Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Jews in Colorado? Yes!

Founder of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society, Dr. Charles Spivak, left, plays chess with a patient, circa 1925.HUMAN memory wavers like fickle candlelight across the mind, obscuring faces once adored, illuminating others hardly known. Kaleidoscopic images — a favorite toy, a hiding place, an ancient dream — invade our daily routine then disappear. Out of thousands of spring mornings past, one single and completely average morning survives with extraordinary clarity. Every sound, shade, shaft of light stands out so vividly that the present moment fades in comparison. Thousands of spring mornings have vanished into oblivion.

“It’s funny what you remember, what comes to you,” Rose Zelinger said about the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (JCRS), where her mother died in 1916 and her father worked for 70 years.

“My father took care of the dining room for a while, and I can just see the young waiters and waitresses in their white coats with warm white towels draped over their arms. I don’t know why but I see them as clear as day.”

What did Adele Karsh, a granddaughter of JCRS founder and guiding spirit Dr. Charles Spivak, recall about the West Denver sanatorium which treated 10,000 primarily Jewish tuberculosis patients from 1904 to 1954?

“I remember when Papa (Dr. Spivak) would drive through the big gates on Colfax Avenue to his office. I often went with him to JCRS. He would sit me on the patients’ beds while he examined them.

“It was always fun to go out to JCRS because it was always so beautiful. The summers were so lush and green, and there were always cows at the Robinson Dairy. The Robinsons donated the land, you see.

“I got my first job at JCRS typing envelopes in the Texas Pavilion for the annual fund drive at Rosh Hashanah. I was 16 years old.”

Don Strauss, Mrs. Karsh’s younger brother, was only four when his by then legendary grandfather passed away in 1927. Yet he too returned if not to the actual event then its anecdotal retelling.

“For example, there was a terrible blizzard in 1913 and nobody could get out to JCRS — except my grandfather. He put on snowshoes and walked from 14th and Court (the end of the carline) to the sanatorium with a 100-pound sack of flour on his back. And he did it again the next day, only this time he carried a 100-pound sack of sugar.

The rest of this interview is available in the IJN’s Welcome to the GA magazine only. Contact Carol to order your copy at (303) 861-2234 or email.



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IJN Senior Writer | [email protected]


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