Among the Southland\’s some 1,500 Yemenite Jews, \”a conservative estimate is that every third or fourth family has a connection,\” says Eli Attar, 46, the president of Solomon\’s Children, a Yemenite activist group.
Ronald Weiner sits on a bench in a serene Beverly Hills park on a perfect, sunny day, filled with rage and frustration. He\’s shaking, his fingers tremble, and his voice cracks with every other sentence. The source of his anger is the city in which he sits. For the past year, Beverly Hills has thwarted Weiner\’s efforts to build a large senior-housing project on property he owns.\n
Among these earlier settlers were many Jewish families, who, notinterested in joining the growing ersatz shtetl up in Boyle Heights,built their graceful homes in the tony new district.
At first glance, Temple Beth Zion, on a busy stretch of Olympic Boulevard in the mid-city, looks stark and abandoned.\n\nThe front door is locked, the religious school has been closed for almost four decades, and the daily minyan and Friday-night serviceare gone (many of the some 135 members, most of whom are aged 75 to80, can no longer drive at night).\n
The Sephardic Arts Festival will take place this Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center, and it\’s a welcome sign for Los Angeles\’ some 100,000 Sephardic Jews.\n
Rabbi David J. Wolpe, along with his wife and 6-month-old daughter, arrived in Los Angeles from New York on June 30.
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.
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