The Jewish Journal,
‘A Lot of Life Left’
With its small and aging membership, the
mid-city’s
By Naomi Pfefferman, Senior
Writer
At first glance, Temple Beth Zion, on a busy stretch of Olympic Boulevard in the mid-city, looks stark and abandoned.
The front door is locked, the religious school has
been closed for almost four decades, and the daily minyan and Friday-night service are
gone (many of the some 135 members, most of whom are aged 75 to 80, can no longer drive at night).
In the last six months alone, the acting
president and the rabbi’s wife died;
one board member suffered a stroke; another had a leg amputation; another sustained a fall and is temporarily in a
convalescent home; and the executive vice president had open-heart surgery.
Yet the congregation struggles along, despite the
difficulties and losses. Each Saturday morning, there is at least a minyan in the spotless sanctuary, which is decorated with 10 lovely stained-glass windows depicting Jewish life. The building is
paid for in full; there is a well-attended Passover seder; and, on the High Holidays, the shul is
filled with members’ children and grandchildren. Friendships of five decades continue in the Sisterhood, which
is led by Sylvia Greenberg, 83;
members who drive pick up those who
can’t for the bimonthly meetings.
Settling behind his scuffed desk in a tiny, windowless office, Rabbi Edward Tenenbaum, a vigorous man of 79, says that the temple has
been beating the odds since he first
arrived in 1966.
“At that time, our members were mostly senior citizens, and they felt we had only one, maybe
two, years left before we closed
up,” he says, peering from behind horn-rimmed glasses. “Today, it’s been 32 years, and we’re still managing, though,
of course, not without difficulty.
Really, it’s a kind of miracle that
we’ve been able to survive with so many setbacks.”
The congregants at Temple Beth Zion are half American-born and half European-born. They speak
Yiddish but do not follow the Yiddishist-socialist philosophy of their contemporaries at the Workmen’s Circle. Rather, the flavor of shul life
is reminiscent of suburban American Judaism of the 1950s. The emphasis is on family, on
togetherness, on Zionism and raising
money for
Temple Beth Zion was founded in a storefront in 1943, as
May Bierman recalls how, in the temple’s heyday, the El Rey movie theater was rented to handle the High Holiday overflow crowd. In those
days, she served with her Sisterhood friends in the PTA of Wilshire Crest Elementary School.
But the
younger generation grew up and followed
the next Jewish migration to
Today, those who remain are determined to persevere despite increasing physical infirmity. Henry Gross put in long hours revising the yahrtzeit
list because “we say ‘Kaddish’ even if there are no family members left to remember.”
Bierman continues to sell entertainment books and insists “we do things a little slower now,
but we do them.”
Her husband, Morris, who is the recent amputee, showed up to the last board meeting in a wheelchair. When he arrived, his colleagues greeted him with a standing ovation.
“There is so much love here,” May says, with emotion.
Several years ago, the synagogue suffered a series of break-ins, in which thieves stole all
the silver Torah ornaments, the
kiddish cups, the typewriters, a
copying machine and even the silver lining
of Tenenbaum’s robe. The rabbi then trudged to every pawnshop in the area until he found much of the filched silver.
The congregants, in turn, rallied around him, “taking over completely,” when his 11-year-old granddaughter died in road accident years ago and when his wife passed away in February. “We are like a big family here,” he says, with tears
in his eyes. “This is a second home
for all of us.”
On a recent afternoon, in fact, the rabbi
introduced the staff and volunteers to a visitor as if they were members of his own family. There was a Latino maintenance man, a young Iranian secretary
who at last is putting all the temple
files on computer, and an Iraqi-born
general contractor who is helping
repair a vandalized fence at a nominal cost. When asked why, the contractor shrugged and said he used to blow the shofar for 20 years at a synagogue in
Now, the
hope of the shul is its two new co-presidents,
Lynne Sturt Weintraub and Judy Sturt Hollander, who are atypical in that they
are members of a younger generation
(they decline to give their ages). The sisters grew up in the synagogue, and their father served as president,
for eight years, until he died in
1993.
They have retained strong ties to the temple, in part, because of the family Torah, which sits in
the ark It was commissioned by their
great-grandfather and their
grandfather, who survived pogroms
and lost several children while waiting for the scribe to finish. The patriarchs literally carried the scroll out of
But don’t suggest to anyone that Temple Beth Zion’s
days are numbered. “Please, God forbid,” says Nettie Berkson, 81. “Where else would I go to find the camaraderie I’ve had all these years?”
“A few groups have approached us to either merge
or buy the building,” Tenenbaum says, “but the board feels we’ve still got a lot of life left. No one wants to give up. There’s a determination to carry on, and every year, it seems, there is
another miracle.” ■
Photos from
Tennenbaum today.