It turns out that there are more Jews in the South Bay than many had imagined — about 45,000, according to a just-released population study by the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.
Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Mizrachic, or just out for a good time — whatever their background, Jews poured into the Skirball Cultural Center last Sunday for the first annual Sephardic Arts Festival. The event was a success beyond its organizers\’ wildest dreams. Attendance, estimated at more than 4,000, was more than double the anticipated turnout, making it the largest audience for any one-day event since the Skirball opened in April 1996. Despite long lines for shuttle buses and food, the mood of participants — a mix of generations and ethnicities — was festive and good-humored. Many people bumped into relatives and friends — often literally — while searching for seats, program notes or restrooms.
They are your brother, your cousin, your lawyer, your best friend, or possibly yourself. Yet, while there are as many gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the Jewish community as in any other, they often feel like outcasts in their own faith, afraid that they can\’t be open about their sexuality and a committed Jew as well.
Amid a blizzard of Spanish-language signs for passport photos, discount shoes and wedding gowns, Langer\’s Delicatessen & Restaurant sits proudly at the corner of Alvarado and 7th streets, the location it has occupied for the past 50 years. The hours are shorter — 8 to 4, Monday through Saturday, closed Sundays — and the price for a pastrami on rye is certainly higher — $7.50, versus a quarter in 1947. The conversation emanating from the brown naugahyde booths is as often in Spanish as in English. And the Ramparts police substation across the street keeps a close watch on the multiethnic parade of humanity that mills about the busy intersection, once the hub of a lively Jewish neighborhood, second only to Boyle Heights.
The ad, which pictures a small child with a worried expression, is one way the UJF is trying to tackle the unfolding \”Who is a Jew?\” debate in Israel and to limit its impact among American donors to the UJF.
If you\’re a young Jewish leader who would like to know more about Los Angeles civic life, or if you\’re a young civic leader who wants to be more in step with the Los Angeles Jewish community, the New Leaders Project might have a place for you. NLP, sponsored in Los Angeles by the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council, is currently seeking applications for its fourth class.
As the son of Holocaust survivors, Adi Liberman grew up, as many second-generation children did, with a sense of profound loss. He knew that he had no grandparents, that his mother, a hidden child during the war, had lost her parents at age 5, and that his father\’s father died before the war and his father\’s mother in Auschwitz.
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