With religious school winding down this month at many synagogues, some cantors will regularly seize the opportunity to produce a brief season of secular concerts with guest artists and visiting cantors.
They are security guards, schoolteachers, cooks and banquet hall waiters. They are waitresses, agency and museum executives and walkie-talkie-toting synagogue maintenance workers. There are hundreds of non-Jewish support staff at synagogues and other Jewish institutions throughout Southern California, and they are integral to the life of the Jewish community.
\”Amazing, amazing people,\” said Conservative Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. \”I don\’t think our Jewish institutions could function properly without the efforts of our non-Jewish support staff and even sometimes senior staff.\”
To understand how Rabbi Morley Feinstein has re-energized University Synagogue, just peek in on his Friday night services, which have been attracting upwards of 125 people every week.
When Rabbi Harvey Fields becomes rabbi emeritus on June 1, after serving for 21 years, Rabbi Steven Leder will succeed him — a transition the two have been preparing for, along with the staff and the board, for the past three years.
When Steven Leder was 14, he got into some trouble with the law. Rather than send him to reform school, his parents sent him to a Reform Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin.
With the retirement this year of several prominent senior rabbis, youthful faces have come to occupy the majority of Westside pulpits and others throughout the city, a confluence of vitality that has the potential to herald the beginning of a new era for the wider Los Angeles Jewish community.
Executive Director Harriet Rossetto thinks that the new campus — named after lead donors Jona Goldrich, Sol Kest and Warren Breslow — will make a dramatic difference in the way Beit T\’Shuvah will offer assistance.
By 1965, I was a well-established suburbanite living in Springfield, whose Jewish community included both a Reform and Conservative congregation. My personal affiliation was with Temple Beth Ahm, the Conservative synagogue, but one of the people in the community whom I liked very much was Israel Dresner, the rabbi of the Reform temple, Sha\’arey Shalom.
Over the High Holidays, somebody scrawled Nazi swastikas and the epithets \”Cursed evildoers\” and \”Evildoers, you will die\” on the front door of the Reform movement\’s Har-El Congregation synagogue in midtown Jerusalem.This was only the latest act of vandalism against Har-El, Israel\’s oldest Reform synagogue, in recent months. Over the summer, someone smeared human excrement on the synagogue door. On two other occasions, somebody poured acid on the synagogue garden, turning the grass yellow. All these incidents took place when the building was closed.
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