The Jews in America Trilogy (165 page)

The murder left Virginia Hill Siegel alone and unprotected, presumably a very frightened lady. But Lansky knew how to handle her. Once the dust had settled, he quietly approached Virginia and asked her to return whatever money Siegel had passed to her from the hotel's construction budget. Virginia, who knew which side her bread was buttered on, immediately complied. It was as simple as that.

Following Siegel's death, Virginia, insisting that Benny had been the only man she had ever really loved, went into a deep depression and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. There followed years of alcohol and drugs, in which she returned to her old profession in a desultory way. She didn't need to work very hard. A Chicago mobster who had been a long-ago flame still kept her on a regular monthly allowance. In 1966, she finally killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates.

By then, of course, the Flamingo in Las Vegas had become the enormous financial bonanza that Benny Siegel, and Meyer Lansky, had said it would be all along, and all the investors were very happy. The Flamingo had also become the prototypal Las Vegas hotel, the very cornerstone of the Strip—that garish stretch of outlandish hotels that extends for four miles west of
town into the Clark County desert. From the Flamingo outward, hotel followed hotel and casino followed casino, each trying to outdo and out-gimmick the last in extravagance and overstatement and Las Vegas “high class.” From the first days of the Flamingo onward, Las Vegas has grown from a dusty crossroads of sand and sagebrush to a glittering Oz-like metropolis, with a permanent population of well over half a million; an entire city supported by, and devoted to, a single pastime: gambling. It is Benny Siegel's city.

In Las Vegas today, his name is spoken with reverence and awe. He is to Las Vegas what Benjamin Franklin is to Philadelphia. Las Vegas was Benny Siegel's vision, his grand design. Had it not been for his dream, there might be nothing there at all.

*
Once, in her column, she evoked the poet Robert Browning, and quoted him as saying, “Oh, to be in England, now that it's May.” The next day, she cheerfully acknowledged her error, and wrote that the line should be, “Oh, to be in England now that May is here.”

15

ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY

By the late 1940s, the social and economic dominance of the German Jews in the American Jewish community had all but disappeared, but few of the old German-Jewish upper crust were willing to admit that this had happened. Within the tight and interrelated circle of German-Jewish families, where dynasty had interlocked with dynasty for a hundred years or more, the myth was maintained that the Germans were the “best” Jews, and that the Russians were “riffraff.” All the Germans would concede was that the Russians now outnumbered them, as they did by several millions; what was harder to swallow was the fact that the Russian Jews also outpowered them in nearly every area, from the marketplace to philanthropy.

Some people would trace the demise of German-Jewish overlordship to as far back as 1920, and the death of the patriarchal Jacob H. Schiff, who had been called the conscience of the American Jewish community. Schiff's mission had been to remind the Jews periodically that they were indeed Jews, with Jewish responsibilities, and it had been he who had headed most of the Jewish social welfare programs that had aided the turn-of-the-century Russian immigrants. Schiff had passed his mantle of Jewish leadership to another German Jew, Louis
Marshall, a prominent New York lawyer, but Mr. Marshall had not had the commanding authority or personal charisma of Jacob Schiff. It had been under Marshall's leadership, however, that the elite German congregation of Temple Emanu-El had begun its plans to move its house of worship from Forty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue to an even grander address uptown, at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, facing Central Park.

The ostensible reason at the time for the move was noise. Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street had become one of the city's busiest commercial corners. The noise of commerce, Marshall explained, did not bother Christian churches in the neighborhood, since they held their services on Sundays. But Saturdays were heavy shopping days, and members of Temple Emanu-El claimed to find the street sounds disturbing on the day of worship. Not stated was the fact that the move uptown was also an attempt to disassociate themselves, socially, from the continuing uptown movement of former Lower East Siders, from the onslaught of the parvenus, or “the newer element,” as the Russians were sometimes called. At the time, upper Fifth Avenue was pretty much the exclusive domain of wealthy Christian families and Old Guard German Jews. The width of Central Park would separate Temple Emanu-El from the “Russian side” on Central Park West, or so the reasoning went.

The real problem seemed to be that Reform Judaism had become
too
popular,
too
successful—so successful that it was difficult for Emanu-El to maintain its traditional German-Jewish exclusivity. When the congregation had first been formed in 1845, its treasury had contained exactly $28.25, and its first services had been held in a Lower East Side tenement at the corner of Grand and Clinton streets. But the congregation had quickly been able to move to better and better addresses until, by 1868, the temple had been able to build—for six hundred thousand dollars—an entire building of its own, on Fifth Avenue, New York's premiere street, where all the most fashionable Christian churches were.

By 1930, however, when the grand new building, which had cost seven million dollars, opened its doors, the possibility of exclusivity had gone out the window. The upward and outward mobility of the Eastern Europeans had been so rapid that Russian Jews were able to afford the higher rents and taxes of the fashionable Upper East Side now, and were moving there in goodly numbers. Ironically, the new temple's first service
was for the funeral of Louis Marshall, and the eulogy was delivered by its first Russian-Jewish head rabbi.

The Old Guard had given way to the new, who had overcome by sheer numbers.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Temple Emanu-El drew Eastern European worshipers like a magnet until, by the late 1940s, Russians outnumbered Germans by a ratio of something like five to one. The reasons for this dramatic switch from the little Orthodox synagogues of the Lower East Side to this stronghold of the American Reform movement were several. For one thing, there was the physical magnificence of the new Temple Emanu-El itself, with its glorious rose window and its altar framed and valanced with carved woods and glittering handworked mosaics. In size, it ranked behind only the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, and could seat twenty-five hundred in its main sanctuary, and accommodate at least thirty-five hundred more in an adjacent chapel and auditorium for the High Holidays. Architecturally, it radiated self-confidence and importance.

Then, too, Emanu-El had long been considered New York's most
fashionable
Jewish congregation, and the appeal of fashionability to families moving upward on the economic scale could not be ruled out. All the heads of important Jewish philanthropies had traditionally been Temple Emanu-El members—the presidents of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Bonds for Israel, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, the Friends of Hebrew University, and the boards of directors of Hebrew Union College, Montefiore and Mount Sinai hospitals, and the American Jewish Historical Society. Rubbing shoulders with the leaders of the community also had its appeal.

But the most important appeal of Emanu-El and the Reform movement was that they represented a step in the assimilation process, part of the Russians' drive to adapt to the prevailing mode and environment. Reform was more “modern,” more “enlightened,” more “American.” While many of the first-generation immigrants liked to keep a toehold in the Old World—out of habit, out of fear, out of nostalgia—through their Orthodoxy, the second generation wanted to blend in, to move with the times. “My parents were Orthodox, but I'm Reform,” became the phrase. Reform meant up-to-date. Everyone knew,
for example, that the Jewish dietary laws had become, by the twentieth century, anachronisms and, in the United States, a nuisance. Reform Jews had come right out and said so, and by the 1940s, any Jew who still kept a kosher household was, in the eyes of Reform, either a sentimentalist or a zealot. The reaction of a Midwest housewife is typical: “I used to cook kosher meals when my in-laws came to dinner, but after they died I stopped.” To be able to serve what one liked and eat in restaurants where one wished was part of entering the American mainstream.

Meanwhile, signs that the Russian Jews had become Temple Emanu-El's dominant group were apparent at the temple itself. Some changes were cosmetic. In the old days of German-Jewish leadership, for example, the temple's board of trustees had dressed in black tie for their meetings in the paneled, portrait-hung boardroom. This practice was abandoned by the Russians as stuffy and old hat. The Russians also proposed that the facade of the building be floodlit at night. The German minority cringed at this notion, considering it “too showy.” But, the Russians countered, bathing the Fifth Avenue face of the building with floodlights would result in a lovely light being cast through the stained-glass rose window for evening services. In the end, the building's architecture defeated this project. The designer of the rose window, it seemed, had made it of the heaviest glass to withstand the rays of the afternoon sun. Only a floodlight with the intensity of the sun would penetrate the glass at night.

Other changes were liturgical. The new Eastern European leadership decided that it would also be a nice idea to broadcast the temple's Friday evening services over New York's WQXR radio station every week. Once more, the Germans were opposed, calling the idea “publicity-seeking,” and “evangelizing through the media.” But the proposal was passed, and the Russians could boast of their new, much larger, “radio congregation.” (When the radio congregation began sending in checks to the temple, the Germans' mutterings diminished somewhat.) In 1872, the then all-German temple had abandoned the practice of conducting bar mitzvahs as “barbaric.” But the Russians, it seemed, liked bar mitzvahs, and so the practice was resumed under the new leadership.

Faced with such changes, some old German families withdrew their support from Temple Emanu-El. Alas, that didn't
seem to matter much. Their support was no longer needed. Others merely carped and complained, calling the Russian newcomers “the Emanu-Elbowers—they've elbowed their way in.” True or not, they were in to stay.

Bastions of German-Jewish supremacy were falling on all sides by the 1940s. Down on Wall Street, the staid old investment banking firm of Goldman, Sachs was feeling it. (The interrelated Goldman and Sachs families were among America's pioneering German Jews.) For years, all the partners in the firm had been either Goldmans or Sachses, but then, fresh out of P.S. 13 in Brooklyn, came a bright youngster named Sidney Weinberg. The Russian-born lad had spent some time looking across the harbor at the towering financial district of lower Manhattan, and decided that that was where the money was. He had gone, by his own account, “to the top of the tallest building” in the district, and started working his way down, floor by floor, asking for jobs at each elevator stop. He had made it all the way down to the second floor before he found Goldman, Sachs, where he was hired as an office boy. By 1947, Sidney Weinberg was the firm's senior partner, and was the principal architect of a high-financial plan by which the heirs of Henry Ford, Sr., were saved hundreds of millions of dollars in inheritance taxes. In Weinberg's design, Ford's heirs were left in control of the Ford Motor Company, while the bulk of the $625,000,000 estate was placed tax-free in the Ford Foundation, making it the richest philanthropic organization in the history of the world. The Ford heirs' federal tax bill amounted to only $21,000,000 on a taxable estate of $70,000,000. Sidney Weinberg's bill for this service? A little over $2,000,000.
*

Social barriers against Russian Jews were also tumbling. At the Century Country Club, which considered itself not only the best Jewish club in New York but the best Jewish country club on earth, and where the anti-Russian bias had been all but written into the bylaws for generations, a few Russians were now being cautiously taken in as members, and one of the first of these, in 1948, was the Flatbush-born Dr. Herman Tarnower,
the son of Russian immigrants. At the time, the club's variance from standard practice was explained by the fact that Tarnower was “a nice doctor,” many of whose patients were Century members. But the hard facts were economic—as German Jews died out, or slipped quietly across the border into Christianity, the Century needed new members to support it. The only candidates were Russians.

The same thing was happening at the equally exclusive men's club, the Harmonie, in Manhattan. Founded by German Jews in 1852, the Harmonie Club's minutes and records had all been kept in German until America's entry into the First World War, and a portrait of the German kaiser had hung prominently in the entrance lobby. The lavish club, with such athletic facilities as squash courts and a swimming pool, sat on a costly piece of real estate on East Sixtieth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, and, if anything, was even more expensive than the Century to staff and maintain. An infusion of new blood, and money, was needed. This could be achieved only by taking in Russian members. It would not be long before a member of the Harmonie's board, addressing a meeting in a heavy Russian accent, would want to know why, if the Harmonie was originally a German-Jewish club, and was now a Russian-Jewish club, the menus in the dining room were printed in French and not in Yiddish that everyone could understand.

In 1937, the Radio Corporation of America had raised its president's salary to a hundred thousand dollars a year, making David Sarnoff one of a small handful of Americans with a six-figure income in that Depression year. His salary was more than that of the President of the United States. That same year, Sarnoff and his wife, Lizette, had also purchased their first Manhattan town house at 44 East Seventy-first Street, a block from Fifth Avenue and Central Park and a few blocks from Temple Emanu-El, where Sarnoff had also been made a trustee.