Bette Myerson and Bruce Grossman

[00:01] BETTE MYERSON: Good morning. I'm Bette Myerson, 76 years old. Today's March 22, 2023. We are in Taos, New Mexico. Beautiful Taos, New Mexico, on a windy March day. I am speaking today with Bruce Grossman, who's been a friend of mine for many decades.

[00:21] BRUCE GROSSMAN: And I am Bruce Grossman. I am 75 years old. It's still March 22, 2021, 23. We're in Taos, New Mexico, and my interview partner is my friend Bette Myerson, who I've known for many decades.

[00:38] BETTE MYERSON: Bruce is an active member of the Taos jewish community for many years. He came here a long time ago, and I'm going to let him tell you about that. He also recently published a book about his experiences with the jewish community in Taos and that's our main focus today. But first, tell us, Bruce, about your childhood and relationship to Judaism.

[01:04] BRUCE GROSSMAN: So I was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947. Both my parents were jewish, and we had quite an extensive family there, particularly on my father's side. And I was raised in a, let's say, conservative orthodox home. Both my parents grew up in very traditional jewish homes, and that was my initial experience. When I was five, my family moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. And the reason for that was that my maternal grandmother, who had some physical disabilities, had moved out to Los Angeles to be in the warmer weather. And so my mother advocated to move, and so we did. And it was kind of a blessing and a curse. I mean, it was certainly the weather was much better in California than it was in the Chicago, but it meant leaving the connection to my father's family, which was quite extensive. And we didn't have that kind of support and family connection when we moved to California. We wound up living in the San Fernando Valley, the east part of the valley, in a little place called Pacoima. There weren't a lot of jewish families there, although my parents somehow found every jewish person that lived in Pacoima I knew. And I grew up in a kind of conservative tradition. I had a bar mitzvah when I was 13 at the Valley Hebrew Academy. And I would say that that at that point, as a young teen, my connection to Judaism pretty much ended. I was very happy that my bar mitzvah was over. I didn't have that large family connection that I had in Chicago. And I kind of put my Judaism aside. I would say it wasn't a, wasn't of interest to me. And as I got older, I got interested in other forms of spirituality, of Buddhism and Taoism. And as the sixties rolled around, I kind of got into that whole scene of music, and like I say, it really. It really was dormant until I moved from the. I had moved. When I graduated from UCLA, I moved up to the Bay Area, and I met my first wife there. Her name is Susan Berman, and she didn't have much connection to Judaism either, although both of her parents were jewish. Interestingly enough, she was actually raised as a Unitarian, which I know, Bette you have a little connection to that group here. So I moved out here. We left California in 1976 on our way to trek in Nepal, and I was my first retirement. I worked as a photographer and teacher, and we decided we just really wanted to spend a lot of time on the road and drove across the United States, hiking and backpacking and pretty much all the national parks. And by the time we got to New York, we were exhausted and decided that we wanted to wait until the winter passed, but we didn't want to spend the winter on the east coast. And I had a friend whose name is, at the time, who I'd met in California by the name of Harvey Mudd, who is a rather famous name here in Taos. He lived here in the seventies and eighties and was involved in the theater here and some of the arts. And anyway, he said he had a ranch out here in Taos that if I ever came to Taos I should look him up. Well, by the time I got out here, Harvey had moved to Santa Fe. But I got in touch with his close friend Jim Levy, who is someone who also has quite a history here in Taos and was involved in the Harwood. And actually, I think Jim is actually doing a StoryCorps presentation this week about his experience with Harwood. So we met Jim and wound up living in a royal Hondo. And in 1980, I had my first child. His name is Teo. And we were living in this small community north of Taos, and he had friends and was going to school. And one day he came home, and he said, dad, what am I? I said, well, what do you mean? You're my son. You're my little boy. He said, no. He said, the kids at school are asking me, like, am I? Am I, what church do I go to? Am I a Catholic? Am I. What am I? And I realized at that point that I needed to kind of do something and give him some identity. And so I started searching around for a way to kind of get him some kind of jewish education. So that's how I got to Taos. And I don't know if you have some other questions you want me to kind of go on with.

[07:28] BETTE MYERSON: Well, please continue in terms of Teo's education and your association with the jewish community and how it all got going.

[07:38] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Okay, well, I'll back up a little bit. I guess things started a little bit sooner than his three, four year old question. It started, actually right when he was born, because I had to decide in the jewish tradition, if you have a little boy, when a little boy is eight days old, you have brit a ritual circumcision. And so that was the first big choice. And my wife and I had kind of talked about it, and she wasn't so happy about the idea, but we thought it was the right thing to do. Of course, there were no traditional moils. The moil is a person who does ritual circumcisions in Taos But it just so happened that our next door neighbor, Ken Brandis, was a doctor and a jewish doctor. And I talked to him, and I said, well, do you do circumcisions? And he said, sure. And I said, well, what do you think about doing one for my son? And he said, that would be fine. And I said, well, can we say a few prayers and make it a ritual thing? And together we. We created a little ceremony. And I think that probably was the kind of beginning of the jewish experience in Taos. And it is sort of symbolic of how things happened here. I mean, the way things happen in Taos is if you want something done, you kind of do it yourself. You kind of create it and make it happen. And that kind of continued to be the theme as we moved along. And so I think the first more formal jewish experience was with a Sunday school experience. At the time, this would have been back in, oh, the mid eighties to late eighties. There was someone here in Taos by the name of Carol, now known as Chava Karp. And she had some training as a jewish teacher. Her mother was the head of a jewish school in New York. And chave had interest in creating jewish experiences for people here. And she had a little Sunday school that was going on at the time. And so I got theo enrolled in that, and he just. It's just funny how it all kind of unfolded. I mean, it turned out again. I mean, Taos did not have that many jewish people, but somehow we wound up meeting the ones that were here. So his friends Lee and Kellen Backer, the children of Sid and Bette Backer, and Matthew Rutherford, the son of Rose Gordon and Wayne Rutherford, were involved. And there was another person here. What was his name? Well, anyway, so they were all involved in the Sunday school, and suddenly there was a little bit of jewish education that was taking place here.

[11:35] BETTE MYERSON: Thank you. Bruce, the name of your book is nobody came or nobody comes. Nobody came to Taos to be jewish. Tell me about that phrase and how the book came to be.

[11:51] BRUCE GROSSMAN: So my wife Cindy, is a pastel artist, and she was having a show at one of the historic sites here in Taos.

[12:07] BETTE MYERSON: Bloom and shine.

[12:08] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Not the bloom and shine, the one on Ledoux street. Well, so she was having a show, and they had a little gift shop there. And so I was bringing the paintings, and I was looking in the gift shop, and I was seeing all these memoirs of different people that different people had written about their experience in Taos. And I'd always loved to write. I'd written a book of poetry earlier about my father and his passing. And I thought, well, I could write. I should write a memoir. I have a lot of things to share, and one of the things that I wanted to write about and share was my jewish experience, but that was only one part of it. And so I started work on this memoir, and the jewish part just kind of kept growing and basically kind of took over and became its own thing. And the expression no one came to Taos to be jewish was a phrase that I had coined years ago, because the reality is nobody came. We came to Taos to ski. We came to Taos to get away from the urban sprawl. We came to Taos to hike in the mountains. The last thing on anybody's mind that I knew was to have a jewish experience here. And then all these things started to happen, and suddenly it just kind of flowered into a renaissance. And there were Sunday schools. There was the banish, which was a group of jewish people that got together to do ritual and have different ceremonies. There was the Taos minion, which is a group of people that got together and did Torah study and prayed on Saturday mornings. And then there was the Taos jewish center. That happened. And then somebody donated land for a cemetery, and land was donated to B'nai Shalom. And we had a cemetery. And it just kind of kept happening. And somehow I wound up kind of being involved in a lot of it. And so I thought, well, I have this kind of unique perspective of kind of what's happened here in the way of Judaism. And it seemed important to kind of write it down and preserve it.

[14:54] BETTE MYERSON: Thank you so much for doing it. It's a wonderful book. We certainly highly recommend it. Tell us about the Taos Minion and Ron Kallman I know you were one of the big machars in that group.

[15:10] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Yeah. So again, just kind of how things happened here just. It kind of borders on the miraculous to me. So one afternoon I was watching television with my two sons. I had a second son, Robin, who was born in 1986. And we were watching a movie that was a canadian movie that had a scene in the movie about a child's bar mitzvah. The background to the movie was that he was a. He was a piano prodigy, and he had a connection with a young girl who wasn't jewish, and their relationship evolved. But at one point, there was a scene in there about a bar mitzvah, and my son Tail, who was, I think, ten at the time, he turned to me and he said, well, can I do that? And I said, oh, you want to learn how to play the piano? And he said, no, I'd like to have a bar mitzvah. And I was kind of just floored because it wasn't anything that we had really ever discussed. And my bar mitzvah experience was not very pleasant one. And I remember when I finished that, I kind of made a promise to myself that I would never force my son into doing something like that he didn't want to do. Well, suddenly he's asking me for a bar mitzvah, and, you know, here I am in Taos, New Mexico, and where do I do this? Well, I had met Ron Kallman here in Taos shortly after I got here. He and his wife Carol ran a pizza place here called the House of Taos. And he was from Chicago. He had had a background in jewish study. He actually went to yeshiva to train to be a rabbi, but then dropped out because he realized it wasn't quite his thing, but he was quite knowledgeable. I'd heard that he had, in the past, prepared children for bar mitzvah, and he prepared the son of one of the more well known doctors here, Larry Schreiber's son Lucas. And he had prepared Judith Fritz, who is now Judith Olevi, who's now a rabbi. He prepared his son as well. So I knew Ron, and so I drove across the plaza to his house and knocked on his door, and I said, would you consider preparing my son Teo for a bar mitzvah? And he said, maybe. He said, it depends. And I said, what do you mean it depends? He said, well, we need to get together and have a talk. And so we invited him over for dinner, and we sat around and he said, well, it's, you know, this. This idea of having a bar mitzvah is not just about your son. It's about your whole family. You can't just do this in a vacuum. You need to be participating and be part of this as well. And so after the dinner, my wife and I spoke, and we spoke with Teo, and we decided we would kind of sign up. And what that meant would be that we would need to kind of start being more observant and lighting candles and doing the preparation for the Passover Seder and all the particular rituals that are involved in Judaism to have a context for Theo to be able to understand and be involved in this process. So that was the beginning of his study. And then the other link in that, and this is another name that I'll talk about, is that I decided that it was, if my son was going to start to learn about Judaism, that I needed to learn as well. And I, from my basketball experiences in Taos, I knew a couple of other jewish guys, and one of them was a fellow by the name of Roger Lermane, who at the time, was very interested in Judaism. And he and I started getting together and studying the Torah on Saturday mornings during the same time that Theo was studying with Ron. So now suddenly, there's this kind of synergy that was going on. Well, Theo had his bar mitzvah, I think it was June 12, 1993, at the Mabel Dodge Lujan house, which is a kind of iconic place here in Taos. And after the bar mitzvah, we were kind of sitting around, a bunch of us, and it was a very sweet and joyful experience. But we realized that we weren't going to be studying Torah anymore. And there was kind of a sadness. And I think it was Ron who said, well, we don't have to stop. We can just start something, and we can all. You know, we can get together as a group on Saturday mornings and start doing Shabbos observance and Torah study, and we can create a minion that would be open to people in the community. And the following or two weeks after that, we started. We started a meeting, and it started at Ted Diamond's house, and we met at people's homes. And for the first year or so, and then after that, we were invited to use the space that was upstairs of the apple tree, which is now Lambert's restaurant. The apple tree was a restaurant, another iconic place and house. And I. And we met for many, many years up there. And Ron was the de facto leader. He never would claim to be the leader, but he certainly knew more than all of us. And that became the Taos minion. And when people would ask, well, who's in the minion? The answer was always, well, whoever shows up on Saturday morning. And we always had at least ten to twelve people, sometimes as many as 20 people, doing the services.

[22:01] BETTE MYERSON: Tell us about your admiration for and relationship with Ron.

[22:09] BRUCE GROSSMAN: So Ron was a very unique and charismatic person. I would say he is kind of the closest person that I've ever met to a prophet or a holy man. He lived a very ascetic life. Not that he had to live that way, but that's how he lived. He did nothing, crave material things. He indulged in study all the time. He gave of himself freely over the time that he was alive here. And he conducted marriages, he officiated over funerals, he led services, and he never took a penny for any of the things that he did in that way. And we just clicked intellectually. I mean, we would get together and, I mean, I had this goofy thing of myself of just being interested in classical biblical works. And, I mean, we would do nutty things, like, I think nutty, and, you know, just getting together once or twice a week and reading through the book of Job and reading all the commentary and discussing it. And when we were finished with. With job, we would. We would go on to Isaiah or other, other books. There was a. We did a whole study on the. A book called Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier that was all about the prayer for the dead that's recited in Judaism. And it was a 500 or 600 page book and very dense. And so, I mean, when I think back, it was just kind of like, it was a great friendship, a great connection. I learned a more from him than anybody that I've ever met. And he taught my other son Robin, also. And if Tao and Robin were here sitting in the room with us, they would affirm that they, too, learned more from him in the time that they spent than they did in their college education. So he was an extraordinary man, and I dedicated the book to him, and there is a section about him in the book, and he's now buried in the cemetery here.

[25:20] BETTE MYERSON: Ron died

[25:23] BRUCE GROSSMAN: When did Ron die? I can't. I don't remember. It's been. Yeah, it's okay.

[25:31] BETTE MYERSON: Robin and Teo now live where. And are doing what?

[25:34] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Yeah, so Robin and Teo live. Both live in Colorado. Tao works for the bioneers. It's an environmental group that does events. And I. He's actually in the process now of putting on a big event in Berkeley, where they bring in environmental speakers and they have workshops. And Robin lives in Colorado Springs, where he taught soccer, was a soccer coach at Colorado College for many years. And now he's still coaching, but now he's an executive coach, coaching CEO's and corporate leaders.

[26:12] BETTE MYERSON: Great. Tell us about your relationship to Rabbi Judith and a little bit of her story in terms of the jewish community.

[26:24] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Yeah. So Rabbi Judith. JuditH FriTz, Judith Halevi moved here the same year I moved here in 1976 from, from. She was living in Mexico at the time. And when she left Mexico with her two children, she got involved in the Donna Hosley school, which was an alternative school here that later became Tass Valley school that I was actually headmaster of for a period of time. But she had a great interest in, in jewish tradition and life and had spent a lot of time in Israel. Her first husband was Israeli, and she had this desire to become a rabbi and got involved with studying with a rabbi by the name of Jonathan Omerman and another rabbi, Rabbi Zalmande, who was also the inspiration for the other taoist rabbi who I mentioned before, Rabbi Chala Karp. And then Rabbi Judith was ordained in Santa Fe and wound up becoming the rabbi for the Malibu jewish center, which is a fairly large congregation. The congregation of Barbra Streisand kind of really made a name for herself in Los Angeles. And then when she retired, she came back out here and became the rabbi for the Taos jewish center.

[28:18] BETTE MYERSON: So tell us about the inception and current day of the Taos jewish center.

[28:28] BRUCE GROSSMAN: Yeah, so the Taos jewish center formed in 2022, 2002. And at the time, there was the Taos minion, which I spoke of before. And there was B'nai Shalom, which I spoke of before, and I. And there was no real jewish space. I mean, the dominion met at the apple tree, and Benesh Alom met in people's homes. And at that point, there was B'nais Shalom had accumulated a lot of jewish books. There was a jewish library. The Benesh Shalom had a Torah, a Holocaust Torah that, that they had acquired, and the minyan had a little Torah that they had acquired here in Taos. But there had long been a desire on many people's parts, and particularly in B'nai Shalom, had talked a bit about wanting a space. And. And one day I was hiking up to Visitero Peak, which is one of the easy local trails here. And I just had this idea that, well, maybe if we, the Minion and Benet Shalom got together. And also there was a Sunday school that was happening at that time as well, that Roger Lerman and Lisa Guttman and Gene Schumer were. Were running at that point. So there were three groups, but no space. And I thought, well, maybe if the three of us got together, we could create an organization and we can get a space. And so at the time, there was somebody who was very much involved with B'nai Shalom and very active in the jewish community, a woman named Beth Goldman. And it was around Hanukkah time, because she was doing something at the Milson Rogers Museum, where we had a little jewish exhibit. And I went over and talked to her, and I said, hey, what do you think if we got together, the three of us, and coalesced and had a meeting, and maybe we could find a space? And at that time, there was a somebody who was very energetic and very involved in Judaism. His name was Carmi Plaut, and he came from a long line of rabbis. He had very famous uncle Gunther Plaut, who was very renowned in the jewish reform movement and written many, many, many books. So Carmi had a lot of jewish energy. So Carmi and I and Beth and a few others got together, and we talked, and it was kind of thumbs up, let's do this. And we had a community meeting at a bakery that I think was run by some jewish folks at the time. And we put the word out. And when I think about it, seemed like there were hundreds of people that were there. Maybe there were 70 or 80, but there was a lot of excitement, a lot of energy to find a jewish space. And there needed to be an organization that would be responsible for maintaining the jewish space. And so that organization became the Taos jewish center. And it's funny how these things all kind of wind back. So this guy that I first meth when I came to Taos, Jim Levy, had this expertise in nonprofits, and he helped us put together bylaws and get our nonprofit organization and get our board together. And I believe it was in September of 2022 that we opened the doors on Gusdorf which is also, interestingly, a jewish name from Taos history. And we started the Taos Jewish center. And when we started it, it had the three groups together, the dominion, the B'nai Shalom, and the Sunday school. And we moved the library in, and we moved the Torian and I. The rest, they say, is history. It's been 21 years now that we've had a jewish space, and we have a board. We went through a period of time where we had an executive director. We had a lot of funding, we had lots of grants, and like all good things, it kind of came to a bit of an end. And now it's more run. It's run pretty much as a volunteer organization, but it's strong. And I think we have about 80 or 90 families that are involved. And we have a rabbi who does high holiday services and services twice a month, and Benesh Alom has services on the alternate. Maybe, Bette you can share some.

[34:18] BETTE MYERSON: Benesh alum continues in a lesser capacity with a service once a month. Rabbi Karp is still with us, and due to Covid, we are still on Zoom. But that enables many people from many different places to all be together once a month, which is wonderful. And the two groups work very closely together. And that's kind of our story, except we have the cemetery still, which is growing because people die. And Bruce has been very involved with a new project to do landscaping for the cemetery. Roger Lerman took care of the cemetery for many years, and he passed away the year after run, I think the same year. Anyway, Bruce took over. He and Nancy Tettenbaum, who unfortunately left us recently as well. But Bruce continues to help us with this project. Tell us a little bit about that.

[35:28] BRUCE GROSSMAN: So the land was donated by Hank Sacks and Hank Sachs family. Hank is a renowned ceramic artist here in Taos, and it's out on the mesa, and it's the only freestanding, independent jewish cemetery in New Mexico. And it's on land. Well, it's all sagebrush. And so in the last couple years, we were able to get donations to help beautify the space. We put up a Latia fence and a beautiful walkway, and we're in the process of continuing to find ways to put plants. And we actually have. We're going to be installing a sculpture that was donated to us by another very famous Taos artist by the name of Ted Egry, who left us one of his larger metal sculptures. So that will be in there. And so it's. There's a good amount of energy and ideas that we have moving forward, and it's a testament to the jewish community here that we are honoring, and we continue to support the cemetery here. And it's an amazing story. And I think that was the motivation to writing this little book. So there would be a legacy, and people could know about the rabbis that were here, Ron and Carol and Judith, and the cemetery, and the organizations that have been here over the last 40 or 50 years. Just want to thank storycorps for giving us an opportunity to share this story with everybody.