‘Tijuana Jews’ filmmakers turn their sights to frontier Jews north of the border

SAN DIEGO (Press Release)– Award winning filmmakers, Isaac and Jude Artenstein are readying production in San Diego for the first professional documentary spotlighting the Jewish Experience in the Southwest. The overall goal of Frontier Jews is to provide new insight into a part of American Jewish history that is an important missing piece of the narrative of the American West.

By focusing on cities like San Diego, Tucson, Santa Fe and El Paso, this 4-part series will highlight the extensive, and often overlooked, role Jews played in the Southwest for many generations, actively contributing to its cultural, political, and economic growth. It will also demonstrate the great lengths Jews went in order to preserve their traditions in a vast and sparsely populated terrain.

The filmmakers began production in Southern Arizona and have conducted research and pre-production in all the key cities, working extensively with scholars, Jewish Historical Societies, and distinguished consultants like Mark Harris (academy-award winning director of The Long Way Home  and Stories of the Kindertransport) and Harriet Rochlin (author of Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West).

Frontier Jews will be a valuable and effective tool for teaching tolerance by presenting the vital role Jews played in the region and by showing how Jewish people effectively adapt to different cultures, and environments.  Once completed, the 4-part series will be offered to television and cable networks, including National PBS, where the filmmakers have a distinguished record of distribution.

Isaac and Jude are San Diego-based filmmakers, responsible for independent feature films as well as documentaries. Their documentary Tijuana Jews  premiered at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival and on KPBS, and won top honors at the Latino Film Festivals in San Francisco, and San Diego.

The evocative imagery of the Southwest will serve as a backdrop to a story told by descendants of Jewish pioneers and other key participants.  Their testimonials will be creatively interwoven with family photos, home movies, and historical footage. An original music score will provide an emotional through-line and context for the images.

This filmic journey begins in El Paso, whose pioneering Jewish community sent circuit-riding rabbis to small cities throughout the region to help with the observance of Jewish rites in the early days. We continue onto to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the Spiegelberg brothers and other Jewish pioneers established themselves after coming across the Santa Fe Trail to sell goods in the mid-1850s.

In Albuquerque we learn that Henry Jaffa became Albuquerque’s first mayor in 1885 and was followed in that post by Mike Mandell, another Jewish merchant.  Jewish symbols appear on gravestones in the Catholic cemeteries of some New Mexico villages, where we encounter age-old customs and oral histories that go back to the secret Jews and conversos who settled in the region to escape the reach of the Spanish Inquisition during Mexico’s Colonial era

Route 66 takes us to the Acoma Pueblo, where Solomon Bibo, a Jewish trader won the trust and affection of the Pueblo Indians, and, in 1885, married Juana Valle, granddaughter of the Pueblo’s Governor.  “Salomono,” as the Pueblos knew him, eventually became governor of the Acoma Pueblo, the equivalent of chief of the tribe, and remarkably, the Acomas asked the United States to recognize Bibo as their leader.

Tucson, Arizona elected five Jewish mayors and established the first Jewish temple in the territory, which now houses the Jewish Heritage Center of Southern Arizona.  It is there we find out about the role Jewish women played in establishing the region’s first Jewish communal institutions.  The Center also holds a vast collection of photographs, documents and testimonials about other Jewish Pioneers, such as Jacob Mansfeld, who helped bring the University of Arizona to Tucson.

In San Diego’s Old Town we find “El Callejón de los Judíos” — Jew’s Alley — known by that name because of the presence of Jewish merchants on that street since the mid-1800’s.  San Diego was the first city in Southern California to hold a recorded Jewish religious observance (1851), to hold a Jewish marriage (1853), and to establish a Jewish congregation (1861).  California is the end of this journey and it helps provide a contemporary context to the Frontier Jews story by presenting an overview of Jewish life, institutions, individuals, and contributions to a region and a state that is represented today by two Senators of Jewish descent, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

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Preceding provided by Isaac Artenstein at 619-276-4142.