5 1/2-Hour Bus Tour Rekindles Jewish Past

The closer the tour bus carrying 40 Jewish passengers got to the front of the Korean Philadelphia Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles Sunday, the faster the laughter rippled toward the back. High up on the face of the church, engraved a few feet above some Asian script, are the Ten Commandments--in Hebrew.

“Would you look at that!” a surprised female voice exclaimed.

“We leave our mark everywhere we go,” returned a male voice.

It’s through just such “marks”--old synagogues, memorabilia, photographs and private papers left by people like Jacob Frankfort, the first Jewish resident of Los Angeles, or Morris L. Goodman, the first Jewish member of the first City Council--that the Southern California Jewish Historical Society brings the past alive in a twice-monthly 5 1/2-hour bus tour through metropolitan Los Angeles and its suburbs.

“The tour rekindles the joy of who we are and where we come from,” said Pauline Hirsh, historical society president. “People really don’t have a great sense of history, very few people even think about it. We attempt to bring the past alive and sensitize people to what Jews have done in the area.”

‘Rolling History Class’

The tour, in its eighth year, is just one of many programs SCJHS offers to help acquaint people with Jewish contributions to the community, Hirsh said. But she said she gets the most feedback from the “rolling history class,” calling it a “titillating experience.”

Sometimes you can’t approach people straight on,” Hirsh said. “You have to take another route.”

Frankfort, the first to arrive, came in 1841 and other Jews began to trickle into Los Angeles during the Gold Rush, said Stephen J. Sass, a historical society vice president and tour guide. In the early 1900s, most Jews who came to California were refugees from New York and Chicago, seeking better air for their tuberculosis and escape from the sweatshops of the garment industry, he said.

Many of them ended up living in East Los Angeles. In its heyday in the 1930s, Boyle Heights was home to between 70,000 and 90,000 Jewish residents. “It was a real self-contained community, and was the Los Angeles equivalent of New York’s Lower East Side,” Sass said.

After World War II, the Southland once again experienced a big Jewish migration from the East. With the population increase came synagogues, kosher butcher shops, Jewish schools, shops, social groups and even, Sass informed the group, “a red-light district where boys went to become men.”

As the tour progressed, Sass pointed out some otherwise obscure examples of the Jewish presence: a cornerstone insignia on an outside wall of what was once a Jewish community center, now a Latino community center, and a Star of David emblazoned on the ceiling of what is now a Welsh Presbyterian Church sanctuary.

The tour stopped at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where ornate family heirlooms and photographs handed through the generations are on display.

Sunday’s tourists were a mixture of singles and couples, some of them California natives with Los Angeles roots dating back to the turn of the century, others transplanted from the East and Midwest, and all of them fund-raisers and activists in the Jewish community.

As the bus drove past Roosevelt High School, which Sass said once was called “Little Israel,” some of the troupe compared their parents’ graduation dates. Michelle Perlman of West Hollywood pointed out what was once her grandparents’ Jewish fish market. Today it is a Latin restaurant.

The first site dedicated to Jewish needs is the former home of the Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery in Chavez Ravine. The three-acre plot of land was bought in 1855 by the society for one dollar. On the hillside, the past is remembered by a standing plaque. “The story we tell is that we were here at Dodger Stadium before Sandy Koufax was,” Sass said.

Between 1903 and 1910, the cemetery became crowded and plots were moved to what is now Home of Peace in East Los Angeles. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles and buried there among some of the city’s earliest residents are members of the Benevolent Society, actress Fanny Brice and Prussian-born Emil Harris, the first Jewish Chief of Police in Los Angeles. Harris, who was appointed, served for one year in 1878.

“Jewish influence is more significant in Los Angeles and less known about than in New York,” New York native Michael Helfant said at the tour’s end.

“They were merchants, policemen, they sat on the City Council, they built buildings . . . they were a major part of the growth in this city and a major part of the history,” Helfant said. “It recharges your batteries when you hear all this, and there is plenty to know.”