L.A. ad agency exec turns passion for Jewish unity into a magazine

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LOS ANGELES — David Suissa is trying to hold back, trying to stop himself from calling his campaign for Jewish unity a revolution, or the dawning of a new era.

But soon enough, as he sits at a gigantic white conference table in his hip Brentwood offices, his humility gives way to his passion. He is so inspired and ready to inspire others, that he can't stop the words, the hyperbole, from flowing.

"This is not our message, it's God's message. We're all supposed to be His children, and He's got to be looking down on us now and saying, 'This is not what I had in mind,'" says Suissa, 43. "We have to begin a new era."

Suissa, darkly handsome with thick gray hair and penetrating coffee-colored eyes, has summoned all the passion of his heart and all the power of his top-rated advertising agency to "make people fall in love with Judaism and their fellow Jews," he says.

It started with 1.1 million copies of his brainchild, Olam magazine. The full-color publication is bursting with articles by every kind of Jew Suissa could find, on every topic he could think of. He distributed Olam — which means world and stands for One Light for All Mankind, or, One Label for All the Mishpacha — throughout the country as an insert in both Jewish publications and select zip codes of subscribers to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Along with the slickly designed magazine came the Web site, which is recording more than 30,000 hits per week, more advertising and billboards in the L.A. area. Next came Cafe Olam, then a television ad in Israel.

"You hit 'em and you hit 'em and you hit 'em, millions of sparks of unity, nonstop, you just blanket the country with sweetness, not debate, with honey," says Suissa.

It would be easy to dismiss Suissa and his metaphors as arrogant or delusional, if two things weren't plainly obvious: He has the resources to do this, and the motive. He is madly in love with the Jewish people, and he is sure he might have found a way to help others feel that love.

Suissa believes in ambiance. It's clear the moment you step from the elevator and see "Suissa Miller" spray-painted across a wall of corrugated metal, and walk on the giant swaths of clashing carpet samples that cover the vast office area.

The frantic banging and rolling sound coming from up the airy staircase turns out to be a Foosball table, where two of Suissa's team of 23 creative people have just finished a game.

"Growing up in Morocco with my family, ambiance and atmosphere were a really important part of our upbringing. You want people in an atmosphere that is pleasant and comfortable and joyful, and it makes everything easier," says Suissa.

"In a way the unity campaign is really about atmosphere, putting honey in the atmosphere. The music of unity is playing and it helps break our barriers, softening the edges, sweetening the edges."

And what exactly does he mean by unity? Suissa laughs at the question.

"It's a state of mind," he says. "We don't want to spell out what we think Jewish unity is, we don't want to tell them what to do. If we can enter their consciousness with the notion of Jewish unity, they will find millions of individual ways of expressing that. For some people it might mean never saying a bad word about another Jew…For another it might mean being open to the taste and melodies of another group."

Entering the subconscious is just one of the tools of modern marketing Suissa has employed in the Olam campaign.

"In advertising, you buy 20 million viewers on TV, you buy a magazine ad, you buy a million readers, so you want to find universal truths that apply to all of them, otherwise it's like paying for a dozen bagels and getting two," he says. "To me, the idea of unity is a universal truth. You rarely find a Jew who will say, 'I don't want unity.'"

Suissa himself lives a life of diversity. He and his wife and four children affiliate with six different synagogues near their Beverly Hills home, from Chabad to Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel. One of his main sources of inspiration is the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

"The idea of getting carried away with love is something I really identify with," Suissa says. "The rebbe embodied a real spirit of unconditional love."

Suissa helped Chabad publish the magazine Farbrengen, and has helped them — and other Jewish organizations — with ad campaigns.

Still, Suissa remains firmly independent. He wants his message of unity to bring more Jews into community organizations, but his own associations are loose.

"David is very anti-establishment, not in a negative way, in a positive way," says Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, whose Sephardic Temple is collaborating with Suissa on Cafe Olam. "He's an independent thinker. He's a very creative, fast-forward thinker. The moment you give him an idea it's done and he moves on to the next thing."

That's the way it went when the two founded Cafe Olam, which transformed Sephardic Temple's social hall into a coffeehouse. The first Cafe Olam in January attracted 350 Jewish singles. The second one, which benefited from some fine-tuning, drew about 500.

Suissa also has about 100 invited guests at his office for lunch once a month for Torah and couscous. On Fridays, he has five or six rabbis from different denominations come talk about the parashah, the Torah portion of the week.

"We don't hold hands and we don't do Kumbaya, we don't do therapy and we don't talk about how we can get together," Suissa says. "We live it. We have the Torah in common and we exchange dvar Torahs."

That same kind of realism is guiding his nascent college campaign — E-Jew.

He plans to have ads in campus newspapers all over the country, addressing what he perceives to be the concerns of today's students.

"Do you have doubts about God? Do you hate organized religion? Are you interested in universal issues like the Dalai Lama? Great! That's Jewish! That's eclectic, Judaism is eclectic, you are an eclectic Jew, an E-Jew," Suissa effuses. "It's flattering and empowering and validating."

Signing on to E-Jew will get students to the same Web site as Olam.org, currently being revamped, which offers everything from 10-second bits of Judaism to entire articles from Olam magazine.