“We Persist, and We Rebuild”: How One L.A. Synagogue Is Finding Strength in Community

On Tuesday evening, January 7th, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris and her husband, Lawrence, rushed over to the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center as wildfires broke out in Eaton Canyon. The front entrance to the synagogue, which has existed as a cornerstone of the Pasadena community since 1941, was closed off by firefighters and local police, but they snuck in through the back entrance to hastily save what they could, including 13 Torah scrolls, as well as prayer shawl and tallitot. “By the time we got into the car, embers were flying into the parking lot,” the Cantor recounted. “We couldn’t have stayed any longer.” That night, the temple’s three buildings were destroyed, as well as the homes of at least 20 congregants. But as the synagogue’s Director of Education, Rabbi Jill Gold Wright, told me, the loss of their headquarters has brought certain tenets of the Jewish faith into stark relief. “When you think about what Talmud teaches us, it’s not the value of the thing,” she explained. “It’s what the heart brings to it that is ultimately the most important.” Earlier this week, as Wright and Harris made arrangements for this weekend’s Shabbat services at Adat Ari El in nearby Valley Village, they joined us to talk about charting a path forward for their congregation and finding comfort in faith and community.

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JAKE NEVINS: Thank you both for taking the time to talk to me today.

RABBI JILL GOLD WRIGHT: Thank you for your flexibility. It’s been really intense.

JAKE NEVINS: I can only imagine. To start, can you two introduce yourselves and explain what your roles are at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center?

CANTOR RUTH BERMAN HARRIS: I’ll go first. I am Ruth. I am the cantor of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, and I’ve been here with this amazing community for almost 14 years.

WRIGHT: And I’m Rabbi  Jill Gold Wright. I’m the director of education, the rabbi educator at Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.

JAKE NEVINS: Can you take us back to—what was it?—two Tuesdays ago, when the fires first broke out. What was your experience of that day?

HARRIS: Well, I think it was about 7:00 PM when I got a phone call from a congregant of ours. He used to be the former rabbi of our community. He lived a few blocks away from the synagogue. He was very concerned about the flames getting stronger by the Eaton Canyon and he was worried that it would reach our synagogue. He said, “Ruth, I’m concerned about our shul.” I said to him, “Are you really thinking that it’s moving in our direction?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Okay, I’m on my way.” And he said, “I will meet you there, and I will help with the Torahs as much as I can.” So I got in the car with Lawrence, my husband. It was very, very hard to get to the site because police officers had cut off all the access. I was able to sneak in through the back alley. By the time I got there, there was a lot of smoke and a lot of chaos. Josh had already left, but one of our custodial facilities was there, RJ, and all the Torah scrolls were already in the lobby ready to be taken and put into the car. So Lawrence and I started doing that. I took my talitot, my prayer shawls, and the tefillin. And I went to her office, and I took her talitot and her tefillin. And by the time we got into the car, embers were flying into the parking lot. We couldn’t have stayed any longer.

WRIGHT: There were the beginnings of warnings of a major wind event on Monday, late in the evening. We said, “Okay, we’ll see what happens.” Tuesday is obviously a work day, and it’s also a religious school day. So normally, from 4:30 to 6:30, we hold class for all of our kids in our synagogue. But by early in the morning on Tuesday, the wind was very, very strong. There were already trees down. People were already experiencing power outages. So we closed the doors of our synagogue at 10:00 in the morning. Ruth and I, separately, stopped by to pick up our computers for a work-from-home day. And then I was starting to get messages from parents, like, “The wind is too strong. We’re not going to be coming up to religious school. We don’t have any power. We’re being evacuated. We’re not sure how long we’ll be.” So I ended up holding religious school on Zoom, and only about 50% of the students who were normally there were able to join the Zoom because some were already evacuated. Some had no power. I actually had two faculty members, in the one hour that we were having Zoom from 4:30 to 5:30, who lost power. So there were all of these kinds of events leading up to our synagogue catching fire. The explosion at Eaton Canyon was instantaneous, but it was not from nowhere. Everybody was already on alert, and the facility was already evacuated.

JAKE NEVINS: Obviously, you’re both leaders in your communities, but this sort of situation requires a different skillset than what you’re probably used to. How did you rise to the occasion?

WRIGHT: After the religious school session was over, and after I knew that Ruth and Lawrence and the Sifrei Torah were out of the building, I was at home watching TV like everybody else. Immediately south of our shul was a residential nursing home facility, and I was watching live on the news how they were evacuating that facility, people in wheelchairs and people in hospital beds being evacuated. And they were in their parking lot, which is directly adjacent to our main building. I kept saying to my husband and to myself, they wouldn’t be putting all of those people in the parking lot if our shul were on fire. And I kept holding onto that like, “Our shul is not on fire.” Friends were texting me constantly, and I was cutting away to the different news stations, of course, trying to just get a handle on what was going on. Fran texted me, “Jill, your synagogue is engulfed in flames,” but I hadn’t seen that. I was on the wrong station. Then I saw it. I personally watched for hours and hours, and finally I went to bed. And when I woke up in the morning, my husband was already awake on his phone, and the first thing I said to him was, “Is it gone?” And he said, “It’s gone.” After some hysterical crying the night before and that morning, my thinking was, “What do I need to do?” The next morning, we all met at a congregant’s house, and then we were writing statements and answering phone calls and figuring out who in our congregation is homeless. We have not missed a beat on that since Wednesday morning starting at about 7:30 AM.

HARRIS: I come from Argentina, and I grew up in a society with a lot of antisemitism, and where diversity and Judaism was not quite welcomed.  I grew up used to not only being the minority, but in fear that anything could happen at any time. So for me, when Josh called and said, “This is what’s happening,” there was no time, no need to feel. There was only time for action. The evacuations started to happen in Sierra Madre, where I live, so I took the same car that I had just driven into the garage two hours before and I went to this congregant’s home and I stayed the night. The car smelled. We took all the covers off the Sifrei Torah and put them away and wrapped our Torahs in clean towels and just put them inside. I didn’t sleep much that night. I learned two things that night. One of them is a refresher on the impermanence of our lives. I had felt that in Argentina before, but not to this extreme. And the second thing I learned is that, once again, I am called to a task, and I need to put my feelings and my needs aside. My grandparents’ generation used to joke that man plans and god laughs. Man, I had no idea. I think it was very much of an eye-opener of what it means to be leading a community and how much of myself I have to put aside.

JAKE NEVINS: What tenets of the Jewish faith have you found yourselves leaning on these last few weeks?

WRIGHT: I have a couple of answers to that, some from Torah and some from Talmud. I don’t know if you saw this in any other news reporting, but 48 hours before this fire, we had placed a cornerstone in our little garden area that came from the initial location of where this Jewish congregation began in Sierra Madre. It was marked the year 1931, and our building was built about a decade later, in the early 1940s. That cornerstone had been lost to us. It became a church property. And then it had gone from family to family, and people had it in their backyards, they had it in their garages. It was an important piece of local history, but also an important piece of history to a congregation. Ruth, who lives in Sierra Madre, met some of these neighbors, and through a series of conversations, that cornerstone came home. We did a whole ceremony that morning, and we invoked the whole story—basically in most of the book of Shemot—of building the Mishkan, and of building a sanctuary where god would be within and among the people, but also that was intended to travel, to carry the law on their backs to the next place and then build in the Mishkan again. And we talked about how, just like Ruth said a few minutes ago, the impermanence and the temporary nature of Jewish community is not new. I mean, we’ve seen it through exile. We’ve seen it through diaspora. We’ve seen it through waves of immigration. We’ve seen it over and over again. We’ve seen it through the Shoah. There’s this whole sense that as long as we have our tradition, our Torah, with us, that we’re a community and that we’re together.

JAKE NEVINS: Right.

WRIGHT: And from the Talmud, the rabbis have a whole discussion around losing and finding objects. If you find something that doesn’t seem to have that much inherent value, that thing is still something to be returned because you don’t know what that thing means to the one who has lost it. So you could have your own valuation of it, but that’s not the valuation that the loser of the object might also have. So there’s the idea of always making sure to return and to give back and to replenish, because what was lost by somebody else can only be valued by that person, not by the one who has found it. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot in that, ultimately, with the loss of our physical synagogue, which had enormous literal value to it, what is even greater is what we have been able to keep, which is the value of the community. Our ark is gone, and our classrooms and our school and the children’s library and all of the things are gone, but the Sifrei Torah and the families and the children who studied in those classes are here. And there are always other walls. When you think about what Talmud teaches us, it’s not the value of the thing—it’s what the heart brings to it that is ultimately the most important.

HARRIS: For me, I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of compassion and loving kindness and gentleness and how throughout everything that we do as Jews, that is a very important thing to keep in mind. Because I need that sense of compassion for myself, and I need it so I can give it to others, so it’s about finding a balance between being loving and caring for my congregants and also loving and caring for myself. It’s been reminded to us many times: “Are you guys taking care of yourself?” I’m not really sure what that means right now, but I am working on it.

JAKE NEVINS: And I’m sure hearing from your congregants is part of that. That’s affirming and regenerative in its own way, otherwise you wouldn’t have dedicated your lives to them.

WRIGHT: Yeah, for sure.

JAKE NEVINS: So, what do the next few weeks and months look like?

HARRIS: I keep telling everyone who writes and everyone who I talk to that, yes, we lost our building, but we didn’t lose our congregation and we didn’t lose our community. Our synagogue is very much alive. We took that synagogue through Valley Village last weekend when we had Shabbat at Adat Ari El. They hosted us and took care of us and cared for us in a beautiful way. And we are about to finalize where we’re going to be this Shabbat and for at least next month or so. We are offering everything that we’ve offered before, just in different locations. We have a funeral tomorrow. We have services on Shabbat. We have religious school, we have Sunday school. So we’re functioning. Is it completely settled? No. Is it comfortable? Not yet. But there are walls, and there’s heat, and there’s coffee, and there’s a sanctuary, and there’s music, right? And we’re here to lead.

JAKE NEVINS: What more do you need?

HARRIS: I don’t get attached to buildings. I get attached to what I felt in the building, to the memories, to the feelings. Buildings are buildings. I lived in Buenos Aires, and then I lived in Jerusalem, and I lived in Milwaukee, and I lived in Phoenix. So, for me, the core of who I am comes with me everywhere I go. This is a Jewish thing, which I didn’t realize until now. I’ve been doing that all my life, I guess. So we are providing all the resources that I think we’ve provided before, just in different locations.

WRIGHT: And in terms of the school, it’s the same thing. We had our shul burned down on a Wednesday, and we had services on Friday night, and Saturday in person.

HARRIS: And on Zoom.

WRIGHT: And then on Sunday, we had Sunday school. It was a little different version of religious school than what we normally had, but we had our kids together and our families together. We didn’t study Hebrew, but we laughed and cried and wrapped tefillin. Our kids made cards for each other and for first responders. And in my living room right now, I have a replenished stack of Hebrew textbooks for every class from second through seventh graders. I have new stacks of workbooks. Everybody is going to have a card that was made specifically for them, and they’re going to have a new tote bag. And on Sunday morning, the start of a new week, we’ll be able to say Shavua Tov” [“good week” in Hebrew] to all 150 students, with a new bag of new books and new supplies. That’s what we do. We learn, we study, we persist, and we rebuild, and we continue on our path.

HARRIS: And I want to add that, in my attempt to strive for balance and for acknowledgement, this is what we do because of two things. The first one is that we are strong. We have a great leadership team, and we are going to be here for our congregants no matter what. But I would say that, sometimes, we’re not as strong. But when those moments come, people have reached out, globally, with books, with talitot, with questions so they can better help us. I’ve experienced a tremendous amount of support from our Jewish extended family across the world, and from our non-Jewish extended family. And that is being the best version of a human being that we can be—when we can collaborate and help and hold and love each other.