Northern Colorado Issue

It used to be that you might see security guards at large Jewish community events. That changed with the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life center, in which 11 people were murdered during Shabbat services. Now, most Jewish events, large and small, have security detail — many times, armed — and many synagogues have armed security regularly.

Jewish oasis exists in, of all places, Longmont, Colorado, west of I-25 North and 30 miles from Boulder. On the fifth day of Chanukah in Boulder, winds are howling up to 92 mph. The electricity is off in much of the town, with no promise of when the lights would be back on.

The mid-December announcement that the Trump administration intends to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder has been met with fierce protest. Sen. Michael Bennet says he is committed to keeping NCAR open, and hundreds gathered on Dec. 20 in Boulder to publicly express their opposition to the move.

For over a decade, a small group of unassuming Fvolunteers from Boulder have supported sustainability projects in Israel and the West Bank. The starting point for Sustainable Israeli Palestinian Projects (SIPP), an organization that focuses on forward-looking cross-border projects, was, surprisingly, a negative event. As one its founders, Peter Ornstein, tells it, the group began after the contentious debate that erupted after Nablus in the West Bank was proposed as a Boulder Sister City. (The effort, in 2013, failed; a second effort, in 2016, passed.)

Among the Jewish institutions and organizations in northern Colorado is BBYO, operating out of Har Shalom in Fort Collins. The combination of the coronavirus and some graduating seniors meant the chapter had gone quiet. But that changed in the last year as Berthoud teen Zelda Stebbins has taken the reins.

Denver metro’s population boom and increasingly expensive real estate market has driven growth across the Front Range, Some seek more affordable housing. Others are drawn to smaller, quieter towns. And, in Colorado, one can never underestimate proximity to the outdoors in choosing a community to settle in. The general trend has been paralleled by a growth in Jewish communal life. Meet some of the faces of Northern Colorado’s robust and growing Jewish community.

Too many times since Hamas’ invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Max Weiser saw signs of hate on the campus of CU Boulder. His campus. “It was really heavy last year when everything in Israel after Oct. 8 started happening,”...

A native of South Africa, Rep. Ron Weinberg who today represents Loveland in the Colorado State House, immigrated to Los Angeles with his family in 2002, concerned about the civil unrest that was then plaguing that country.

Twenty years ago, Rabbi Yerachmiel Gorelik, a native of Australia who has been at the Chabad Jewish Center since 2005 and is also on the faculty at CSU, orchestrated what has become a big hit in Fort Collins.

The rabbi replies speaks with Lynne Goldsmith of Or Hadash in Fort Collins: “If you can talk to somebody who you disagree with violently and still see that image of G-d in them, things are going to be OK.”