Welcome to Jewish LA

Reisner, Neil

WELCOME TO JEWISH NEIL REISNER East is east and west is . . . well . . . different. The first thing to understand about Los Angeles is that it's big, very big. And the second thing is that it's...

...We weren't a community...
...Once again, LA Jews behaved in familiar ways...
...We're on the sharp edge of life and what happens, I think, in California, happens back East five to ten years later...
...By 1854, land was purchased for a Jewish cemetery, and eight years later, in 1862, the first congregation was established...
...There is little doubt that many blacks, chicanos, Asians, and members of all the other ethnic groups that make up Los Angeles became aware of the plight of Soviet Jews because of the counter-exhibition...
...You can see it also in a growing openness to Orthodoxy in the Bureau of Synagogue Affairs, in the Bureau of Jewish Education, on the Federation Board, on the Community Relations Committee, all over...
...Hebrew Free Loan is now Jewish Free Loan...
...That's encouraged," he continues, "by the fact that LA is West Coast, and that means that there's a feeling that people don't have to do what's expected of them...
...American Jews simply have ambivalent feelings about Israelis in this country, and, until that ambivalence is resolved, the Israelis will continue to keep their distance from the community...
...When the Jews first arrived, they lived in the downtown area surrounding what is now the Civic Center...
...The Council on Jewish Life recently coordinated a project designed to increase synagogue affiliation—not exactly your everyday sort of Federation activity...
...It was fascinating to watch it happen...
...Fairfax, which might well have disappeared as a Jewish center, retained its character by becoming host to a new generation of Jewish immigrants—Israelis, young people, and, more recently, Soviet Jews...
...Ford Lauderdale from 560 to 60,000...
...Palm trees, freeways and crazies...
...The real boom took place between 1880 and 1887, when the population of LA skyrocketed from 11,000 to 100,000...
...That is, they all exist, but not one is called a center...
...But one can also discern a kind of congregational gravity that helps cluster Reform and Conservative Jews in hailing distance of a congregation...
...But that enables you to have a combination of urban and suburban life which combines the best of both, the camaraderie of the village and the resources of the city...
...At the end of the War, there were some 150,000 Jews in LA...
...Perhaps as a result of this greater political visibility, the Jewish community qua Jewish community has become increasingly political and activist...
...From the look of it now, LA may no longer be the place where the rest of the country dumps its misfits...
...Miami has moved from 45,000 in 1951 to 225,000 now...
...Each city has its own style, to be sure, but none could justify the kind of institutional development which LA, so very far from New York, and big enough to go it alone, has pulled off...
...By 1951, there were 250,000...
...Some 9,000 copies have been sold in the year-and-a-half the Guide has been out, and the nicest thing may be that every Jewish couple that gets married in LA receives a copy as a wedding gift from the community...
...So we have really close institutional and personal relations with the Federation, for example...
...There was quite a flap not long ago when Federation tried to expand its own house organ into a community paper, and, when that issue was finally, more or less, resolved, Herb Brin, editor of Heritage, put together a slate of candidates to run for Federation's Board of Directors against the official slate...
...But that requires a very radical change in the understanding of what is in the proper ken of the synagogue...
...The insurgent slate was disqualified, and, while there were some very nasty accusations, the end result may be that Federation office is now seen as something worth fighting about...
...it doesn't...
...Numbers breed visibility, visibility breeds numbers...
...has the city itself, without plan...
...Unlike other cities, however, this is not happening as a separate development, unrelated to the general institutional life of the city...
...Los Angeles, as Osias G. Goren (General Chairman of this year's United Jewish Welfare Fund campaign) puts it, "is not an urban area...
...they have come to it...
...After New York and maybe Tel Aviv, Los Angeles is the world's largest Jewish community...
...For kashrut, we had to get meat from Denver...
...Our Council on Jewish Life, which has been in operation for several years, includes a Bureau of Synagogue Affairs, whose job is to develop real communication and cooperation between the Federation and the Synagogue...
...Hollywood, Yorty and rootlessness...
...to Cleveland, which had 80,000 then, and has 80,000 now...
...Of late, however, the organized community has been much more willing to initiate such action on its own...
...That's a difficult thing to do, because Federation, in order to be effective, must focus its attention on raising the money that's needed to do all the different things that need to be done...
...With the notable exception of game show host Monty Hall, who is very deeply involved in Jewish affairs, occasional stellar appearances by some others, and perhaps some signatures on a newspaper ad, the creativity, wealth and talent of the world's largest entertainment center simply does not touch Jewish life...
...When power is given to the people, that raises expectations for services, for participation, for development of smaller forms of community organization, all of which need to be staffed, all of which cost money...
...The GI wanted to live in a little home of his own...
...So we're trying to create a situation in which they'll get some sense that there's a larger community of which they're a part...
...And now we at HUC have one of the finest Jewish museums in the country...
...Howard Berman, a state assemblyman from LA's Westside, is a graduate of Camp Ramah...
...One of the sometime results of limited resources and multiple claims on those resources is a tendency to invest huge amounts of time and money in a particular segment of the community for a period of years, and then to move to another, and then still another...
...And with that growth came the first (and only) major incursion of anti-Semitism in the city's history...
...And like the city, it has been easy to dismiss it with contempt...
...There is organized supervised kashrut, with about 14 butchers and seven or eight restaurants, and there are all the other services an Orthodox community requires...
...This rather predictable development did not inhibit the growth or the development of the Jewish community...
...Tom Tugend, writing in Heritage, points out that "In 1948, when the Los Angeles Jewish community numbered around 200,000, the Welfare Fund received 54,000 individual or family contributions...
...The whole lifestyle ends up stressing the casual rather than the organized...
...But now we've come to recognize that Jewish life can't be compartmentalized, can't be divided into welfare on the one hand and Judaism on the other...
...Less than half the Jews of LA appear to maintain even a loose affiliation with the Jewish community...
...Barbi Weinberg, whose term as Federation president was concluded in December, comments on the change in philosophy: "Federations generally had the attitude years ago that they were secular Jewish institutions...
...And now Ye-shiva U. has joined the others by opening its own Western branch...
...The case is obvious with respect to Orthodox Jews, who will not drive on Shabbat and hence must live near their shul...
...Take the Brandeis-Bardin Institute...
...Nobody knows exactly how many Orthodox Jews there are in Los Angeles...
...six were German, and all but one were merchants...
...And in fact, Bardin had briefly experimented with the Brandeis model in several sites on the East Coast—but met with little success there, and a chilly reception...
...In 1975, the Federation moved to a more centrally located building at 6503 Wilshire Boulevard...
...The fact that in other parts of the country Jews may hold certain things very dear just doesn't mean that much out here...
...According to Max Vorspan, the flowering of synagogue life in LA really began only in 1948...
...But there are more than there used to be, and they are far more visible...
...Relatively few people over 30 come/raw LA...
...This trend towards decentralization started with the development of area councils in the Eastern, Western, Southern and San Fernando areas, where professionally-staffed Federation offices were opened, area campaigns were conducted, and fieldworkers from central agencies were assigned on a part-time basis...
...Take the development of Jewish institutions of higher learning...
...Since the Yom Kippur War, LA Jewry has taken to the streets to demonstrate community solidarity on a variety of occasions—the Ma'alot massacre, the United Nations Zionism-is-racism resolution, and the release of PFLP terrorist Abu Daoud...
...Thus, Ted Kanner, Executive Director of the Federation, cites problems that go beyond the obvious challenge of geographic size and demographic numbers...
...Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, West Coast director of Chabad Lubavitch (with a staff that includes 28 full-time rabbis) believes that "the community has begun to realize that it takes all types of forces to make a community work, and that Chabad is one positive force in the community...
...So they'd put a little ad in the paper and they'd say, 'Kaffeeklatsch at my house to discuss a Sunday School,' and 20 or 30 men and women would show up—and that's how congregations started all over town...
...And we know that there isn't necessarily a direct relationship between participation in community organization and giving...
...it may, instead, be the cultural R&D center for the nation, the place where new models are tested and then disseminated, our collective future writ small...
...LA has made it possible for them to remove themselves without stigma, something that would have been far more difficult in, say, Cleveland...
...I sit on the Federation Board, and I'm president of the Board of Rabbis, the first Orthodox president in a number of years...
...They went north to the orange groves and vast housing tracts of the San Fernando Valley...
...Whether or not it's an idea whose time has come—again—its leaders seem more comfortable in their relationship to the organized Jewish community than is often the case elsewhere...
...Estimates of the number of Israelis here range from a low of 30,000 to a high of 80,000...
...Quoting Bardin, Prager explains the Brandeis success story simply: "West Coast Jews, California Jews, don't know anything, and they know they don't know anything...
...They lived next door to one another in a block of storefronts known as Bell's Row, located at what is now the corner of Los Angeles and Aliso Streets, where the Los Angeles Federal Building now stands...
...And, as a result of their experiences, they wanted something Jewish for their children...
...Recently there has been a dramatic increase in community-sponsored newspaper advertisements on behalf of Soviet Jewry and Israel...
...As the city and its Jewish population grew, Jewish institutions kept pace, in a pattern that had already become familiar in the older cities of the East...
...Ask a most obvious question, back in 1960—where are the Jewish neighborhoods?-—and there was no real answer...
...There's real resistance to organized activities...
...they were often people who had been raised in heavily ethnic Jewish neighborhoods...
...as a rule they were then coopted (in the best sense of the word) by the community as a whole...
...They're easier to start here than, let's say, even in Boston...
...That's why we've developed, in the last few years, a real sense of interdependence between the Federation and the synagogue community...
...That's a real challenge...
...The Jews who were arriving from the Midwest and the East were (by definition) those least tied to the close-knit communities they'd left behind, and even if they'd wanted to connect with "the" Jewish community here in LA, they would have found it exceedingly difficult to do so...
...That's been a good thing so far as developing a new and genuinely innovative community, but it's had disastrous consequences for community financing...
...Congressman Henry Waxman has been in the forefront of the House of Representatives on behalf of Israel and, recently, in arranging the release of 15 Jewish women from Syria upon receipt in Damascus of marriage proposals from Syrian Jews in the United States...
...And the explanation, of course, is that there is no burdensome history, no ossified tradition to overcome...
...That community has grown, as Neil Reisner, a Los Angeles based freelance writer specializing in Jewish topics, was editor of Davka Magazine and Jewish Los Angeles—A Guide...
...We were growing, and we could feel it...
...There's still a long way to go, of course...
...The German Jews found the East Europeans an uncomfortable embarrassment...
...My experience has been that whatever is true of the West Coast is more true in LA, and whatever is true in LA is more true in the Jewish community...
...Indeed, there is evidence of a growing Israeli underworld in Los Angeles, with fairly well-substantiated rumors of protection rackets, arson, drug traffic and prostitution...
...One of the most successful educational programs in town goes in exactly the opposite direction...
...Back east, Jewish communities are inevitably touched by the shadow of New York...
...Close on the heels of the joint US/USSR statement on the Middle East, President Carter appeared in Los Angeles to speak before a Democratic National Committee fund raising dinner...
...And today there are 455,000—or more...
...there weren't any large institutions waiting for new people to join...
...Worse yet, these numbers include many people whose affiliation is absolutely minimal...
...As Eddie Friedman, the program's director, points out, "We have a whole bunch of little communities, each with its own temple and its own school...
...On a non-elected level there is Ed Sanders, former Federation and American Israeli Public Affairs Committee president and more recently a deputy national campaign director for Jimmy Carter...
...There are others...
...Ten years ago, the total amount allocated to religious schools through the Bureau of Jewish Education was about a quarter of a million dollars...
...That's very atypical, and we can't say that it can be sustained for a long period of time, but so far we seem to have developed in a way that bridges a number of worlds...
...East European conflict that started the Jewish community on its way...
...The synagogue could become the most important therapeutic institution imaginable...
...Kaspare Cohen Hospital is now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center...
...The Jews who arrived had come to serve the mercantile needs of the growing community...
...The sprawl, together with our youth and the fabled Southern California lifestyle, have produced both dynamism and dilemma...
...really new...
...Instead, they moved west to settle in the "I've made it" suburbs of Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles and Pacific Palisades...
...More important, it is exceedingly difficult for the community simply to keep track of its constituency...
...Now, with the growth of storefront agency service centers in Fairfax and the Valley and with increased Federation-synagogue-agency joint-venturing, the trend is growing even stronger...
...But something's happening in LA, something important...
...Camps are a very important part of that, and I think that camping is much more important to us than to other communities...
...Afraid that" the poorer and often sickly newcomers would become a burden on the community-at-large, thus inflaming anti-Semitism still more, and threatening to undermine the status they had managed to achieve, the German Jews did the right thing for the wrong reasons, and established a network of social service agencies to provide aid to the immigrants...
...Then, for a while, it was the poor and the elderly...
...So they established 'centers.' Dozens and dozens of them...
...Cunin and Lamm both stress the openness of LA, people's receptivity to new ideas—and, in terms of where most Jews come from, Orthodoxy is a new idea...
...After a brief legal battle involving the State Department, city officials, and the Convention Center management, Federation rented Convention Center space to present a counter-exhibition for the same period...
...Jewish Los Angeles—A Guide was another Council project, a 114-page book that detailed virtually every aspect of Jewish LA from a tour of the Fairfax area to the worship schedule of most congregations...
...We were just becoming aware that Los Angeles was a great Jewish center, one that needed a lot of growth and a deepening of Jewish intellectual and cultural life— and we felt that that was about to happen, that we were on the verge of something very big...
...Many of these people were experiencing non-Jewish neighborhoods for the first time...
...The names are here, somewhere, but not within the Jewish orbit...
...Then, as the city grew, Jews followed the traditional pattern of neighborhood clustering, first fanning south and west of the downtown area, then in the Bunker Hill area north and slightly west of the center of town, and, in the 1920's, with a steady rise in the number of newcomers, in Boyle Heights, east of downtown and in West Adams, south of the city's center...
...It's not that LA has Jewish neighborhoods...
...There are over a hundred synagogues in the LA area, which may not sound like a very large number until you stop to remember that a synagogue that is more than 30 years old is considered venerable...
...A Woody Allen vision, New York as texture, LA as fraud...
...And the second thing is that it's new...
...He is on the board of governors of the Jewish Student Press Service...
...But nobody seems to know quite what to "do" with them, or even how to feel about them...
...What they were likely not aware of is that the Soviet Jewry exhibition was sponsored by the Federation in cooperation with 45 Los Angeles synagogues and Jewish organizations, and thereby provides a real example of the potential of a well-organized Los Angeles Jewish community...
...But even after you make allowances for family size, and add in an estimate for those Jews who maintain organizational affiliation but who do not contribute to the Welfare Fund, you're still hard-pressed to come up with anything over 200,000—and the real figure may be much lower than that...
...That's a contradiction in terms, of course, but that's what they believed...
...According to Jerry Weber, assistant director of community planning and the professional who works with the Council on Jewish Life, about a thousand people requested information and were put in touch with the synagogue movements...
...And in 1912, a Federation of Jewish Charities was organized, to raise funds for all the local Jewish institutions...
...It is a 12 story high-rise with only one wing...
...These later merged to become the Los Angeles Jewish Community Council, including the UJWF for fund raising and the United Community Committee (now the Community Relations Committee) as its community relations arm...
...Greeting him at the Century Plaza Hotel was a crowd of close to 3000 demonstrators in a rally sponsored by the Jewish Federation-Council...
...One can travel 30 miles in any direction (except the Pacific) from the offices of the Jewish Federation-Council and not leave all the areas of significant Jewish settlement behind...
...He recalls, "There was a sense of excitement about it then, because it was so obviously a real beginning, it was very fresh...
...In the meantime, segments of the community continue, inevitably, to take off on their own...
...And, while there were no waiting lines for the trade fair, long lines of several hundred people patiently waited to gain entrance to the counter-exhibition, which could accommodate only 40 people at one time...
...Every year, one or another of us—HUC, or UJ, or UCLA—would take on an additional faculty person, so we no longer felt that we were in the wilderness...
...others say the number may be as large as 600,000), and more and more of them are seeking each other out, clustering together in a network of institutions, agencies, and cha-vurot which is characterized by a spirit of cooperation and acceptance that is rare in older Jewish communities, and rarer still in a place which was once termed "a bunch of suburbs in search of a city...
...The electronics industry and new businesses began to develop, so the jobs were here, and they came...
...There are 14 of them, including one Reform, and of the 14, six have been established within the past 10 years...
...Even more impressive was the obvious array of ethnic groups in the line...
...The Jews were all young unmarried men...
...We're aware of that, but we're ready to take our chances...
...Since Rabbi Schulweis came to Valley Beth Shalom from Oakland, the congregation has grown to 900 families, and, more significant, the concept of the congregational chavurah has been so successfully institutionalized that it is now being copied all over the United States...
...Ironically, however, the sprawl that made LA the butt of so many jokes and that was once the chief impediment to genuine community has contributed much to the vitality of Jewish LA...
...The institutions that were established between 1909 and 1911 form part of the core of today's Jewish Los Angeles: The Hebrew Orphan Home is now Vista Del Mar Child Care Service...
...It is the place to go for ethnic foods and ritual objects, for feeling at home...
...And some went east, so far east that they were virtually lost to the Jewish community...
...Efforts at outreach and inter-institutional cooperation don't always lead to decentralization...
...Phoenix from 4,300 to 15,000...
...That kind of easy relationship does not yet exist between the organized community and the growing Israeli community...
...So our job is to take a community that's not deeply rooted, that doesn't respond to the usual public relations, or phone call, or outreach program, and figure out what will make it respond with constructive Jewish be-'havior...
...Shlomo Bardin...
...Barth does not speak for HUC alone when he speaks of the interconnections among LA's Jewish institutions...
...Nobody would have picked the Simi Valley, 35 years ago, as a likely site for Jewish learning and living.'' Learning and living proceed in more conventional ways, as well...
...We were concerned with widows and orphans and that sort of thing, institutionalizing the older and more personal welfare system...
...There are 455,000 Jews here (that's the American Jewish Yearbook estimate...
...They went south to the beach cities with their burgeoning aircraft industry...
...Neither does a good chunk of the old, established Jewish aristocracy...
...In the meantime, perhaps our motto should be "We are Becoming...
...That's why we're investing heavily in neighborhood councils, grassroots organizations that help people plan for their own neighborhoods...
...The numbers say that Kanner's right in his assessment...
...the Duarte Sanitarium for tuberculosis is now the City of Hope...
...And each one required its own nucleus of leadership, so you have many more Jews involved in the mechanics of Jewish life...
...City Councilman Zev Ya-roslavsky first made his mark in LA life as the executive director of the Southern California Council for Soviet Jewry...
...For all that the Federation had a female president, women are still underrepresented in both lay and professional positions...
...Seventy thousand people viewed the counter-exhibition displays of photographs, posters, letters, and documents depicting the plight of Soviet Jewry...
...There's the entertainment industry, for example, still largely Jewish, and almost wholly irrelevant to Jewish life...
...We do have a programmatic vision which has developed because we're in LA and not in any other community...
...Lewis Barth is Dean of HUC's Los Angeles facility, and one of the few native Los Angelenos interviewed for this article...
...In fact, as was the case in so many other cities, it was likely the combination of social discrimination and the German vs...
...By 1900, there were about 2,500 Jews in the city, and two synagogues (one Orthodox, one Reform), two B'nai B'rith lodges, a Hebrew Benevolent Society (which administered the cemetery), a Ladies' Auxiliary, and a downtown social club (The Concordia...
...They saw their responsibility as providing for the health and welfare needs of Jews...
...No profile of LA Jewry would be complete without noting the very visible entry of Jews into the secular political arena, Jews have, of course, always been involved in political life, but, until recently, their involvement was almost always behind the scenes...
...And then, of course, there are still those 250,000, straights and gays, men and women, rich and poor, who are here, somewhere, hiding or forgetting, uninvolved, counted but not numbered...
...Two current examples are the Orthodox, and the Israeli immigrant community...
...Small groups had to take responsibility for themselves...
...But the Israelis are almost a shadow community...
...there was no place else to live...
...Located in the Simi Valley (that's one valley over from the San Fernando, about 50 miles from the center of town), Brandeis has moved very far along the road staked out for it by the vision of its founder, the late Dr...
...If the pattern of the immediate postwar period had been sustained, the migration of so many Jews to Los Angeles might well have culminated in a Jewish catastrophe, more than 300,000 Jews losing their Jewish identity in the bright sun, hiding their Jewishness in the smog...
...and there is Her-shey Gold, a key Democratic Party fund raiser in Southern California...
...Camps, schools, neighborhoods, synagogues—and a Federation...
...If we can proudly point to a number of innovative achievements and to a special readiness to cooperate across institutional lines, we cannot ignore the areas of gross underdevelopment...
...They had no choice...
...We have to search each other out...
...It is no longer a surprise, in the Midwest or in the East, to find people who have been exposed to Brandeis-Bardin wondering why their communities cannot learn from what's been done there...
...For decades, it was that sprawl that seemed to doom the prospect of a real Jewish community...
...And there was the beginning of the inevitable conflict between the established German-Jewish community and the steady influx of East European Jews...
...In the late 1960's and early 1970's it was students...
...Take your basic Dizengoff lowlife, put him down in Fairfax, and he is as unpalatable, and rather more of an embarrassment...
...The synagogue community has got to prove itself as having something to say in relationship to the moral, spiritual and intellectual needs of a very new kind of Jewish hunger, and that's what the chavurah structure—small groups, really cohesive groups, within the synagogue— makes possible...
...The original Federation of Jewish Charities was followed, in 1929, by the establishment of the United Jewish Welfare Fund, to do fund raising for both local and overseas needs, and then, in 1933, the Jewish Community Committee, intended to combat anti-Semitism, and the United Jewish Community, concerned with youth, education, and such, were organized...
...The problem, of course, is that so long as they keep that distance, the ambivalence is likely to continue...
...City Attorney Burt Pines, while not necessarily elected for Jewish reasons, traveled to the Soviet Union in mid-1977 and visited with re-fuseniks...
...So what you come up with is that very, very many people—a quarter of a million, maybe more—are functional dropouts from Jewish life...
...So in ten years, a hundred new institutions were born...
...LA was a boom town then, cattle ranchers becoming rich by trading their beef for the gold of Northern California...
...And, for the first time, day schools are making a real impact...
...It has had a large Jewish population for some time, with some current estimates going as high as 75 percent...
...Either way, that's a lot of people, perhaps as much as 18 percent of the total Jewish population...
...It's hard to know whether there's a kind of faddism at work here, in which interest in a particular problem area can only be sustained for a limited time, or whether, instead, these shifts in attention are the result of genuine need matched by incredible organizational flexibility...
...It's as easy to lie on the beach or pedal your bicycle as it is to go to a meeting, and therefore, we compete with anything that any Federation is up against, plus golf, tennis, the beach and all that...
...But if it works out, it may represent a first step towards the genuine integration of the Israeli immigrants into the mainstream of LA Jewish life...
...The leap into the future, and away from the familiar, took place after World War II...
...Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary have thriving branches...
...Now, 1948 may be an unfair base-year to use for such a comparison, and the estimates of current donations from within the Federation go as high as 60,000...
...It's outreach with a new twist...
...But it's not easy, not only for the same reasons it's not easy anywhere else, but also for some more typically LA reasons...
...That, of course, is a central aspect of community life here...
...Our goal here is not simply to "Ju-daize" the Federation, but to overcome the artificial barrier that assigns welfare to one agency and Judaism to another...
...In the open and cooperative style which may be Jewish LA's most distinctive feature, it is not unusual to find crossover among the faculty of the several institutions, or to find professionals from the Jewish Federation-Council teaching classes, particularly in the Hebrew Union College School of Jewish Communal Service...
...And the question for us is whether we will be able, as we come to the full realization that we are America's Second Jewish City, to avoid the fate of our East Coast big sister city, where so very many Jews have separated themselves from the community, whether we will be able, as we mature, to retain the sense of Jewish adventure which may yet make us One—and number one, as well...
...No one was quite sure last year what to do about the involvement of some Hillel Foundation directors with Breira, and some are not sure what to do this year about Beit Chayim Cha-dashim, a gay congregation that participates fully in communal life...
...For yeshivas, we had to send our children to New York...
...If all that sounds as if LA is a Jewish boom-town, remember the 250,000 or so Jews that aren't reached at all...
...There is a kind of psychological revolution in which the privatistic needs of people now emerge as central in their agenda, as opposed to the social needs...
...And both are encouraged by the presence in Encino of Valley Beth Shalom, a Conservative congregation, and its rabbi, Harold Schulweis...
...New York Jews don't know anything, but they think they know everything...
...we were just a few synagogues, and a few schools...
...there is Al Spiegel, a mover and shaker in Republican political circles...
...The United Jewish Welfare Fund did inaugurate, this year, an Israeli fund raising division, although there was some reluctance to publicize its existence...
...Reflecting the flavor of the time, it met for its first ten years in a variety of locations—rented halls, Judge Sepulveda's courtroom, and John Temple's saloon...
...Nobody was there to look over their shoulders and say, 'This is the way it's supposed to be done.' Eventually, they had to develop some kind of ideological conception of what Judaism was going to mean to them...
...Some cities have grown even more rapidly, but the sheer size of the LA community sets it apart from the others...
...to Baltimore, which had 75,000 in 1951 and has moved up to 92,000 today...
...With over 500 discrete Jewish organizations and organization chapters in the metropolitan area, something has to act as the communal cement...
...For that reason, the Federation invests heavily in developing its constituency, supporting a variety of outreach programs...
...Compare that to Chicago, which had 325,000 in 1951—and has 253,000 today...
...It may be the case that the recent rejuvenation of the Beverly-Fairfax area as a Jewish neighborhood is due to the fact that it has been a major zone of settlement for the new Israeli immigrants, but some rather distressing and totally un-predicted elements have come along with that development...
...It combines a very serious commitment to Jewish scholarship with a deep involvement in Jewish community life and concerns...
...More recently, single parent families and young adults have captured the limelight...
...Encino, for example, is an upper middle class neighborhood on the southern flank of the San Fernando Valley...
...And he continues by talking about the weather: "I've come to believe that the warm weather, the climate itself, together with the prevalence of all kinds of recreational opportunities contribute significantly to people taking responsibility less seriously...
...But in spite of that ethos, and in spite of the physical vastness, and in spite of the dispersion of the Jewish population, and in spite of the relative ease with which fading away can be accomplished, Jewish LA is making it...
...The Anglo-Jewish press (three papers—Heritage Israel Today, B'nai B'rith Messenger) reaches a combined circulation of about 50,000 with a product that leaves many people dissatisfied...
...And today, not one of the centers still exists...
...For the fact is that today Los Angeles has more Jews than France or Great Britain, more than the entire continent of Africa, more than Jerusalem and Haifa combined, more even than Tel Aviv (proper...
...Free Soviet Jewry" buttons were a common sight inside the Soviet exhibition itself...
...Increasingly, many of us do just that...
...The Jewish community became firmly entrenched during that period, virtually dominating the city's rapid economic growth...
...It is a series of villages...
...What it took was a determination on the part of those who cared the most to develop a style appropriate to the city's dimensions...
...Lately, however, more and more Jews who are overtly and explicitly committed to Jewish causes have run for, and been elected to, political office...
...That's the kind of problem that Federation—to put it mildly—hasn't had much experience in dealing with...
...We mean that in mundane ways, such as in saving money by ordering supplies together, and also in searching for opportunities to bring more Jewish knowledge and culture into the Federation...
...And that means that the children are often cut off from any contact with other Jewish children during their early years...
...In fact, the recent emergence of a new generation of Jewish neighborhoods can, in some measure, be traced to the development of synagogue life...
...The Soviet exhibition was entitled ' 'The Soviet Union: Six Decades of Progress...
...Today," Lamm continues, "the situation is really changed...
...Calling that a "challenge" is a bit of an understatement...
...Even more significant, perhaps, was the Soviet Jewry exhibition sponsored by the Soviet Jewry Commission of the Community Relations Committee in late November...
...that was his dream, and out here it was a possible dream...
...The vitality, openness, experimentation, youth, and lack of institutionalized tradition which characterize California and provide such ample grist for the stereotyping mills have also led to the emergence of a rich and—in important respects—novel Jewish community...
...The challenge of community building is to develop the sense that one is not a transplant, but is of Los Angeles...
...You can see and hear them—Israeli teachers working in the Hebrew schools, falafel stands on the street corners in Beverly-Fairfax, Hebrew conversation on the streets...
...The counter-exhibition was called "Soviet Jewry: Six Decades of Oppression...
...The latest, and presumably the last, merger took place in 1958, when the Jewish Community Council joined with the Federation of Jewish Charities to become the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council...
...It has "areas:" Eastern, Western, Southern, and the Valley (that's San Fernando...
...And the third thing is that it is the frontier of American Jewish life...
...Howard Miller is president of the Board of Education, a difficult role in a city where the major local issue is busing...
...He had to go to court to win his claim that he should be allowed to list himself as a 'Jewish community executive' on the ballot...
...the wonder of LA is that the sharing actually happens...
...As LA changed from frontier-Mexican to big city-provincial, it developed certain airs that led to discrimination—mostly social—against Jews...
...It was natural for them to want to establish some kind of social or educational setting, not only for their children but also for themselves...
...The reason, says Rabbi Maurice Lamm of the prestigious Beverly Hills Beth Jacob Congregation, is simple: "When I came here in 1972, there was no reliable kashrut in Los Angeles, or very little...
...The $27 million raised in last year's UJWF campaign represent just $60 per Los Angeles Jew, and very little of that derives from the old line wealth that can be found in this community...
...Today, it is closer to a million and a half dollars...
...Max Vorspan, author of the most complete history of LA Jewry (and Vice President of the University of Judaism) notes that in 1850, according to a Federal census, there were only eight Jews living in Los Angeles—whose total population back then was 1,610...
...Scriptwriters rather than poets and novelists, game shows rather than documentaries...
...So, too, did Jewish neighborhoods...
...The trend continued with the development of sub-area councils in Beverly-Fairfax and in the San Fernando Valley...
...Instead of saying that the synagogue is the place in which we pursue the ritual celebrations of one's life, rites of passage, festivals, fasts, study, and social action, if we can say that there are problems we have not been attending to, such as existential alone-ness, single parenthood, a tremendous increase in divorce, the home which has become a pathogenic institution, and if we can come to understand that it's the synagogue's function to deal with these new kinds of psychological problems, then loneliness and the rest can be, oddly enough, an opportunity...
...It was their particular need that brought them together in the first place...
...And with the numbers there have now developed the necessary support services: kosher meat, ritual goods, books, the things that make a place a neighborhood, the things that make a neighborhood Jewish...
...There is tremendous mobility, a shriveled extended family, and a sense of loneliness that's very marked, and all that encourages innovations such as chavurot...
...By World War II, however, these neighborhoods had begun to disappear, and the Beverly-Fairfax area became the primary location of Jewish settlement...
...It's the sun-belt story, of course...
...Rabbi Barth was one of HUC's first students in LA...
...HUC's located (since trie early '70's) next to the University of Southern California, JTS's (known as the University of Judaism) now moving to its new campus, midway between UCLA and Cal State-Northridge—both with rapidly expanding Jewish student programs, UCLA housing one of the world's finest Jewish library collections...
...Almost 30 years later, with a much wealthier and more than doubled Jewish population, contributors dropped to 49,000...
...Rabbi Schulweis explains, "You've got at least 150,000 Jews concentrated in this Valley area...
...The children of the Fairfax settlers didn't stay put...
...As in other cities, the age of the Orthodox congregant is going down, not up, and there is a real sense of new vigor among the Orthodox...
...Every one of them is today a congregation...
...A letter was sent to the entire Federation over Barbi Weinberg's signature encouraging those not affiliated with congregations to seek information on the options available to them...
...As Kanner explains, "We are attempting to do something highly atypical, by giving power to the people...
...Even today, Fairfax is more than 50 percent Jewish, and, with its adjunct to the southwest, the Pico-Robertson district, it is the only neighborhood in LA which still has the "first generation" flavor associated with Jewish neighborhoods...
...And there are other groups, whose needs have yet to be met, less dramatically perhaps, which have yet to be fully integrated...
...The building of a Jewish community of LA's scope is necessarily a shared task...
...Depending on how you draw the boundaries, Los Angeles may indeed be the second largest Jewish city in the world...
...None yet offers ordination (though there is increasing talk of that) but all offer pre-rab-binic training, concurrent programming with their neighboring secular universities, and extensive educational programs for the Jewish community-at-large...
...Sponsored by the Bureau of Jewish Education in conjunction with participating congregations, both Reform and Conservative, Chavurat Noar is designed to give ninth graders, city-wide, an intensive Jewish experience, punctuated by six camp conclaves over the course of the year...
...Initially most of these protest activities were student-initiated and organized...
...It was not always so...
...The simple concept of transmitting Jewish knowledge to Jewish lay people by "teaching and touching" has been translated into a major national force which, according to Director Dennis Prager, now reaches as many as 20,000 people each year...
...Camps help to compensate for our geographic dispersion...
...The problem is compounded by the fact that while the vast majority of the Israeli immigrants are professionals, merchants, craftspeople or academics, there is a small—but very visible—element that is undesirable...
...Everybody lived there in the early years...
...He made his findings public upon his return...
...That's a way of enriching Jewish life in the community, even though it may not show in our campaign results...
...This merger happened none too soon...
...I came here to start fresh, not to repeat...
...Jewish education in general, as elsewhere in the country, is receiving increased attention—and support—from Federation...
...There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that the old Jewish Community building at 590 N. Vermont was built in two wings to facilitate the division of community property should the 1958 merger prove unsuccessful...
...As Prager puts it, "This was where he found the most fertile and receptive ground, and he was a prophet in that sense...
...He observes that even though most of the Jewish population came here immediately after World War II, there's still a relatively small native population and most people continue to identify home as someplace else—Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo, wherever...
...The desire to create a Sunday School for children and a social center for adults wasn't based on ideology or profound religious conviction, and the people involved were pretty limited in their knowledge...
...Fairfax was once in West Los Angeles, a prime new development, but is now in the urban core (although to an Easterner, what we consider the urban core often looks more like a suburb...
...And, as important, there's a real Orthodox presence in the general community...
...Making it, and then some...
...So they were open, and went about creating a new tradition based on trial and error...
...To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the USSR mounted a massive trade fair in the Los Angeles Convention Center, running from November 9 through 27...

Vol. 3 • January 1978 • No. 3


 
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