Alaska
Where the cold warms your heart.
Juneau · Glacier View · Anchorage · Talkeetna
The Journey
As we landed in Alaska, it felt like we had arrived on a different planet, unlike anything we had experienced anywhere else in America.
We landed in Juneau at night, not realizing what a gem we had arrived in. Waking up the next morning was a gift, surrounded by surreal mountains covered in snow and ice. We first visited the magnificent Mendenhall Glacier, where we were able to see it up close. We also witnessed the incredible life cycle of salmon, watching them swim upstream and spawn in the rivers right in front of us. It was incredible. We then stood outside the Alaska State Capitol, continuing the ritual we had followed across the country.
From Juneau, we flew to Anchorage, where we spent several days experiencing the people, glaciers, national parks, and vast landscapes of Alaska. We went dog mushing, hiked on a glacier with guides, and traveled north toward Talkeetna. Seeing Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, rising above the landscape was surreal.
Alaska was also one of those places where I simply could not put my phone down. Every few minutes, every turn in the road, and every new angle seemed to call for another photograph.
Alaska made America feel larger than I had understood it to be.
Jewish Alaska
The Jewish story of Alaska was, to my surprise, much larger than I had anticipated.
When we arrived in Anchorage, we met Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, who helped establish the Alaska Jewish Museum. We learned so much about local Jewish history and about the remarkable role Jews played in building Alaska. Jewish merchants and pioneers followed opportunity north, and Jewish Alaskans went on to play important roles in business, government, and civic life. Anchorage’s first mayor, Leopold David, was Jewish, as were other mayors who followed. Ernest Gruening, one of the central figures in Alaska’s path toward statehood, served as territorial governor and later as one of the state’s first United States senators.
The story goes back even further. In Nome, around sixty Jews gathered for Rosh Hashanah services in 1900, and the following year established the Hebrew Benevolent Society, Alaska’s first Jewish organization.
There is another remarkable chapter in this history. As Jews desperately searched for ways to escape Nazi Europe, the Alaska Development Plan considered opening the territory to Jewish refugees. The plan never became American policy, but for a brief moment this distant American territory represented the possibility of refuge.
One of the most surprising stories we learned was Alaska Airlines’ role in Operation Magic Carpet. Beginning in the late 1940s, Alaska Airlines crews took enormous risks flying thousands of Yemenite Jews to the newly established State of Israel, becoming part of one of the great Jewish rescue stories of that era.
Today, Anchorage remains the center of Jewish life in the state. Congregation Beth Sholom, established in 1958, is Alaska’s oldest active congregation, while the Alaska Jewish Campus and Chabad have become a beacon of Orthodox Jewish life in the state.
As we did in every state, we made sure that our Alaska journey included Jewish life too. There was something meaningful about finding a Jewish community here, in one of the most distant corners of the country. It was another reminder that Jewish America extends much farther than the familiar communities where most of us live.
What Stayed With Me
What stayed with me about Alaska was its vastness.
The distances, the mountains, the glaciers, and the sheer amount of open land made the country feel larger than it ever had before. Yet there we were with our children during the holiday, visiting the state capitol and finding Jewish life just as we had across the rest of America.
Seeing Denali rising above us also made me realize just how small we really are. Alaska has a way of doing that. The landscape is so enormous that, for a moment, everything else seems smaller.
Alaska made me realize that the fifty state journey was not simply about reaching fifty points on a map. It was about discovering just how enormous and varied this country really is, and finding familiar threads of family, faith, and community even at its furthest edges.
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