“West Side Stories,” a documentary about Denver’s old Jewish neighborhood, premiered last week at the Hebrew Educational Alliance. At one time, the Alliance was an anchor of the Jewish Westside. Eventually, the synagogue followed its congregation to the east side, though around here they have a saying: “Once a Westsider, always a Westsider.”
Director and producer Steve Feld figured about 150 people would attend. Eight hundred showed up. About a third were Westsiders. After the movie, the rest wished they had been.
“It was our Camelot and, later on, I called it — it really was — our Colfaxalot,” Jerry Lande says as the film opens.
In less mythical terms, the Jewish Westside existed about four blocks deep along both sides of West Colfax Avenue between the South Platte River and Sheridan Boulevard.
So Jewish was the neighborhood with its synagogues and grocers and tradesmen, with its women singing on the front porches and bearded men and bathtub carp destined for gefilte fish, that a couple of people in the movie said it was like someone scooped up an Eastern European shtetl and plunked it down here.
“How did Jews come to Denver?” asks Mike Zelinger, a former reporter for the Intermountain Jewish News, and we are back to the Cotopaxi agricultural colony of the 1880s. We are back to the first neighborhood, the place we know now as Sun Valley, south of Invesco Field. We are among the tuberculosis-stricken who sought a cure here. We are in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and their undisguised anti-Semitism. We are in a community far from the Jewish populations of the coasts and thought to be more cohesive because of that.
“Being Jewish was our glue, and that kept us together our whole lives,” Jerry Feld says in the movie.
Steve Feld’s grandparents lived in the neighborhood. His grandfather was a sofer — a scribe who could write and repair the Torah. But he also owned a hardware store. It might have been the only place in Denver where you could buy a hammer and a prayer shawl.
Steve Feld moved back to Denver in 1993 after a successful career as a Hollywood writer, producer and director. “I was in the community doing a lot of work for Jewish organizations, and a lot of the elderly people would say, ‘I remember your grandfather.’ They said, ‘You should do a movie about the Westside.’ “
His proposal then went nowhere, but about 18 months ago, his brother, Sandy, and eventual partners, Ron Bernstein and Marc Rosen, told him he had to do this movie.
Together, the four raised $16,000. The plan was to film a few interviews and use them to raise more money. But six interviews became 45 and a nearly complete film.
The four worked for free. When the money to pay the film crew ran out, Steve took over filming and Ron carried the equipment and rounded up old photos. Steve spent three and a half months editing. The partners are raising money to finish it in time for the Denver Film Festival. They also want to build a video archive of interviews with Jewish Westsiders.
“We’re not historians,” Feld told the audience last week. “We’re just four guys with a great appreciation of where we came from. This is not so much a documentary as it is a loving tribute.”
The Jewish Westside exists now only in the geography of memory. As Zelinger puts it in the movie: “Certainly you can drive down West Colfax and look at the houses, but without a story behind those houses, it really has no meaning.”
So, here’s a story. It comes from Libby Rosen, Marc’s mom. She and her husband owned Phil’s Supermarket.
“A lady came in and she says, ‘Libby, I want a herring. So, I put my hand in the barrel and I only had one herring. I pulled it and she said — she talked to me in Yiddish — ‘That’s really, really very nice, but maybe you have a bigger one?’ So, I put that same herring back into the barrel and I pulled it out and she said, in Yiddish, ‘That’s very nice. I think I’ll take both of them.’ “
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
