When Lionel Faitelson told his wife, Karen, about a job offer in the cutting-edge field of cardiac electrophysiology at the University of Arizona, her initial response was “There can’t be a single Jew within 50 miles of Tucson, Arizona. That’s a cowboy town! I am not raising my children where there are no Jews.”
It was 1988 and the Faitelsons were living in Houston. They had moved to the United States five years earlier from Johannesburg, South Africa, and Lionel was completing his cardiology fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine after a residency at Boston University Hospital.
Lionel agreed that this was important and responded by saying, “Well, let me think. If there are Jews, there must be a JCC. Let me see if I can find a phone number for the JCC in Tucson.” Since there was no convenient way to look up information (the Internet was not yet a household word), he called 411 and asked for the phone number of the Jewish Community Center in Tucson. When the operator responded with “520-299-3000” he looked at Karen and said, “You see – there must be Jews in Tucson.”
For the Faitelsons, that made all the difference. “Being a foreigner, you don’t have that much in common with local people when you first arrive, but for us, our Judaism has always been the point of connection with fellow Americans. … this community became our family,” Karen says.
Karen and Lionel quickly became involved in the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s Women’s Philanthropy and Next Generation Men’s Group, respectively. Since both of them were raised with a strong background in Jewish education in South Africa, it was important that their daughters had the same benefits, so they enrolled them in Congregation Anshei Israel’s preschool and kindergarten, followed by Tucson Hebrew Academy.
Lionel was instrumental in helping to establish the University of Arizona’s arrhythmia surgery program and continued his practice of catheter ablation and insertion of implantable defibrillators. He opened his own cardiology practice in 1991 with Karen handling the business side for the first two years. The practice expanded into Tucson Heart Group with three other partners. Lionel, now 59, is currently chief of cardiology at Tucson Medical Center, where he serves on the medical executive committee.
With an M.A. in teaching from Simmons College in Boston, Karen taught middle school math and science at Tucson Hebrew Academy from 1989-1991. After their second daughter, Ariella, was born she switched to a volunteer role on the board. She was recognized as THA’s Woman of Valor in 1994 and served as board president from 2003-2005. She also worked as director of Tucson’s Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning and was honored as the federation’s Gary I. Sarver Young Woman of the Year in 1998. Nine years ago, she went back to school and earned an M.S. in counseling from the University of Phoenix. Karen, now 56, loves her work as a licensed counselor.
Now their daughters are each off pursuing their own dreams. Danielle, 30, has an M.F.A. in acting from Columbia University and works as an actor and licensed real estate broker in New York City. Ariella, 24, has a bachelor of science in sociology and women’s studies from Emory University. She is working as a personal trainer and sports coach in Atlanta while applying for graduate school.
Clearly, the move to Tucson paid off for the Faitelsons.
Karen was born in Liverpool, England, to a British mother and South African father. The family moved to Johannesburg when she was still an infant. She attended King David School, a large Jewish day school system throughout South Africa, from first grade all the way through high school; together with Jewish camps and the Habonim youth movement, this formed a very central part of her youth and identity. She grew up with a love of Jewish culture and Jewish music – a passion that she continues to pursue today while singing in the choir of Congregation Or Chadash and the Kol Shirah community choir, both directed by Cantor Janece Cohen.
Lionel was raised in Benoni, about 17 miles east of Johannesburg, to a South African-born mother and Lithuanian father, who had immigrated to South Africa at the age of 16 in 1933. “He spoke five languages, but none of them included English or Afrikaans, so he had a very tough time,” says Lionel. Like Karen, Lionel grew up with a strong sense of Jewish identity. He was in the third graduating class of the Hillel School, which was modeled on the King David Schools, and was also involved in Habonim. While in medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand, he sang in the renowned Berea Synagogue choir.
After finishing two years of compulsory military service as a physician in the South African army, Lionel says they began to think about emigrating. “In the early ’80s, the level of civil violence in the cities was beginning to increase. … So people in their 20s and 30s who had a degree in their hands – lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants – a lot of people left.”
The initial transition was a little harder than they anticipated. Karen says that she was terribly homesick at synagogue on their first Yom Kippur in Boston. “I remember sobbing through the whole day. I just felt so disoriented and not really part of anything. Nothing was familiar. You go into the shul and you expect to feel the same feelings and familiarity, and there was just none of it. The songs were different, the music was different, the layout of the synagogue was different, the service, everything was just unfamiliar.”
When Lionel finished his residency, they moved to Houston, where Karen has family. Her parents, both physicians, had emigrated there in 1979 with her three younger siblings when Texas was actively recruiting doctors to fill a shortage. Although they loved being near her family, they knew it wouldn’t be their permanent home.
Despite Karen’s initial resistance, Tucson has ultimately been a wonderful environment for the Faitelsons to grow and thrive. “We all joke amongst our little South African community that it’s a very well kept-secret here,” says Karen. “If more South Africans had known about it, they probably would have flocked to Tucson in droves, because of the lifestyle, the climate and the incredible Jewish community.”
