The Jewish Chicken Ranchers

The synagogue at 740 Western Avenue in Petaluma was built in 1925 as the Jewish Community Center, the meeting hall of a community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had taken up chicken ranching on the hills around the town. Petaluma had had a Jewish congregation since 1864, but many of the ranchers were socialists or communists, and the 1925 building was a compromise between the atheists who wanted a culture club and the observant who wanted a synagogue. The big hall went to the socialists and a small room near the front to the religious. By the 1930s about a hundred Jewish families ran ranches around Petaluma, most of them small egg farms, and the center hosted a Yiddish drama group, a folk chorus and lectures. On 21 August 1935, as he was organising hop pickers in Healdsburg after a summer of farm strikes, some 300 vigilantes seized the chicken rancher Sol Nitzberg and four other labour organisers, attacking Nitzberg's ranch with tear gas. Nitzberg and Jack Green were coated in tar and chicken feathers and paraded through Santa Rosa in the early hours, then ordered out of the county within twelve hours. Twelve men were charged with kidnapping, four had the charges dropped, and a jury that included eight growers and growers' wives acquitted the rest in sixteen minutes; the vigilantes had included Santa Rosa's mayor and city attorney. In 1950 the center expelled its left-wing groups. The egg industry collapsed in the 1960s and the ranches became dairies and vineyards. Kenneth Kann's 1993 oral history Comrades and Chicken Ranchers recorded three generations of the community. The hall is now Congregation B'nai Israel's Center for Jewish Life.