Iranian Jewish Temple, Social Complex Nearing Completion in Tarzana

In the eight years since the revolution in Iran, an estimated one out of five Iranian Jews who have left their country have settled in the San Fernando Valley. Many of them are eagerly awaiting the opening of a large gray building at the corner of Wilbur Avenue and Calvert Street in Tarzana.

The building, called the Iranian Jewish Cultural Center, promises to provide a religious and social haven for an immigrant community often struggling to adapt to a new country, an unfamiliar language and sometimes confusing customs.

“Our purpose is to educate the people who come from outside the United States,” said Ruben Dokhanian, president of the group that has built the combination temple and social center. “They don’t know how to speak, how to act. We want to teach them and to help build America--not to take advantage of the country but to make it better, as Americans did before us.”

450 in Congregation

The $2.5-million building is nearly completed. Some plumbing work and the hanging of several large chandeliers remain.

Dokhanian, 59, of Encino, said the congregation of Iranian Jews hopes to open the center next month. In the meantime, the group conducts its Saturday morning services at nearby Portola Junior High, as it has done for the past three years. Attendance usually numbers about 450, Dokhanian said.

Members of the congregation not only are impatient to worship and hold social events in the new building, he added, but also to show nearby residents that they will not be a nuisance.

Several neighbors opposed the center at a series of city government hearings in 1983. The city eventually granted a conditional use permit with a number of limitations that the congregation hopes to see lifted.

Late last month, vandals apparently used paint-filled balloons to leave two small red stains above the building’s front doors. No arrests have been made. Police said they doubted the attack was aimed at Iranian Jews. Nor did they think it was related to several recent incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in the Valley.

“The feeling among our people is not good,” Dokhanian said. “It is not a good welcoming for us.”

Both Dokhanian and Solomon Aghai, president of the Iranian Jewish Federation, estimated the number of Iranian Jews in the Valley at close to 10,000. Formed in 1981, the federation is a clearing house for religious groups and social welfare organizations that serve Iranian Jews, who, they say, number from 15,000 to 25,000 in Los Angeles County.

More Jews Leaving Iran

Last year the Israeli government estimated that 80,000 Jews lived in Iran at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution, and that 30,000 remain. The population of Iran is about 28 million.

The Washington Post reported this month that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime has been letting increasing numbers of Jews leave the country. Israel, which supplies arms to Iran, has denied that the emigration is linked to the arms sales. Whatever the reason, many of the emigrants come eventually to Southern California, and in the last year or two they have often arrived financially strapped.

“I have been very busy with the new people,” said Rabbi David Shofet, head of a congregation that meets at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills. “They’re battered after eight years” of living under Khomeini, he said. “Many of them are not in a good condition.”

Shofet, whose father was chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Tehran, said some of the first Jews to leave revolutionary Iran settled in Southern California because they or their children had been educated here. The influx continued as subsequent emigrants sought to be with family members.

“A stranger in a place looks for his brother,” Shofet said. “That is the reason they’re coming here.”

Dokhanian, an owner of three clothing stores, said about 5% of the Valley’s Iranian Jews are poverty-stricken.

“The Iranian people will take care of them,” he said, echoing the statements of others that Iranian Jews rarely turn to public agencies for help.

$1.2-Million Loan

Among the services planned for the cultural center is a first-aid station to be staffed daily by a doctor. Plans also call for a library to be added on the 17,000-square-foot building and a day-home for the elderly to be established in a nearby house, already purchased by the congregation.

Construction of the Iranian Jewish Cultural Center began in July of last year, financed by four years of fund raising and a $1.2-million bank loan. Leaders said costs of the project were kept down by many donations of labor and material, including a large quantity of tile from a kibbutz in Israel. The building has a lobby, five classrooms, a large kitchen and a cavernous main room, where services will take place.

The city, however, has prohibited several activities that the congregation wants to offer. These include a day school for children and classes for adults in U.S. citizenship laws and English. The conditional use permit allows only religious instruction, and then only between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Attendance at religious services is limited to 500 people, and special events such as weddings, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs must end at 10 on weeknights, midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. The permit stipulates that violations of the limitations can be prosecuted as misdemeanors.

“I wonder who’s going to police the restrictions,” remarked Al Sarnelle, one of the neighbors who fought the center. “Joy Picus isn’t going to sit there and make sure they do what they’re supposed to do.”

Leaders of the center credit Los Angeles City Councilwoman Picus with cutting through much of the bureaucratic red tape to obtain the necessary government permits.

Sarnelle said he has become resigned to the congregation’s presence because, he added, “Who’s going to fight religion?”

Leaders at the cultural center plan to prove that their group is a good neighbor, then ask the city to remove the restriction against non-religious instruction.

Regular religious services will be conducted in Persian and Hebrew--as they are now at Portola Junior High--by Rabbi Farajollah Netaneli of Reseda. Netaneli, who left Iran seven years ago, speaks little English. The Orthodox Saturday morning service lasts five hours.

“Some places they make it short,” explained Dokhanian. “They pray a shorter time or do the services short, but we don’t leave out anything.”

Other Sites of Worship

Not all the Valley’s Iranian Jews will attend the new center in Tarzana. Some already worship elsewhere.

“We have a good number of them,” said Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino. “I would put the number in the hundreds. They not only come, they take a very active part.”

Schulweis said the building of temples by immigrants is common in Jewish history.

“They do it to preserve their own distinct culture,” he said. “In the 1880s, for example, the German Jews and the Eastern European Jews did it because they felt comfortable with their own people. Then assimilation takes place. You no longer hear about Polish Jewish or Russian Jewish synagogues.”

Schulweis said that perhaps the most distinctive custom of Iranian Jews is the ululation of women in celebration at weddings.

“It’s a lovely sound, a very deep, throaty thing that’s like a yodel, but it’s different,” he said. “It’s very difficult to do. Also, when the bride and groom come down the aisle, the people applaud. It isn’t done by Americans. I don’t think it’s a Jewish difference as much as it’s an American difference. Americans aren’t as expressive as people from other parts of the world.”

It is exactly that sort of custom that the Iranian Jewish Cultural Center seeks to preserve.

“We put a high value on the Iranian Jewish tradition,” said the center’s secretary-treasurer, Manijeh Pournazarian, 47.

“With the cultural center we will keep our tradition with our children,” the Encino woman said. “The children will learn as we have. Our tradition will not fade away into the great America.”