The biggest flap in my area is the shocking decision by the city of Pleasant Hill to demolish the famed domed theater, the CinéArts (aka “the Dome”). SyWest Development of San Rafael — owned by the Syufy family who built the Dome and now want to euthanize it — plans to put up a two-story sporting goods store in its place. Movie buffs are furious.
But I believe the people who really dropped the ball and could’ve saved the theater are local Sephardic Jews.
Please understand I greatly respect Sephardic Jews, who were once the grandees of the medieval courts of Spain and Portugal until thrown out in 1492, made famous as the first year lead pencils were used. I’m always thrilled to meet a Sephardic person. I instantly prove to them I know the greatest Sephardic Americans like Haym Solomon, who financed the American Revolution; Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, second Jew on the Supreme Court; Judah Benjamin, secretary of state of the Confederacy; and Paula Abdul.
In Portland, Ore., where I grew up, you knew Sephardic Jews were abundant just by the prevalence of their names: Hasson, Babani, Policar and particularly Menashe, a prolific family that was more like a small city. The Portland Sephardim started a synagogue that’s now nearly 100 years old — Ahavath Achim — whose greatest challenge remains teaching Portlanders how to spell its name. Ahavath Achim was founded by members of the Turkish and Isle of Rhodes communities who lived in south Portland — the Jewish and Italian immigrant community — until Portland’s city fathers embarked on an urban renewal project in 1958 to demolish an 84-acre area. Eventually this displaced 1,500 residents and leveled five synagogues, the JCC and kosher shopping district. Only one synagogue, Beth Israel on the other side of town, escaped the wrecking ball.
Meanwhile, Sephardic members of Ahavath Achim tried moving the original synagogue, but one of the dollies sank into the asphalt from the excessive weight of the building’s 55 storage cartons of oneg baklavas. When the new synagogue was completed, it featured the dramatic neo-Byzantine dome found atop many U.S. synagogues, including San Francisco’s Emanu-El and Sherith Israel and Portland’s Beth Israel. The dome is instantly identifiable with some of the most famous world synagogues, such as the Great Synagogue of Florence, the New Synagogue in Berlin, the Naval Academy Jewish Chapel in Annapolis, Md., and the Little White Chapel and Drive-Through in Las Vegas.
I was reminded of Ahavath Achim’s domed synagogue when I realized it’s the same type of dome found on the CinéArts Theater! The Pleasant Hill City Council, in its haste to raze the well-loved structure, did not investigate the longtime rumor that the CinéArts, with its nongeodesic dome, may have been since its 1967 founding a clandestine Sephardic synagogue.
The builder of the theater (or house of worship), the late Raymond J. Syufy, was the powerful founder of the giant national Century Theatre chain. His biography identifies his origins as “the only child of Lebanese immigrants.” Despite a suspicious scarcity of information about the Syufy family’s religion, there are irrefutable clues to Raymond’s possible Sephardic Jewish identity. He: (1) attended Boalt Law School; (2) became an attorney; (3) developed his company’s reputation as exceptionally aggressive and highly profitable; (4) was from a Lebanese family (hence, Sephardic/Mizrachi?); and, most convincingly (5) lived in San Rafael, which, according to the Yellow Pages, has 60 delicatessens.
No one knows why Raymond would build the movie synagogue yet fail to hold services. It’s speculated that when he constructed his 80 Century Theatres, he envisioned he could establish a synagogue franchise but was personally destroyed by the merciless, most formidable opposition known in business: synagogue politics.
I believe the local Sephardim with their grapevine knew about the existence of a movie shul recognized by the American Sephardi Federation as “The Cinerama Synagogue.” If so, the Sephardi community had the duty to present its case to the Pleasant Hill City Council to save the Dome: that the CinéArts Theater is, if nothing else, a symbol of the greatest, most awe-inspiring domed synagogues.
Or, possibly, the UFO mother ship in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters.”
Trudi York Gardner lives in Benicia and can be reached at [email protected] or via her blog, www.tygerpen.wordpress.com.