2003-02-21 Temecula's Jewish Pioneers
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 California Riverside
CountyTemecula |
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| . Temecula: Its Jewish
Pioneers San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, Feb. 21, 2003 |
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2003-02-21 Temecula's Jewish Pioneers |
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| Temecula and its neighboring cities in southwestern Riverside County have
a colorful Jewish history. This is the first in a series of articles examining
Jewish history and institutions in that region. By Donald H. Harrison TemeculaThere is a growing, but hardly new, Jewish community in southwestern Riverside County, just north of San Diego County on the Interstate 15. The community dates back to the saloon-keeper, store-keeper, judge and Indian labor-broker Louis Wolf, who was the prototype for one of the characters in Ramona, a 19th century novel of California, and it reaches to Jeff Stone, the current mayor of Temecula, who owns a compounding pharmacy in neighboring Murrieta. The defunct Murrieta Hot Springs resort played a colorful role in attracting Jews to the area, including Stone's family, who, during his childhood, would commute from their home in Anaheim along some treacherous roads to reach the resort built around pools that bubbled up hot water through fault lines in the Earthıs surface. The portion of southwestern Riverside County that stretches from Temecula on the south to Lake Elsinore on the north has two Conservative synagogues, each with its own paid-off building; a Reform congregation that leases space from a church, and a Chabad house that meets in its rabbi's home. It also has an old Jewish cemetery, once abandoned but now operated by Riverside County, and a new Jewish cemetery that was consecrated at the end of last year. * * * Just off the main street of Old Town Temecula, a tourist destination for people who enjoy cowboy-style food, local wines and shopping for antiques, there is the two-story Temecula Valley Museum, with both permanent and special exhibits on Temecula's history. In a public square near the museum is a large boulder on which are carved the names of famous people in Temecula's history, including those of Louis Wolf and his one-time assistant, Simon Levi, who would later become an important force in the development of San Diego's Jewish community. Among some of the museum's most treasured possessions are a cumbersome powder-and-cap gun that belonged to Wolf, and two letters written in 1883 by Ramona's author, Helen Hunt Jackson, to Louis Wolf's wife, Ramona Place Wolf, about some fabrics she had commissioned local Indians to weave for her. Mrs. Wolf was half-Indian, one-quarter Caucasian and one-quarter African-American, prompting some debate whether she was the prototype for the half-Indian, half-Caucasian fictional character in the novel Ramona. Although she bore the same name as the book's heroine and was interviewed by author Jackson, Ramona Place Wolf was not the prototype, according to a research paper issued by the Temecula Valley Museum. However, according to the research, she may have contributed to the composite drawn by Jackson. Another influence may have been Ramona Lubo, whose husband, Juan Diego, was killed by a White man in 1883 for allegedly stealing a horse an incident fictionalized at the climax of the novel. Even though it was fiction, Ramona is considered a preeminent book in California's historical canon because it created a national wave of sympathy for the plight of Indians in California, whose lands were stolen from them. Ramona also was the book for which the town of Ramona in San Diego County was named. It was the subject of several celebrity-studded movies made in the early 20th century, including one starring Mary Pickford and another starring Loretta Young. It was the inspiration for the nationıs oldest outdoor pageant, which with only a few interruptions has been performed annually in Hemet since 1923. Its effects also were felt in Old Town San Diego, where the Casa de Estudillo for many years was promoted to tourists as "Ramonaıs Wedding Place." The novel is a tale of a tragic romance between Ramona, a beautiful girl unaware that she is half-Indian and half-European, and Alessandro, the handsome son of a chief of the Temecula Indians, whose lands have been taken away from them. The Temecula Indians later became known as the Pechanga Indians. In the novel, Wolf and his wife, Ramona, were transformed into Mr. and Mrs. Jim Hartsel, whose store was described as "one of those mongrel establishments to be seen nowhere except in Southern California. Half shop, half farm, half tavern, it gathered up to itself all the threads of the life of the whole region. Indians, ranchmen, travelers of all sorts, traded at Hartsel's, drank at Hartsel's, slept at Hartsel's. It was the only place of its kind within a radius of twenty miles, and it was the least bad place of its kind within a much wider radius." Like Wolf, the fictional Hartsel immigrated to the Temecula area from the Alsace region of France. The author's description of Hartsel corresponds with descriptions of Wolf written by his contemporaries. In its unsigned research paper, "Louis and Ramona Wolf of Temecula," the museum points out the passage in Ramona in which it said of Hartsel: "He liked the country. He liked the wild life, and, for a wonder, he liked the Indians. Many a good word he spoke for them to travelers who believed no good of the race, and evidently listened with incredulity when he would say, as he often did: 'Iıve never lost a dollar on these Indians yet. They do all their trading with me. There's some of them I trust as high's a hundred dollars. If they can't pay this year, they'll pay next; and if they die, their relations will pay their debts for them, a little at a time, till they've got it all paid off. They'll pay in wheat, or bring a steer, maybe, or baskets or mats the women make; but theyıll pay." Alessandro, bringing his father's violin to Mrs. Hartsel for sale, is told "Jim'll make as good a trader for you's he can. He's a real good friend to all of you, Alessandro, when he's himself (not drunk)." To which Alessandro replies: "OI know it, Mrs. Hartsel. I'd trust Mr. Hartsel more than any other man in this country. ... He's about the only white man I do trust!" Wolf's combination of store and hotel was a success because it was located at the crossroads of two important wagon trails the southern Emigrants Trail (by which Americans traveled to California while avoiding the high zmountains of Northern California) and the road between San Diego and San Bernardino. When the railroad came to Temecula, however, the station was constructed in the present Old Town Temecula, about four miles north of Wolf's store, leading to his rapid economic deterioration. Levi, who was Wolf's assistant and served as a postmaster in Temecula, opened a grocery business in San Diego in 1876 along with his uncle. Samuel Steiner, and Abraham Klauber. He would become a member of San Diego's board of trustees (forerunner to the city council) and one of the founders of Temple Beth Israel. * * * Another exhibit at the Temecula Valley Museum concerns Murrieta Hot Springs, which was founded in 1902 by Fritz Guenther and operated by his family through 1969. Thereafter a variety of interests operated the resort until it was sold to the Calvary Chapel Bible College and Conference Center. Old postcards depicting the resort include a large Magen David above the main building's entryway. As the Guenthers weren't Jewish, some dismiss the six-pointed star as simply a design element, but others have suggested that the successful proprietors of the resort always welcomed Jewish trade, and this was their way of showing it. Among the Jews who frequented Murrieta Hot Springs was Tillie Alpert, who remembered, in an interview with AMC Records, that she went to the resort one weekend in 1943 with her husband Louis, leaving her 8-year-old son, Herb, at home in another's care. "When we got home there was a horn in the house," Tillie Alpert said. "We asked the children where it came from and Herb said, 'I rented it from school with my allowance.' I asked him how long he was allowed to keep it, and he said six months." Herb Alpert grew up to be the renowned leader of the Tijuana Brass and cofounder of A&M Records. Jeff Stone, a member of the Temecula City Council who has held the rotating position as mayor on three occasions, including this year, has memories of childhood vacations spent at Murrieta Hot Springs during the early 1960s. "Murrieta Hot Springs was primarily a Jewish resort and my parents had been taking me there since I was 5 years old," he recalled in a recent interview. "It was open to the public. There were mud baths, saunas, massages, a gourmet dining room and horseback riding for kids, bingo for kids, swimming for kids, so there were a lot of exciting things for everyone to do. In fact there was even gambling out there and the sheriffs came out and did a raid a few times. Jews like playing pan." With some prompting about those days, the mayor continued: "I remember the beautiful mosaic swimming pool, which still exists today. I remember they had a high dive, and it was a very shallow pool, and someone dove in and was killed ... so then they didn't allow anyone to do high dives anymore. They had activities for kids I remember winning a bingo, and I won a free horseback ride... ." Prior to the resort's conversion to a Bible college, a stable stood where today there is a horseshoe of apartment buildings, Stone said. "So," he continued, "I got on the horse, and the guy said, 'I donıt want you over-riding this horse.' I said: 'I have never ridden a horse, tell me what to do' ... and he said 'take the reins to the left, when you want to go left, right when you want to go right, and kick him when you want to go... .' What he didn't tell me was how to stop. It was a hilly area; the horse walked up this hill and then immediately turned around and shot back downhill towards the stable, and my foot fell out of the stirrups and I was holding on to the saddle for dear life. We get down to the bottom and the horse is frothing at the mouth, and the guy who was tending the horses came over screaming: 'I told you not to run the horse very hard.' And I said, 'Get me off this thing,' and I have never ridden a horse since. It scared me to death..." Initially, Jewish residents of Temecula and Murrieta held services in each other's homes or drove north either to Lake Elsinore or to Sun City to attend services at any of three congregations: Lake Elsinore Hebrew Congregation (Orthodox), which was founded in 1948 and was destroyed by fire in 1978; Congregation Beth Isaac (Conservative) of Lake Elsinore, founded in 1948 and closed in 1989, and Temple Beth Sholom (Conservative), established in 1965 in the retirement community of Sun City and still going strong. In 1954, the Home of Peace Cemetery was dedicated in Lake Elsinore, but it eventually fell into disrepair with lack of use. There proved to be sufficient interest in Temecula and Murrieta in 1972 for Congregation B'nai Chaim to be founded adjacent to the Murrieta Hot Springs resort. What then were called "mobile home" parks (and now called "modular home" communities) had attracted numerous retirees to settle in the area, among them a substantial number of Holocaust survivors. In this context, the congregational name B'nai Chaim, or "Children of Life," is particularly significant. The congregation was located at the bottom of a hill leading up to one of the modular home parks. To this day, many members of the congregation still live "on the hill," which needs no other identification. Among the congregationıs treasures is a Torah presented to it by Max and Thelma Zicklin, who migrated there after Congregation Beth Isaac dwindled to 14 elderly members by 1989 and so was sold. Thelma Zicklin, today 99, remembers that she secured the "biggest and nicest" of Congregation Beth Isaac's five Torahs for Congregation B'nai Chaim. Still active in the congregation, where she regularly says Ha Motzi at the oneg following Friday night services, Zicklin is anticipating celebrating her 100th birthday with synagogue members later this year. If any of them should ask her secret of longevity, she said, she has a one-word answer: "Exercise," which she still does every morning before breakfast. Signaling the growth of the Jewish community in southwestern Riverside County is the emergence of congregations on different points of the Jewish theological spectrum. Congregation Havurim was started in 1994 and since has been accepted as a Reform congregation by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. It is served by student rabbis. In 1999, the Lubavitcher organization sent Rabbi Yitzchok Hurwitz to Temecula, where he has since conducted services and classes, and has participated each Chanukah in public menorah-lighting ceremonies. Another sign of the Jewish community's growth came in 1997, when the all-but-abandoned Home of Peace Cemetery was rededicated as part of the neighboring public Elsinore Valley Cemetery District with the help of Rabbi Alice Dubinsky of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Herb Lipson, then president of Temple Beth Sholom. Cemetery officials said Home of Peace would continue to be operated exclusively as a Jewish cemetery, commenting that there was no shortage of space at either burial ground. Last December, Rabbi David Barnett of Congregation B'nai Chaim consecrated separate ground for Jewish burials at the Miller Jones-operated cemetery park in Sun City. * * * |
