Besides being a pair of Brooklyn Jews, Bugsy Siegel and Shea Harlig wouldn't seem to have much in common. Siegel's formative years were spent breaking skulls, running numbers, raping and bootlegging; the teenage Harlig studied in a yeshiva. Siegel became a world-class thug, his charm matched only by his ambition; Harlig became an Orthodox rabbi. And yet, when the two men first laid eyes upon Las Vegas, decades apart, they were seized by the same dream. They did not see, as others saw, a forbidding desert. They saw a shimmering expanse of boundless opportunity, a veritable land of milk and honey.

Siegel's dream ended badly, with gunfire. Shea Harlig's dream, of establishing a foothold for Orthodox Jewry in a most unorthodox setting, has so far played out according to plan.

"When I moved here, in December 1990, I was the only yarmulke-wearing Jew in town," he says. That would seem like lousy odds--one of about 30,000--but it's just what he wanted. He was 25 years old, freshly married and jobless. He had considered posts in Ohio, in California, even Copenhagen. None of them appealed. "You're looking for a place where you can make things happen," he explains, an excited smile flashing beneath his shaggy beard. "I always wanted to go where there were no Orthodox Jews. I was looking to get away, to start my own show."

Rabbi Dovid Lieb Myhill celebrates Purim by dancing with his son on his shoulders. His show has started and then some. As the overall population of Las Vegas has exploded, so has the Jewish population, to about 70,000, the fastest-growing Jewish community in North America. Which has led to a full-throttle boom: a rash of new synagogues (nearly 20 congregations, up from a handful a decade ago), outreach programs, kosher restaurants and grocery sections; two Jewish Community Centers are also in the works. Rabbi Harlig is hardly responsible for all of it, but more roads than not lead to him. "This is a midbar [desert], and I mean that spiritually, intellectually and in other ways," says Rabbi Louis Lederman, the retired spiritual leader of the Temple Beth Sholom, a Conservative synagogue that is the city's oldest. "He has taken a midbar and brought so much to this community. No offense to the Conservative or Reform rabbis, but he's the only one who has really lifted the Jewish level of this community."

Rabbi Harlig belongs to the Lubavitcher movement, a Hasidic group of legendary zeal also known as Chabad. Its aim: to bring every single Jew, no matter how secular, back into the fold. It is Chabad that sends motor homes into the streets of Manhattan, blaring Hasidic music and trolling for curious Jews. It is Chabad that holds Passover Seders in Siberia and Katmandu and Kazakhstan. For decades, the movement was led by the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom many Lubavitchers believed was Moshiach, the messiah. To spread his message, Rabbi Schneerson sent Chabad "emissaries"--usually young married couples--to any city that had even a small Jewish population. "I have found two things in every city I have ever visited," a noted Israeli rabbi once remarked. "Coca-Cola and Lubavitcher Hasidim."

Wearing a baseball cap in lieu of a yarmulke, Mayor Oscar Goodman opens a Purim gift, accompanied by three of Rabbi Harlig's children in Purim costumes. Every city, apparently, except Las Vegas. Rabbi Schneerson had repeatedly vetoed a Las Vegas emissary. The city's secondary vices aside, gambling is plainly anathema to Jewish law: The Talmud states that "one who plays with dice" is unfit to bear witness. And while the city has had plenty of prominent Jewish citizens--Siegel and Moe Dalitz and Lefty Rosenthal among them--they seemed unlikely candidates for Chabad ministry. On the other hand, Rabbi Harlig never had a shot at them. His missionary zeal is matched only by his entrepreneurial zeal; there are few doors that he hasn't managed to stick at least one foot inside.

Today, for instance, Mayor Oscar Goodman is awaiting his visit. It is Purim, the holiday marking the defeat of Haman, a wicked Persian who tried to exterminate the Jews. On Purim, it is customary for Jews to wear costumes, bestow gifts, donate to charity and get drunk.

Rabbi Harlig, because he is driving a carload of children to the mayor's office, five of them his own, has presumably refrained from this last custom. Nevertheless, he is running late, and the mayor isn't pleased. When the rabbi finally arrives, the mayor tells a secretary to keep him waiting. "Let the kids drive him nuts for about five minutes," he says. "Get back at him."

Students at the Chabad center's Desert Torah Hebrew Day School work together on a puzzle. Shortly, Rabbi Harlig strides inside, the flock of children in his wake. "No no no, who let you in?" asks the mayor.

"Be nice," says the rabbi.

"No, I'm not going to be nice. I'll be nice to the children but not to you."

Unlike many Chabad donors--that is, Jews who don't know much Judaism but want to keep it alive--Mayor Goodman has strong enough religious credentials to not be cowed into piety. He has belonged to Temple Beth Sholom since he moved to Las Vegas in 1964, later serving as its president. Still, on Election Day last year, with Goodman's name on the ballot, it was Rabbi Harlig's synagogue where he went to pray.

"That was the last time I saw you in shul," says the rabbi.

"Because I go to another shul, because of the wickedness of you, Haman."

Rabbi Myhill prepares to label the kosher chicken packaged by the butcher in an Albertson's store in west Las Vegas. Most mayors, it should be pointed out, would not call a rabbi "Haman." Most mayors did not make their living defending Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, either. "Come on, a little yarmulke--you've got to wear something," the rabbi is saying. He wants to recite a Purim blessing but the mayor's head is uncovered.

"Troublemaker," growls the mayor.

It should also be pointed out that Rabbi Harlig gives as good as he gets. "If not for me," he tells the mayor, "you never would have won. Remember the first one in the Jewish community who was there for your announcement? You were able to get three homeless people to show up, and me."

The rabbi hands the mayor some Purim literature and the mayor throws it in the garbage. The children help the mayor unwrap the gifts they've brought him: box upon box of chocolates and hamantashen, a Purim pastry. The mayor seems flustered at the bounty. He offers it around: "As Tony Spilotro said, children, you can only eat one steak at a time."

With the niceties, such as they are, concluded, the mayor scrounges for his checkbook. "It makes me sick," he says, with only half a grin. "I mean, he gives you two dollars' worth of hamantashen and wants a check for ..."--he looks up at the rabbi--"how much, $900?"

The rabbi nods. The mayor scribbles. The children eat hamantashen. From the other side of life, neither Bugsy Siegel nor Rabbi Schneerson can quite believe what they are witnessing.

Rabbi Louis Lederman, once leader of Temple Beth Shalom, now performs civil wedding ceremonies at the MGM Grand. The religious school at Ner Tamid, the city's oldest Reform synagogue, bears the name of the building's chief benefactor: Moe Dalitz.

This might strike some as incongruous--as if, say, a Justice Department library were dedicated to Al Capone--but Jewish life in Las Vegas has been one long incongruity. Moe Sedway, a Flamingo boss and former Siegel henchman, was the chief fund-raiser for the Nevada United Jewish Appeal. (Like Dalitz, he understood that nothing touched up a former gangster's reputation like charity.) Jack Entratter, who ran the Sands and served as president of Temple Beth Sholom, once showed up for services toting a revolver. When Rabbi Harlig first came to town, he conducted High Holy Day services at the Aladdin. "Here I was, a full-dressed Orthodox Jew walking through a casino for Kol Nidre," he recalls. "I felt so unkosher."

And then there was the time that Temple Beth Sholom, packed beyond capacity for the High Holy Days, held overflow services in a church across the street. The crucifix was dutifully covered with a white cloth. But when the air conditioning vents began blasting, up blew the cloth and there hung Jesus for all to see.

The wives of local business leaders chat during a fund-raiser for the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. As the Jewish boom takes hold, however, such unorthodoxy is fading. The crucifix incident, for one, will never happen again, at least not at Temple Beth Sholom. The congregation is building a $10 million complex in Summerlin South, replete with religious school, two ballrooms, two kitchens, a ritual bath and a sanctuary that can seat 1,800. Rabbi Harlig, far removed from the Aladdin, recently opened a $2 million Chabad center on the west side of town, with substantial funding from Venetian owner Sheldon Adelson. (The bathrooms, tiled with leftover Venetian marble, are especially spiffy.) Rabbi Yitzchak Wyne, an Orthodox rabbi from Edmonton, is building a $1.2 million synagogue just east of Summerlin, largely through the charity of real-estate developer Eskander Ghermaizian. "Everybody needs their billionaire," explains Rabbi Wyne. "Harlig has Adelson and I have Ghermaizian." Rabbi Wyne, 33, is a quiet but blunt talker, a father of five young sons, and the other major Orthodox presence in Las Vegas. He wears a dark suit, wire-rimmed glasses, his beard trimmed close. His office, synagogue and classrooms are currently housed in a double-wide construction trailer surrounded by chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. An earthmover sits outside, where the synagogue will soon rise.

Batsheva Lederman, daughter of Rabbi Lederman, lights the Sabbath candles as a friend looks on. He is both an ally and rival of Rabbi Harlig. He calls their relationship "not warm and not cold." Whereas Rabbi Harlig's ambitions are broad and emotional--to bring every lost Jew home and inspire all Jews to perform the Torah's commandments--Rabbi Wyne positions himself as a more cerebral alternative. "From a political standpoint, Harlig will always be the right-wing religious zealot and I will always be the moderate," he says.

Before moving to town five years ago, he phoned Rabbi Harlig. "He said, 'Don't come, no one's religious, no one's Orthodox,'" Rabbi Wyne recalls, "and I said, 'I'm here to make them Orthodox.' ... I said, 'There's 70,000 Jews here. You want them and I want them, so we'll carve up the pie. I'll look at your programs and the ones you're doing, I specifically will not do."

And so the turf was divvied up, rather amicably. Because Rabbi Harlig had started a summer camp for children, Rabbi Wyne geared his programs toward young adults. Rabbi Wyne gladly ceded the kosher-food campaign ("It's a headache," he says) to Rabbi Harlig, who most recently has overseen the opening of a kosher Chinese restaurant, Shalom Hunan; he also persuaded several supermarkets to carry kosher food, including meat, which requires a separate butchering station. And while Rabbi Harlig expanded his outreach, opening two suburban branches and importing four more Chabad rabbis, Rabbi Wyne began building a single Orthodox community, family by family. He has held services in 19 different locations since he arrived, including the health club of an under-construction apartment complex. "The acoustics on the racquetball court," he says, "were great."

Rabbi Wyne's synagogue is aligned with the Young Israel movement--"the McDonald's of Orthodox Judaism," he calls it. He specifically wanted an English name, not Hebrew, since his main targets are single professional Jews. His overriding mission is to halt assimilation, which in Rabbi Wyne's view means halting intermarriage. To that end, he has created singles programs like "Wyne and Cheese" (is the art of the groaner taught in rabbinic academies?) and "Speed Dating." In the latter, men and women pair off for seven "dates" per night, seven minutes each, their quick-fire conversation helped along by a question sheet that Rabbi Wyne provides. For example: "How often do you speak with your parents?" or "Did you think Prince of Egypt was accurate?"

In celebration of Purim, Rabbi Harlig dances with a member of his congregation; as is the custom, men and women dance separately. His efforts, he says, have produced more than 20 Jewish weddings. But marriage is not enough for Rabbi Wyne. The ultimate success, he says, is for these young couples "to become Orthodox and take responsibility for the Jewish people." Rabbi Wyne, like most of the rabbis in town, never envisioned himself in Las Vegas. His decision to move here raised eyebrows back in Edmonton. Now that he's recruiting more young rabbis to join him, he finds that the stigma is still alive. "They say, 'Oh man, I couldn't bring my kids to live in that city.' The billboards, the casinos--it just has such a schmutzy, scummy rap."

So how does he persuade them?

Men from Rabbi Harlig's Chabad center read from the Megillah, the book of Esther, which contains the Purim story.

"I tell them that Moshe Feinstein, the greatest rabbi of his generation, lived on the Lower East Side in New York, only six miles away from Times Square. And I"--he pauses expansively--"am 11 miles from the Strip."

The surest sign that the Las Vegas Jewish community has begun to mature? The bickering.

As the old joke goes: A Jew, stranded for years on a desert island, is finally rescued. It turns out that he has built two synagogues. Why two? "That one," he sneers, pointing, "I don't go to."

Synagogue politics can make Washington seem like a tea party. Rabbi-firings, for instance, are a fact of life. In Las Vegas, trigger fingers are particularly itchy. Rabbi Mel Hecht, who long ago was ousted from Ner Tamid, counts 12 rabbis through the door at Temple Beth Sholom in the 20 years he's lived here. But deposed rabbis are just the start. As the city's Jewish population has multiplied, so have tensions over turf, members, ideology and, especially, funding.

The Jewish Federation of Las Vegas raises money for distribution across the religious spectrum. Last year it took in just $1.3 million, a figure that Rabbi Wyne calls "tragically small." As a result, synagogues and other Jewish institutions must seek out wealthy individuals for large donations. There are several reasons why the Federation figure is so low. For starters, the Las Vegas Jewish community is perhaps the most assimilated in the country. Also, many recent Jewish arrivals still donate in their old communities, or don't see themselves as permanent Las Vegans. But most insiders believe that the Las Vegas Federation is so ineffective because--well, because it is so ineffective. This theory holds that the bar was set way too low in the past, when there wasn't as much need for funds. "People here have been able to buy prominence for what would have been laughed at in other communities," says Rabbi Hecht.

And so rabbis often find themselves battling each other for funding, and the allegiance that goes along with it. Last year, the Las Vegas Sun ran an article about Jewish divorce law. Rabbi Felipe Goodman, a 32-year-old Mexican who is the leader of Temple Beth Sholom, was quoted as saying, "The Talmud can be very sexist. It is a very traditional text. In the times that we live in today, we really need to start changing our interpretation of it."

Rabbi Harlig, the traditionalist, took extreme umbrage. "The sanctity of the Talmud, for traditional Judaism, is second only to the Bible itself," he wrote in a letter to the editor, equating Rabbi Goodman's "offensive" comments with Salman Rushdie's famed critique of Islam.

Rabbi Goodman, in a letter to his congregants, expressed his discomfort with Rabbi Harlig's venomous rhetoric. In closing, he made a plea for his members' souls as well as theirs wallets--since many of them, from the mayor on down, also support Chabad: "I urge you to give thought to the important issue of who we are and how we should channel our support, both moral and financial, to the different religious organizations in our community, and that of course is only for you to decide."

With such fireworks, it is tempting to keep score between rabbis, synagogues, denominations. Cooler heads, however, have no patience for the infighting. "The commonality and the goal here is to engage people, and use Judaism as a vehicle to become a better person," says Ed Bernstein, the ubiquitous lawyer and talk-show host who is now running for Senate. "Any way you can bring people into Judaism is OK with me if they weren't there before, and if egos are going to get hurt because somebody's going from Orthodox to Reform to Conservative, or from this temple to that temple, I really don't care. I don't see this as a struggle internally as to which team is winning."

Bernstein, 50, takes his Judaism seriously. During an interview in his office, he interrupts himself to give his new campaign aide (a non-Jew, imported from Massachusetts) a lengthy and pointed exegesis of The Jew in the Lotus, a book about Judaism and Buddhism he says he has read three times. Growing up in Philadelphia, Bernstein wanted to be a rabbi. He fell away from Judaism but then reconnected in his mid-30s; he has since served as president of Temple Beth Sholom and is the Nevada chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Rabbi Harlig got him in the habit of laying tefillin, a daily ritual in which a Jewish man prays while wearing on his arm and head two small boxes containing Biblical verses, held in place with leather straps. "I lay tefillin every day and I meditate every day," he says. "Occasionally I meditate with my tefillin on. It's a great experience, but as you've noticed, I don't have a lot of hair, except in the back. With tefillin, when you're meditating, during that extra 20 minutes of meditation, the strap on your head leaves an indentation in my hair that lasts me four hours--so I've learned to not meditate with my tefillin on."

Toward the end of the interview, in wander Bernstein's wife, Nancy, and one of their daughters, 5-year-old Eden. Bernstein calls Nancy a "Jewban"--she's a Cuban-American who converted to Judaism. Nancy studied for years, she explains, "to the point where I knew more Judaism than Eddie did."

Eden Bernstein, meanwhile, is being queried on the origin of her name. Who lived in the Garden of Eden?

"Adam and Eve," she answers.

What did they do wrong?

"They ate from the Tree of Knowledge."

And then what happened?

"They got vanished."

Where?

Eden thinks, hard. "I don't know." She turns to her father for help. "Where?"

"To Las Vegas!" he laughs, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

It is the day after Purim. Rabbi Harlig is looking back over his 10 years in Las Vegas. His accomplishments notwithstanding, it hasn't all been smooth. He admits that the more liberal Jews consider him "out there" and "brainwashed." The mayor's treatment of him, though half tongue-in-cheek, was hardly an aberration. "When Federation heard that Chabad coming to town," he recalls, "it was like the Russians were coming."

He doesn't much care. He sees himself as doing God's work. Thus are dulled the slings of man. Just now, sitting in his office at the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Chabad Center, he grins with satisfaction as he talks about something that happened in his synagogue two nights ago.

On Purim, it is incumbent upon Jews to gather and hear every word of the Book of Esther, which tells the Purim story. It is the most freewheeling Jewish holiday: Haman's name is lustily booed at every mention; the Jewish victory is cheered; afterward, there is eating and dancing.

Rabbi Harlig drew a sizable, rambunctious, motley Purim crowd, typical of Chabad: devout Jews and first-timers, Hasids and hippies, young parents and widowers. Among them was the author Naomi Ragen, in town from Israel to speak at a Federation fund-raiser. Ragen had begun the night at Temple Beth Sholom. When she found, however, that the Purim reading there was being abbreviated to speed things along, she dashed to the Chabad synagogue.

This is the kind of story that fuels Rabbi Harlig, the Brooklyn exile who discovered in Las Vegas a chance to build from scratch something that neither politics nor fashion can tear down. When asked if he's had to compromise his Orthodoxy to fit this unorthodox city, he practically scowls. "There's nothing I would do to bend," he says. "We teach traditional, authentic Jewish values without any compromise. Because once you tear a few pages out, the whole book falls apart."