The first chapter of this story is a hostile one, and it has its own note. Scottsdale and the Color Line covers the 1950s: the “restricted” resorts, the Anti-Defamation League’s campaign against the Camelback Inn, and the Century Country Club, which Jewish families built near 56th Street and Shea because the other clubs wouldn’t have them. It is now the Orange Tree golf course.
This note picks up after that. It tells how a town where Jewish visitors were turned away became one of the centers of Jewish life in Arizona. It happened in three steps: a living-room meeting in 1966, the move of the Valley’s Jewish institutions north and east in the 1990s and 2000s, and the congregations that now line Shea Boulevard.
The numbers behind it
Jewish Phoenix was small for a long time. The Jewish Federation’s own history, published by Jewish News in 2008, counts about 5,000 Jews in the Valley at the end of the 1940s, about 7,500 in 1957 and about 10,000 in 1965. In 1955, Wikipedia’s history of Congregation Beth Israel notes, Phoenix had more than 3,000 Jewish families and only two congregations, Beth Israel (Reform) and Beth El (Conservative).
Then the population took off. By 1984 the federation counted more than 45,000. Its 2002 population study found more than 100,000 people claiming Jewish status in the Valley, an increase of 138 percent since 1987. Where the institutions moved over those years shows where much of the growth went: north and east, toward Scottsdale.
1966: twelve people in the Marshalls’ living room
In 1963 Jonathan Marshall, a New Yorker who had edited Arts Magazine and worked at the Ford Foundation, bought the Scottsdale Progress and moved to the Valley with his wife, Maxine. Jewish families in the area who wanted a Reform synagogue were still driving their children to religious school at Temple Beth Israel in downtown Phoenix.
On April 16, 1966, twelve people met in the Marshalls’ living room to start a congregation closer to home. Jewish News reconstructed the founding for the temple’s 50th anniversary in 2016, and the details show how small it was:
- Weeks later the group held its first Shabbat service at Phoenix Country Day School. Temple Beth Israel lent it a children’s ark and 25 prayer books.
- Services were led by Rabbi Fred Krinsky, the head of the political science department at the University of Southern California, with Seymour Raboy, a founding member, as cantorial soloist.
- The members chose the name Solel, Hebrew for “pathfinder.” Dues were $170 a year per family and $20 for religious school.
- At the first membership meeting, on July 7, 1966, 27 of the 35 members attended. By August there were 51. That fall Rosh Hashanah services were held at the Kerr Studio, very likely Louise Lincoln Kerr’s studio on Scottsdale Road, now the Kerr Cultural Center.
- Every other week the service was a “creative” one that members wrote themselves, on themes such as peace, poetry or folk music. Jonathan Marshall described the founders’ goal as a small, participatory synagogue.
Temple Solel joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1967 and hired its first full-time rabbi, Jerrold Goldstein, the same year. In May 1968 it began renting space at Camelback United Presbyterian Church (now Palo Cristi Presbyterian). Rabbi Maynard Bell arrived in 1977 and stayed 25 years. In 1978 the congregation bought a building from Scottsdale Bible Church at 6805 E. McDonald Drive, which is in Paradise Valley, and by 1979 it had 200 members. Its preschool grew into the Solel School, which grew into Pardes Jewish Day School, a K–8 school with more than 300 students in 2016.
Jewish News called Temple Solel “Scottsdale’s first Jewish congregation” in Jonathan Marshall’s 2008 obituary. Its building is just across the town line in Paradise Valley, but its founders lived here, worshipped here, and in Marshall’s case ran the local paper. The Marshalls also helped found the Arizona chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
Jewish life was part of the town’s ordinary calendar by the 1970s. Joan Fudala found December 1977 issues of the Progress announcing a Hanukkah potluck at the Civic Center Senior Center, an AVIVA/Hadassah luncheon at Eldorado Park with a slide show on Hanukkah in Israel, and Temple Solel’s Hanukkah boutique.
The 1980s and 1990s: congregations move north
The next wave came as the city spread north.
Har Zion Congregation, founded in 1960, moved into a building at 6140 E. Thunderbird Road, Scottsdale, in 1997. Temple Kol Ami, a Reform congregation at 15030 N. 64th Street, marked its 13th anniversary in April 2002, which dates its founding to about 1989. It had started with 53 families and had about 344 households by then. Chabad of Scottsdale was founded in 1992 by Rabbi Yossi and Dina Levertov. By its 25th anniversary in 2017 several hundred families were connected to it, from a home in a shopping center on Scottsdale Road near Shea.
The Jewish Community Center went through the same move, the hard way. Phoenix’s JCC opened a Scottsdale branch in the 1980s. A failed capital campaign in 1988 forced a restructuring, and in November 1991 the Scottsdale JCC closed “because of financial considerations.” In May 1992 the Phoenix and Scottsdale centers merged, still based in Phoenix, and in 1993 the merged agency took the name Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center. In 1996 it sold its 1962 building on West Maryland Avenue in Phoenix.
The biggest move was the Valley’s oldest congregation. Congregation Beth Israel, incorporated in Phoenix in 1920, left its building at Eleventh and Flower and in 1997 opened a new one at 10460 N. 56th Street, at Shea Boulevard. It had 45,000 square feet, a 500-seat sanctuary and a 300-seat chapel. By 2003 it had about 1,000 member families, the largest Jewish congregation in Arizona. In 2005 it dropped “Temple” and went back to its original name, and in 2007 it opened the Phoenix area’s first mikvah, a ritual bath approved by Reform, Conservative and Orthodox rabbis together. Its first building, the 1922 synagogue on Culver Street in downtown Phoenix, is now the Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center.
Beth Israel’s new home is a short walk from the Century Country Club’s old fairways. The golf course Jewish families built because other clubs shut them out, and what was then the state’s largest Jewish congregation, ended up in the same neighborhood.
2002: the campus on Scottsdale Road
The institutions came together in one place in 2002. The Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix finished a two-year, $34.5 million capital campaign in 2001 to build the Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus at Scottsdale Road and Sweetwater Avenue, on land donated by William Levine. Ground was broken on May 21, 2001. The campus opened on September 30, 2002, at 12701 N. Scottsdale Road. A dedication ceremony, with a mezuzah fixed to the front door, was set for October 27 that year.
The campus houses the federation, the Valley of the Sun JCC (now known as the Valley of the Sun J), the Jewish Community Foundation, the Bureau of Jewish Education and the Council for Jews with Special Needs. Pardes Jewish Day School is there too. The JCC brought something from its old home: the panels showing the creation of the world that had hung on the 1962 Maryland Avenue building were mounted on the new one. If you want to see Jewish Scottsdale in one stop, this is it.
Religion row
The newest congregations went to Shea Boulevard. Congregation Beth Tefillah, an Orthodox synagogue, was founded in 2010 by Rabbi Pinchas Allouche. “We started in my garage,” he told Jewish News. It grew from one rented suite to five. By 2015 it had more than 300 families and had bought just over two acres at 65th Place and Shea for a building of about 15,000 square feet. The building has a sanctuary, a banquet hall, a kosher kitchen with separate meat and dairy rooms, and its own mikvah, which collects rainwater from a section of roof kept clear of equipment for that purpose. It was nearing completion in 2018 at 6529 E. Shea Blvd.
The Progress has called this stretch “religion row.” Beth Tefillah stands between Chaparral Christian Church and a Latter-day Saints church, a few blocks east of Beth Israel, with Scottsdale Bible Church down the road. In December it lights a menorah every night of Hanukkah. Our Hanukkah guide has the public lightings.
Har Zion’s story ended in a merger. In 2014 it joined Congregation Or Chadash to form Congregation Or Tzion, which had about 500 membership units. In 2015 Or Tzion sold the Thunderbird Road campus, which became the Arts Academy of Scottsdale charter school. It moved to a suite on East Bahia Drive while it looked for a permanent site in north Scottsdale.
By 2016, Jewish News counted more than a dozen congregations in the Scottsdale and Paradise Valley area, three of them Reform. Fifty years earlier, families here had driven to downtown Phoenix for Reform religious school.
Where to go
- Congregation Beth Israel, 10460 N. 56th St., at Shea. Check the congregation’s website before attending a service. Orange Tree, the old Century Country Club, is a short way north on 56th Street.
- Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus, 12701 N. Scottsdale Rd. Look for the creation panels carried up from Phoenix.
- Shea Boulevard east of 56th Street, for religion row.
- The Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center, 122 E. Culver St., Phoenix, for the history itself. It holds the Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s archives.
- For lunch, Goldman’s Deli on Hayden Road.
What the record doesn’t show
- A Scottsdale-only history. The published histories are Valley-wide and Phoenix-centered. Nobody has written down when the first Jewish families settled in Scottsdale, or how many lived here in 1960 or 1980. The federation’s population studies of 1987 and 2002 should break the numbers down by area.
- The first Scottsdale JCC. The federation’s history says only that a branch opened in Scottsdale in the 1980s and closed in 1991. Its address and opening date are in the Jewish News archive and the federation’s files.
- Har Zion before 1997. We know when it was founded and when it came to Thunderbird Road, not where it met in between.
- Kol Ami’s founding. The 1989 date is worked back from an anniversary story. The congregation’s own records would confirm it.
- The Century Country Club. Its founders, charter and the dates of its opening and sale are still unconfirmed. See the color-line note for what is known and where to look.
The Arizona Jewish Historical Society’s oral histories and the Phoenix Jewish News back files, both at the Cutler-Plotkin center, are where most of these answers are.