\”We are dwindling,\” says the 1939 Club\’s Fred Diament.\n\n\”We are afraid of what will happen when we are no longer around tokeep the memory alive,\” says the Lodzer Organization of California\’sKal Berson.\n\nThe aging Holocaust survivors are speaking not only of fellowsurvivors but also of their respective clubs, which were formed inthe 1950s by émigrés who had lost everything to Hitler.
Complete with a ketubah signing, champagne, speeches and a few tears, the installation of Rabbi Michael Beals at B\’nai Tikvah Congregation in Westchester seemed more like a wedding.
To many American Jews in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Zionism, the ancient dream of a Jewish homeland that spawned a political movement and the birth of Israel almost 50 years ago, is little more than a footnote in a Sunday-school textbook.
Following an intensive, three-year fund-raising campaign, augmented by government aid, BBI has moved from \”rubble to renewal\” and from \”dream to reality,\” according to the invitation to the Sept. 14 event.
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.
Leni Riefenstahl\’s long career ranges from silent-screen actress to recent underwater photographer, but her name is invariably linked to her 1934 film, \”Triumph of the Will.\” Shot at a Nuremberg party rally, it is considered one of the world\’s most notorious propaganda documentaries, in which she used brilliant cinematic techniques to glorify Hitler and the Aryan ideal.
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
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