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By Root 2151 0

Two Rock Road. On the property was a large frame house, with a couple’s house and bunkhouse out back. The Kaels got their poultry business off the ground with a flock of white Leghorns. As was the case with most Jewish immigrants in the area, their lack of experience wasn’t much of an obstacle. Maintaining a chicken ranch wasn’t overly complicated and didn’t require a huge initial outlay of cash, but it was hard work; the eggs had to be gathered and sorted and cleaned by hand, then packed up to go to market. Year by year their business grew, and Isaac ultimately built up the ranch to the point where it could accommodate five thousand chickens. He and Judith also added to their family. On November 30, 1913, another daughter, Rose, arrived. And on June 19, 1919, their fifth and last child, Pauline, was born at Petaluma General Hospital. In a few short years the family’s life had improved to an almost unimaginable degree, and the future seemed to hold great promise.

At home, however, the atmosphere was far from harmonious. From the beginning, Judith—or Yetta, as she was often called—loathed life on the farm. A woman who, during her privileged youth in Poland, had scarcely had reason even to boil an egg was now harvesting and cleaning them for long hours each day. Then there was the kale that had to be grown, picked, and mixed into the chicken feed, on top of cooking for the ranch hands. Judith was angry and frustrated much of the time, and the harder she worked, the more distant she grew toward her children. Anne Kael Wallach’s son, Bret Wallach, who remembered visiting Judith in the late 1940s, described her as someone whose “affection radiated at about two degrees above absolute zero.” However frustrated she may have been, Judith did show a certain motherly concern for her three daughters, and as time went on, she grew determined that Anne, Rose, and Pauline would have the educational opportunities that had eluded her.

Judith’s unhappiness made a sharp contrast with Isaac Kael’s own good-natured gregariousness. He was a man who naturally expected good things to unfold before him and made no attempt to hide his delight when they did. He had great drive and energy and confidence, and his children adored him.

The Jews who settled in Petaluma generally fell into one of two groups—those who allied themselves with the Labor Zionist movement in Israel, and those who sought to improve social conditions for American Jews; outsiders were quick to tag the latter group as “radical,” even “Red.” To Kenneth Kann, author of Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, an oral history of farm life in Petaluma, the town was “a community of idealists, people who were not so concerned with making a lot of money, people who preferred the agricultural life over the sweatshops and the pushcarts of the city.” The so-called radicals were, in Kann’s view, individuals who “retained a Jewish identity, but they were people with a national and a world perspective.”

To Isaac and Judith Kael, it was plain that such an intellectually inquisitive community needed a proper social gathering place, and Isaac became one of the founders of the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma. Plans for the center got under way in 1924, but when it became apparent that the community hadn’t raised enough money to pay for its construction, Isaac traveled to San Francisco and appealed to the wealthy Haas family of the Levi Strauss Company, well known for their support of Jewish cultural enterprises. The Haases came up with a sizable gift, and with Judith serving tirelessly on the building committee, the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma opened on August 2, 1925. Its activities were focused on Jewish cultural and religious issues; the individual organizations that made the center their home included both the men and women’s branches of B’nai Brith, Hadassah, and Poale Zion. Jewish performers and lecturers on Jewish topics visited the center, spurring the locals to engage in colorful and often heated debates on topics of international significance. Sometimes the locals themselves banded