LOS ANGELES — Orly Israel first spotted the smoke in Pacific Palisades around 10 a.m. last Tuesday.
“You could see that hill on fire,” he told J. on Friday, motioning into the distance as he stood in the ruins of his family home in the once-bucolic neighborhood in Los Angeles. “That’s when we started packing.”
Israel, 30, along with his younger brother and their parents, evacuated after pulling together photo albums, journals, passports and computers, as well as a couple days’ worth of clothes.
“I would have thrown everything I own in my car if I could have, if I’d thought, ‘Oh, this is everything you get,’” he said.
The same night, Israel came back with a friend, determined to save his family’s home. (A video of their firefighting efforts has been viewed millions of times on social media.)
With trees and fences on fire, embers flying and winds gusting, they used a garden hose to try to saturate the property. But as the flames closed in, they were forced to flee. The entire house was consumed.
“I was right here, spraying this lawn, spraying the fence,” he said just three days later. “It was surreal.”
J. visited L.A.’s Jewish communities as they observed their first Shabbat amid evacuations, flames and smoke during the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles County’s history. Strong Santa Ana winds have tested the limits of fire crews, with more brush fires and hot spots popping up day after day. At least 25 people have died, according to the county medical examiner. The fires have scorched more than 40,000 acres, bigger than all of San Francisco.
As of late Monday, the larger Pacific Palisades fire was 14 percent contained. The more destructive Eaton fire, which has killed 17 people, was 33 percent contained, according to Cal Fire.
The Los Angeles area is home to the second largest Jewish community in the U.S., with more than half a million Jews, according to a 2021 Brandeis University study. An estimated 125,000 Jews live in areas impacted by the fires. Hundreds of Jewish residents have lost their homes, and others are still waiting to find out.
Many Bay Area residents have family, friends and other close connections in Los Angeles. L.A. native Paul Lowenthal, division chief fire marshal for the Santa Rosa Fire Department, is more familiar than most with the devastation of wildfires. As a veteran of the department, he experienced the horrors of the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which consumed 36,800 acres, killed 22 people, destroyed more than 3,000 homes and wiped out URJ Camp Newman.
On Thursday, Lowenthal arrived in Pasadena with around 70 Sonoma County firefighters to provide mutual aid. He has also been speaking with reporters and community members, answering their questions and hearing their stories.
Pasadena is Lowenthal’s hometown. The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, destroyed early on in the conflagration, was the synagogue where he became a bar mitzvah and where his father once served as president.
“There’s a lot of family history there,” he told J. on Friday afternoon, standing across the street from his former middle school, which suffered “significant” fire damage. “There’s a lot of connections.”
Also in L.A. from the Bay Area were Rabbi Nico Socolovsky and seven members of Congregation Shir Hadash, his synagogue in Los Gatos.
They came for the Kol Tefilla conference held in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, where a large concentration of Jews and Jewish businesses are located. The three-day “soulful Shabbat experience” hosted by Temple Beth Am went on as planned, though more than two dozen attendees canceled.
Naomi Parker, a member of Shir Hadash, also considered canceling, concerned that her presence could “add to the chaos” and inconvenience as Angelenos were evacuating. But when she saw an email update from conference organizers encouraging attendees to come in solidarity with Los Angeles, participate in creative worship and singing, and engage in community service, she was grateful for the opportunity.
”I thought, of course, that’s our way,” Parker said. On Sunday, conference attendees prepared baskets of supplies and homemade treats for first responders, including handwritten messages of gratitude.
Pacific Palisades
On Friday morning, Orly Israel and his father arrived at what for 20 years had been their family home in the so-named Alphabet Streets, a flat residential area with blocks named in alphabetical order. They began sorting through the rubble and ash to see what, if anything, was salvageable.
“This was the doorway,” Israel told J., gesturing to a pile of debris. “I want to find a mezuzah, I really do.”
So far, the only meaningful item recovered from his childhood home was a clay vessel created by his grandmother Joan Israel that depicts the Old City of Jerusalem. “There’s a menorah,” he said, pointing to a painted scene on the pottery.
Israel, a freelance development executive, had recently moved back in with his parents as he prepared to launch a new company. His father, David M. Israel, is an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning television producer who has been behind hit shows for 30 years. He was just a few months away from retiring, his son told J. The house was going to be rented out, and his parents were planning to take time to travel. None of that looks possible now, Israel said.
As Israel was being interviewed, a family friend from the neighborhood pulled up in a car.
Cellin Gluck, a Hollywood feature filmmaker, was heading to his home nearby to find out what was left. (Gluck’s 2015 film “Persona Non Grata” told the story of Chiune Sugihara, dubbed the “Japanese Schindler,” and screened at Jewish film festivals around the country. Gluck is of Jewish and Japanese heritage.)
“Dude, do you want a hug?” Israel asked him. Gluck responded with a chuckle.
Pacific Palisades is a tight-knit neighborhood, including among the Jewish community. Over the years, Gluck and his family had enjoyed Shabbat dinners at the Israel home, and at least one Passover seder.
Over at Gluck’s property, more ashes and rubble. Not a single home was standing for several blocks.
Gluck and his wife bought their house in 1998 and raised their two children to adulthood there. Last Tuesday, Gluck’s wife and daughter evacuated, taking along their four cats and dogs. Gluck and two neighbors stayed behind to try to divert stray embers from lighting their homes on fire — until it became far too dangerous to keep trying.
In the rubble on Friday, he found three coffee mugs intact — one from his wedding set.
“This was my wife’s favorite coffee cup,” Gluck said. Another was a gift from his son. And the third belonged to his mother. He also found a sculpture he’d made as a kid.
Gluck said he wasn’t interested in mourning for the home he lost.
“I’d grieve if somebody died, but I’m not going to grieve for a house,” he said. “I’m sitting here going, ‘Goddammit, I should have grabbed that or I should have grabbed this, but I didn’t.’ It’s a lot of stuff. It’s years of stuff. But it’s stuff.”
Just a mile away is Kehillat Israel, the largest Reconstructionist congregation in the United States. The synagogue was left standing, but roughly 300 households — nearly a third of the 920-household congregation — lost their homes. Among them were Senior Rabbi Amy Bernstein, Associate Rabbi Daniel Sher and Rabbi Emeritus Steven Carr Reuben. More homes are still in danger, and Kehillat is closed due to the evacuations and risk.
“The fire is still raging on,” Sher told J. on Sunday afternoon. “We have well over 50 families that are in the Mandeville Canyon zone, which means that we are still waiting on pins and needles for whether or not more congregants are going to lose their homes.”
Pacific Palisades is a “warm and haimish” neighborhood that has always felt like the “nicest shtetl in America,” Sher said. He often saw Kehillat Israel members out in the community, running into them at his children’s school pickup, at the farmers market and at Cafe Vida, a popular restaurant now destroyed.
That the synagogue itself came out unscathed is seen as somewhat of a miracle. While buildings across the street lie in ruin, Kehillat’s landscaping is still green. The “audible relief” expressed by congregants upon hearing that the synagogue survived “is proof that what we had can be rebuilt,” Sher said. “As Jews, we’ve done that for a long time.”
Pasadena
As the Eaton fire was bearing down on Tuesday night, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris and her husband, Laurence Harris, drove to the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center (PJTC), where they met up with the building’s security guard and the synagogue president. The four were on a rescue mission to save all 11 Torah scrolls.
Ash and embers were flying in their faces, Laurence Harris recalled to J. on Friday afternoon.
The electricity was out, but the Torahs were already in the lobby. Former Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater had come earlier to remove them from the sanctuary and chapel. The group managed to get every Torah scroll, unscathed, into the Harris family’s car — including one of particular historical importance.
“There’s one, a Persian Torah, that they smuggled out of Iran during the Iranian Revolution,” Harris said.
On Friday afternoon, he stood overlooking the debris and mangled remnants of what once was a sanctuary, a chapel, a Hebrew school and a community preschool. The historic Conservative synagogue had occupied its address on North Altadena Drive for 80 years.
“Hundreds of thousands of lifecycle events have gone on here,” Harris said. “The most incredible thing is the memories.”
With sundown approaching, his focus turned to Shabbat.
“We’re still running a synagogue, even though we don’t have a building,” Harris said, pulling up information on his phone to share the location for Friday night services and a potluck dinner. “It doesn’t matter about the building. It’s the leadership and the people who make the synagogue.”
The next day, PJTC Rabbi Jill Gold Wright focused Shabbat morning services on gratitude. Some 50 members were gathered in a Catholic school’s theater — just four days after the fire destroyed their synagogue and many homes in the community.
They read from one of the Torah scrolls saved from the fire.
Noah Golden-Krazner, the Torah reader that morning, wore jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt rather than his usual button-down shirt and tallit. He and his family had evacuated with their two cats from their home in Altadena, and he hadn’t packed a Shabbat wardrobe. He barely had time to practice the week’s portion, he said, yet still chanted it all the way through.
Gold Wright paused before the prayer for healing. Prior to reading off her printed list of names, she turned toward the congregants and began naming those present whose homes were destroyed in the fire. Among them were Levine Grater, as well as the sisterhood president and the synagogue security guard.
The worshippers joined in, calling out more names. They prayed for the families in their congregation whose homes were now charred rubble and for the entire community who had lost their spiritual home.
“We pray for refuah shlema,” Gold Wright said, “for a complete and whole healing of our bodies, of our minds, of our hearts and of our souls.”
The congregants, many with tears in their eyes, began to sing the words of “Ana El Na,” a song for healing.
“The devastation is without expression. No words can reach or describe what we have witnessed, experienced and shared over the last few days,” Gold Wright said in her emotional morning sermon. “The tears, the memories, the loss and the grief, all of this envelops us and sometimes makes it hard to breathe. … [but] we were here last night, we are here today and tomorrow morning,” she said.
Several worshippers embraced throughout the service, some wiping tears from their eyes.
Helping one another
Synagogues and Jewish communities around Los Angeles have quickly stepped up to help.
In Pasadena, members of PJTC have been hosting families in their homes. One congregant, who works for the restaurant chain Sweetgreen, provided packaged vegetarian salads on Saturday afternoon.
Adat Ari El, a Conservative synagogue in Valley Village in the San Fernando Valley, will host PJTC’s services and b’nai mitzvah next Shabbat and for as long as they need a space, Senior Rabbi Brian Schuldenfrei told J.
“We’re going to give you our sanctuary, you’re going to run it like your service, and we’ll be guests in our own home,” Schuldenfrei said he told the clergy. “We want to stand in support of you.”
To Schuldenfrei, the gesture is in line with what he’s witnessed since the fires broke out.
”People have just opened their hearts with acts of love and kindness,” he said.
Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue near UCLA, opened its main sanctuary to Kehillat Israel’s congregation over Shabbat, Sher said, and Sinai Akiba Academy, a private Jewish day school in L.A., collected new toys for Kehillat children who had not been able to return home.
“Over 300 people came Friday night and prayed,” Sher said, and “80 percent of the people there lost their homes.” The next day, they hosted a bar mitzvah for a family who had evacuated.
“To throw candy four days after this devastation … nothing will stop us from celebrating the people who deserve to be celebrated and connect to a tradition that’s timeless.”
With his house destroyed, Sher and his wife are staying with family in Redondo Beach, along with their children, ages 7, 5 and 2, and their dogs, Herzl and Golda.
“All of this is a Jewish lesson,” Sher said. “We know this too shall pass. Our story is one of renewal and pain and also taking that story and being the light that the world needs. No one asks for this, but when you have the opportunity, you have the origin story for something great in this world.”
Lowenthal has seen this play out in his own Santa Rosa neighborhood, ravaged by fires more than once.
“I didn’t know nearly as many of my neighbors before the fires as I do now,” he said. “As a neighborhood, we’re a lot stronger, we’re a lot closer, we socialize together, we’re at each other’s kids’ birthday parties.”
Right now, he said, the best way to help L.A. is to support organizations already on the ground, such as the Red Cross or local synagogues.
“There’s a tendency for people to want to drop stuff off, but oftentimes that’s not what’s in the best interest of the community,” Lowenthal said. “Legitimate organizations are the ones that should be reached out to and contributed to.”
Levine Grater, the former PJTC rabbi who lost his home, is now executive director of Friends In Deed, a nonprofit that provides support and resources to vulnerable Angelenos experiencing homelessness or on the verge of homelessness. Friends In Deed had recently helped move a group of seniors into a permanent supportive housing complex, but it burned down in the fire.
“I am personally houseless, but I would never consider myself homeless,” he told J.
He and his staff, including three who also lost their homes in the fire, have been operating a round-the-clock shelter.
“I just would like to encourage people to reach out to those who are in desperate need, even if you don’t know who they are,” he said. “The help is not going to be just now, but in the months and years ahead.”