My Tour of Jewish Pico

A few months after October 7, a giant mural took up residence on the wall that abuts the parking lot of my local grocery store. I never thought I would see Israeli flags in my neighborhood of Birmingham, England, but there they were. On the left of the mural, the artist painted a white strip adorned with two Israeli flags.

Of course, this was no depiction of Zionist pride. Between the two flags, in all caps, you can read the words painted in blood red: “ISRAEL GENOCIDE.” To the right of this message is another flag, the same one you see hanging from almost every streetlamp, café, and household window where I live—a Palestinian flag. Several stories high, it takes up most of the wall.

Arriving in Los Angeles the other day, I was greeted with Israeli flags. But they couldn’t have been more different from the ones in my neighborhood. Here, the blue-and-white flags flutter over rooftops of cars, adorn the windows of restaurants, soften an expletive by replacing the letters between F and K in a sticker damning Hamas. If there are words adorning these flags, they are “Am Yisrael Chai,” or, in Hebrew, “Be’yachad nenatzeach” [Together, we will win]. And the connection to Israel comes out in other ways. I walked by a bright yellow Ferrari with “Free the hostages” painted in a matching color across the windshield. Trees were tied with wide, unmissable, similarly hued shiny ribbons, and not just to evoke the old-timey song. The yellow ribbons embraced KIDNAPPED posters, one after the next, images of hostages in Gaza waiting to be released.

But, taking the Jewish Linguistic and Culinary Walking Tour of Pico-Robertson Sunday morning, I quickly discovered that Zionist pride is only one marker of the neighborhood’s loud and proud Jewish community.

We began at Factor’s Famous Deli, a landmark restaurant that has graced its current location since 1948. Though traditionally Eastern European Jewish in cuisine, choc-a-bloc with sable and whitefish, matzo ball soup, and hot pastrami, its non-kosher status turned out to be pretty unusual for the neighborhood, where kosher restaurant after kosher restaurant (Persian, Chinese, sushi, milchig, trendy) line Pico Boulevard.

As we waited for participants to arrive, we nibbled on the deli’s divine rugelach, which are made by the baker from the now-closed Beverlywood Bakery (I couldn’t determine which I liked more, the raspberry or chocolate chip, so I had to alternate between the two several times). Meanwhile, Sarah Bunin Benor, who runs The Jewish Language Project, asked if we knew the meaning of the word “rugelach.” As I greedily shoved another chocolate chip pastry (the decided favorite) into my mouth, I realized I had no idea. She explained. The word can be broken down into three parts: “rog,” a corner in Yiddish; “el,” indicating a diminutive; “ach,” meaning plural (like “shtetlach”). I made a mental note to remember the etymology and also to take many of these delicious little rolled corners home with me!

Although Sarah, a professor of Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College, helped with some of the word definitions and linguistically versatile signage, the tour was primarily led by Alan Niku, a Persian-American filmmaker, and Aaron Castillo-White, the executive director of Kultur Mercado. Alan, who grew up as part of the only Persian Jewish family in San Luis Obispo, told us he used to make pilgrimages to Pico as a kid, eating, for instance, at Kolah Farangi, a Persian-Chinese fusion restaurant fronted by the Yiddish sign “Glatt,” Hebrew “Kasher,” and the name in Farsi and English. “Farangi,” we learned, refers to the old word “Franks,” which has been extended to mean “foreigner” at large. A kolah is a hat. It’s not clear why the restaurant is called “foreigner’s hat,” but I’m told it’s tasty!

Alan was also familiar with every synagogue, big and small, in the vicinity. In the Jewish Chronicle, there used to be a columnist called “The Secret Shulgoer.” She went, anonymously, from shul to shul around the United Kingdom and reviewed grand synagogues and tiny shtiebels, rating them on the flow of their service, the moistness of their honey cake, their friendliness to toddlers (she brought her daughter along to test the waters). Alan could play the same role in Los Angeles!—though given Pico’s growing non-Ashkenazi context, perhaps he ought to be called the Covert Kenissa Congregant.

Whether you’re a shulgoer or kenissa congregant, the options along Pico seem unlimited. You can attend the “Happy Minyan,” a “Modern Hasidic Shul,” and sing the tunes of Shlomo Carlebach. You can go to the three-story Chabad Bais Chaya Mushka Campus, a replica of Brooklyn’s 770, which has several options (mostly Sephardic). Chabad also has Bais Bezalel and CPY: Chabad Persian Youth Center. We passed Pico Shul, and The Community Shul, and Adas Torah (black hat yeshivish), and B’nai David-Judea (liberal “open” Orthodox), and Shuvah Israel Torah Center (a big Sephardic mix), and countless others.

Along the way, we discovered urban mythology—like the claim that the oil tower, with architecture resembling the tablets of the Torah, was called “Moshe’s Oil” (there is an actual synagogue called Ohel Moshe down the road, and we visited it!). In reality called Cardiff Tower, this active oil well site, established by Occidental Petroleum at the corner of West Pico and South Doheny Drive in 1966, was built to fit with the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood’s style. Only when you realize that not a single window appears on the structure might you start to wonder what the synagogue-like building could really be. Apparently, someone once scaled the tower and topped it with a menorah!

We also discovered evidence of the neighborhood’s incredibly diverse Jewish communities. Take the sign still taped to a pole for “Esrog Express,” promising Sukkot sets for “Mehudar Ashkenaz, Sefardi, Israeli, and Moroccan” traditions. Who knew there were so many options??

And although the pain of October 7 is everywhere—the first names of the American hostages (Judith, Sagui, Omer, Gadi, Itai, Edan, Keith, and Hersh z”l) in the windows of Factor’s, the large painted “Bring them home” dog tag in the windows of Bibi’s Bakery—so too is the joy of Jewish life on Pico Boulevard. A vibrant mural called “The Common Thread” by local Iranian-Jewish artist Cloe Hakakian depicts a woman’s face, eyes closed in prayer, before Shabbat candles; the candle’s flames spell “le’dor va’dor,” in Hebrew, with the translation, “From generation to generation,” written in Hebraicized English font. The woman wears a headscarf, and woven into its fabric are diverse figures and Jewish symbols; beyond her, we see the Hollywood hills.

Electrical boxes have been covered in graffiti, mostly in Hebrew: a thank you to God (“Hashem” unusually spelled out in Hebrew); a map of Israel with the Hebrew words “am Yisrael chai”; a bilingual sign offering the slightly different “love more” in English and “ahavat chinam” [free love] in Hebrew; the Hebrew transliterated “Bitachon” [security] followed by “Trust in G-d”; the line from the Torah, “ve’ahavta le’ra’echa kamocha,” that commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves.

As we ate Pico Café’s fried Yemenite malawach; as we walked by clothing stores that sold “Japparel” and restaurants that served “sandwichim”; as we passed Elat Market (which Persian Jews pronounce Ee-lat, not Eilat), where Alan told us it would be too difficult for our group of 22 to enter (“very sharp elbows,” another tour participant whispered in my ear) but snacked on its sweet, dense chickpea cookies; as we sat in Kenisa-ye Ohel Moshe and listened to  Shahnaz Yousefnejadian, a woman from Sanandaj, Iranian Kurdistan, speak to us in her native Hulaula, the neo-Aramaic dialect she is documenting in a dictionary-in-progress; as we were served a beautiful multi-course meal at Kabob by Faraj (I’d consumed too many rugelach and barely had room for the beef, chicken, and tofu kabobs, salads, and rich soups), I marveled at the Jewish universe contained on a handful of blocks in sunny Los Angeles.

Karen Skinazi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture and the director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and the author of “Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.”