Have you heard the one about the Orthodox rabbi, the Mormon and the Latino cattle rancher?

It's no joke, says the rabbi, Baltimore's Mayer Kurcfeld.

It's the cast of characters in "Kosher Valley," a film chronicling Kurcfeld's journey to southern Colorado's San Luis Valley to teach kosher butchering to a group of mostly Latino ranchers who were looking for new markets for their meat.

The film has its Baltimore premiere at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Park Heights Jewish Community Center. Admission is $4.

"Kosher Valley" tells the story through the words of Kurcfeld; soft-spoken cattle rancher Demetrio Valdez and his wife, Olive; and Clair Hull, the Mormon from Denver's Rocky Mountain Farmers' Union sent to manage the cooperative.

The idea was hatched in March 1995. Olive Valdez saw how difficult it was for her husband and their neighbors to keep their ranches profitable.

"I had seen that no matter how hard the ranchers worked, they just didn't get a living wage," she said. "And it had nothing to do with working hard or not working. It just simply was the fact that the market was so depressed. And I just felt something had to be done."

She had heard that the Israeli ambassador, who was visiting Denver, had been given kosher-prepared buffalo and liked it. The cattle in the San Luis Valley are raised organically -- "It's cheaper to do it that way," she said. She wondered if there might be a market in the Jewish communities of the West for organically grown kosher beef.

Soon, she was working with Hull of the Farmers' Union. The rabbinate in Denver referred them to Star-K Kosher Certification in Baltimore, and Kurcfeld, who inspects Jewish businesses in Baltimore to ensure they are following kosher practices, was soon on his way to Colorado.

Everyone involved describes the first meeting between rabbi and ranchers as "magical."

"I can't explain it," Kurcfeld said. "We just hit it off right away. Remember, these were people who don't easily accept an outsider. They definitely were suspicious. They never met a Jew, let alone a rabbi."

"When I met him, there was a kind of meeting of the minds, a purity of spirit," said Olive Valdez, whose husband runs Valle Escondido Ranch. "He felt it, and my husband felt it. We felt we had a special relationship with this man."

Kurcfeld explained the concept of kosher to the ranchers -- the animal must be without imperfection before the slaughter and must be slaughtered in a humane way dictated by Jewish law -- and had them look up passages in their Bibles that referred to the practice.

Later, Kurcfeld demonstrated the art of kosher butchering to the ranchers. As Kurcfeld killed the animal, Demetrio Valdez held the head still. "I could tell when I held the animal, it didn't suffer," Demetrio Valdez said. "For sure, God wouldn't want his animals to suffer. I was sold right there, that this went back to God, that this was the way to butcher the animals."

This relationship of mutual respect and affection is what filmmaker Chuck Davis tried to capture. Davis, who is a physician, learned about the story from his local newspaper.

"The film really is about Rabbi Kurcfeld and who he was and how it affected him and how he affected the people in the valley. Just his presence, his personality gave them a sense that they could do this. His presence gave them a lot of courage and confidence that they could make this happen," he said.

The more Kurcfeld talked about Jewish practice and ritual, the more some of it sounded familiar to the ranchers.

"After the interest in the kosher market, several people started remembering kosher practices," Olive Valdez said. "One lady told my sister, 'We purify our dishes, but my grandmother did it, that's why we do it.' Another lady said, 'We light candles on Friday night, but that's an old Spanish custom. Our family has always done it.' "

Later, a researcher from the University of Mexico who studied the crests of several families in the San Luis Valley found they were descendants of the conversos, Jews who were forced to renounce their faith during the Spanish Inquisition and were given land grants in the New World in return.

The film does not have a happy ending. The cooperative was badly mismanaged and on the verge of failing when an electrical fire put it out of business. Many hard feelings resulted, people say, and friendships have ended.

Although the Farmers' Union is trying to rebuild the slaughterhouse and resume the cooperative, Olive Valdez says she is afraid too much credibility has been lost.

"It was a labor of love on my part," she said. "We needed it not only economically, but spiritually we needed a success.

"This was a gift to my community. Then if failed," she said. "It's a shame, and I'm very sorry it didn't work."

Pub Date: 3/09/99