and he lived to see my oldest son bar mitzvahed. So that was a miracle in itself. But my dad was fairly religious. He worked hard. He had to work on Saturdays because he was a barber and that's the biggest day for a barber. But he was a minyanaire. A minyanaire? A minyanaire, yes. He was one of those guys who would go as often as he could to make minyan at Temple Beth Sholom. We really, really grew up at Beth Sholom. We lived behind what is now Boulder Station. Back then it started out as the Skyway Drive In. So it was a drive in back then. Everybody when we bought the house?it was during a bit of a recession?said, "What are you doing moving so far out of town?" Out of town meant away from the temple area, actually. There was one other Jewish family in our neighborhood, so we were the only Jewish family after they left. It was a lower middle class, mostly LDS, neighborhood. It was a great place to grow up. Everybody knew everybody. You couldn't get away with anything because somebody would tell your mom. So it was okay to grow up there. But really the place that I think, at least as far as I'm concerned, that I felt most safe and most comfortable was the temple. So at the time we had the Kolod Center, which we all talked about at the Growing Up in Vegas thing. We would clean up on Saturday morning and then my mom would drop us off there around noon and we would stay until my dad picked us up. We really lived there. On top of that we went to Sunday school and then we had two days a week of Hebrew school and then we belonged to USY, Junior USY and then USY, and all three of us were also very involved in the junior choir and then subsequently in the teen choir. This was really the core of your life. It was the core of our life; it really was. We went every Friday night. Once we got to high school it was probably a little bit harder because we wanted to go to football games and do your typical things that teenagers do. But we could not leave the house until the candles were lit, starting Shabbat, which is kind of ironic. But my dad said, "You're not leaving until the candles are lit," and then we'd go off.