The rain during Noah’s flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights. The Torah was given to Moses during a 40-day stay at the top of Mount Sinai. The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert.
During the 1930s and ’40s, even as young people across America were swing dancing to the beat of such Jewish bandleaders as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Harry James, a vibrant musical subculture dubbed “Yiddish swing” was flourishing in an L.A. enclave, according to Tali Tadmor, a local pianist, composer and vocal coach.
The legendary Sunset Strip, traversing nearly 100 years of Los Angeles history, winds it way past three famous, even infamous, enterprises along its 1.7-mile length: the gangland offices of Mickey Cohen; the hotel of Alla Nazimova, a bisexual Jewish silent film star; and the nightclub of Alice Schiller, a Jewish woman whom The New York Times called in her obituary the “The Impresaria of Striptease.”
When Henry Leventon, his wife and three daughters attended their first Sabbath service at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock (TBI) in 1976, the gabbai at the synagogue immediately approached.
Herb Citrin, who pioneered valet parking in Los Angeles and was known to many as Mr. Valet, died on June 15 at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda following a long illness. He was 91.
Some months ago, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was “cruising Boyle Heights,” the neighborhood where he grew up and where a large portion of Los Angeles’ Jewish community once lived. Feeling nostalgic, he drove by B’nai Jacob Synagogue — once known as the Fairmont Street Shul — and recalled that some of his parents’ students had celebrated their bar mitzvahs there.
It had been a tough week. The more news I read about the Boston bombing, the less I understood. Who were these young men, full of grievance, using a fresh start in America to maim and kill innocents?
When Los Angeles was incorporated as a city in 1850, eight Jews, all bachelors, were included on the population rolls. Today, according to the best estimates, somewhere between 600,000 to 650,000 Jews live in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with figures varying depending upon who does the estimating, how they define the geographical boundaries and, indeed, the definition of who is a Jew.
Choreographer Heidi Duckler isn’t content simply to make works for a stage. To her, the whole of Los Angeles, the whole of the world, even, is fit for dancing. Why leap across a theater floor when you can glide around the lobby of an office building? Why spin atop sprung wood when you can frolic in a laundromat?
Eddie Goldstein, remembered as being the last Jewish resident from the original Jewish community of Boyle Heights, died on Jan. 5 after having lived in the neighborhood for almost eight decades.
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