Growth of Orthodox Jewry Alters Face of Community

It was not the prospect of kosher pizza for dinner that made Dr. David Sherman and his family embrace strict observance of Judaism’s 613 commandments, but it didn’t hurt.

Sherman said his family had always been “spiritually inclined.”

“It was not a matter of not having faith. It was just a matter of not being a practicing Jew,” he said.

But their faith underwent a drastic change after his wife, Andrea, became interested in the life style of their Orthodox Jewish neighbors, who follow hundreds of rules and traditions laid down by the Bible and rabbinical commentators.

The Shermans are now Orthodox themselves, part of a community that has nearly doubled in the Los Angeles area in the last decade and that thrives amid a network of shops, synagogues, ritual baths, kosher butchers, kosher restaurants and other services unmatched west of the Hudson River.

“My previous notions were that these are people who dressed in black and had 25 children, that they were rigid and they never bathed, all these preconceptions,” Andrea Sherman said.

But she changed her mind after befriending an up-to-date couple in their Hancock Park neighborhood.

Slowly, she found herself accepting the Orthodox way of life, opting for a kosher kitchen and suggesting that the family dedicate Friday nights and Saturdays to rest, prayer and religious study.

“By that time, we had made the decision to send the children to a Jewish day school, which was virtually within walking distance,” David Sherman said. “Shopping was there, adult classes were there. All the resources were there, which made it very supportive for us.”

He added with a laugh that “any Orthodox community gets measured by how many kosher pizza shops there are.”

“As soon as we got past one on our side of town, we knew we were really into a return to Orthodoxy,” he said.

Orthodoxy is still the smallest of Judaism’s three major branches, behind the Conservative and the Reform denominations.

But its growth in Los Angeles has altered the look of some business streets, raised the cost of housing within walking distance of synagogues and changed the face of Jewish life here.

It has also had a political impact, with politicians as disparate as Assemblymen Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and William J. Filante (R-Greenbrae) joining to support legislation pushed by Orthodox groups, principally Agudath Israel, which represents the most strictly observant of Orthodox Jews.

The legislation provided for inspectors to check on kosher butcher shops, banned hiring discrimination against people whose religion forbids them from working on Saturdays and limited the powers of coroners to order autopsies. Many strictly observant Jews find autopsies abhorrent because they believe corpses should remain whole to be ready for resurrection when the Messiah comes.

The growth of Orthodoxy has also had an impact on the rest of the Jewish community.

Kosher Food

There has been a switch to serving kosher food at events sponsored by such organizations as the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and the Israeli Consulate, and Orthodox rabbis and lay people have taken a larger role in the deliberations of the federation itself, especially when it comes to mobilizing support for their legislative agenda.

Orthodox leaders have also become more visible in the city at large, with Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Rabbi Baruch Shlomo Cunin of the Chabad Hasidim taking the place of the late Reform rabbi, Edgar Magnin, as the most visible Jewish leaders in Los Angeles.

Like the Shermans, many Orthodox Jews are ba’alei tshuva, a Hebrew term meaning “masters of return” or “masters of repentance.” It refers to people who come to Orthodox Judaism as adults.

But ba’alei tshuva are not the only ones involved in the growth of Orthodox Los Angeles. Many Jews who were born into strictly observant homes have returned from studies on the East Coast to build their lives in Southern California. Others never left, while thousands more have been attracted by good weather and economic opportunities.

“When I was growing up, basically I knew everybody Orthodox in the city,” said developer Joseph Kornwasser, 41, recalling the Los Angeles of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Now if you know 10% of the Orthodox in L.A., it’s a lot.”

No one knows exactly how many Orthodox Jews there are in the area, but Stanley Treitel, a director of Agudath Israel, estimated that there may be as many as 15,000 families in Los Angeles County.

Typical Family

With at least two children in a typical family, he suggested that the total Orthodox population may be as high as 60,000, which is about 10% of the estimated Jewish population of 600,000.

Steven Huberman, executive director for community services at the Jewish Federation Council, said that synagogue membership lists indicate that 8% may be a more accurate estimate.

But in any case, Huberman said, the Orthodox community has clearly grown since the federation’s last survey in 1979. That survey put the Orthodox population at 5% of the Jewish community, which then numbered about 500,000.

“They are more self-proud and assertive than they were 10 years ago, and their institutions have become quite strong,” he said.

Orthodox men, many of them bearded and all of them wearing hats or the traditional skullcap, and their wives, in modest dresses and wigs or kerchiefs and trailing large numbers of children, are a frequent sight in the older Jewish neighborhoods of the Fairfax District and North Hollywood and in newer areas in the San Fernando Valley and the South Bay.

While some of the men wear black robes known as kapotes and circular fur hats called shtreimlakh , a costume brought over from Eastern Europe, most Orthodox Jews do not wear distinctive clothes.

Stand Out

But they stand out on a Saturday, when large families fill the sidewalks for their weekly walk to the synagogue.

They go on foot because driving would violate the biblical ban on Sabbath work, an ancient law that has had an effect on the cost of housing within walking distance of certain Orthodox synagogues.

“On those streets, when a nice house comes on the market, there’s a lot of bidding within the Jewish community, and it does tend to drive the price higher than it would normally sell for,” said Carl Maggio, manager of the Coldwell Banker branch in Hancock Park.

In some cases, as many as three Orthodox families have bid against each other for the same house, Maggio said.

While Jews have maintained their ancient life style in places as far-flung and hostile as Yemen and the Soviet Union, the growth of Orthodox Los Angeles has made it easier to bear the dictates of biblical law and rabbinical tradition that adherents call the “yoke of the Torah.”

“You can live almost anywhere. It’s just a question of attitude and conveniences, and the conveniences are here now,” said Joseph Rhein, a real estate broker who came to Los Angeles from New York in 1979.

“Originally, I was transferred out here, but I’ve elected to stay,” he said. “It’s less of a hardship than it was nine years ago.”

Like many Orthodox Jews, Rhein said that the opportunity to give his children a good religious and general education in Jewish day schools was the No. 1 reason for his decision to stay in Los Angeles.

According to Emil Jacobi, executive director of the federation’s Bureau of Jewish Education, there are now more than 3,000 pupils in the city’s 11 Orthodox day schools and high schools, about three times more than in the 1950s.

“They have grown annually by 7% in the last three or four years,” Jacobi said. “And they would grow more if we had more space.”

Los Angeles lacks a college-level seminary, but a post-graduate kollel academy has been in operation in the Fairfax District for 12 years.

Rabbi Chaim Fasman said the major emphasis of the kollel is on intensive study of the Talmud, a compendium of Jewish law and practice.

The 11 full-time fellows study “until you are really at the point where you feel ready to step forward as a rabbi, educator or leader,” he said.

They devote mornings to reading the Talmud aloud and debating the fine points in a singsong melody. They also conduct dozens of evening classes at synagogues and private homes and hold brown-bag study sessions at law firms, accounting offices and hospitals.

Candy Factory

There were no more than a handful of kosher restaurants and butcher shops in the Los Angeles of the 1950s and ‘60s. Now there are about 35, including a candy factory, several take-out counters and falafel stands, and a variety of sit-down restaurants, including one upscale establishment with pink tablecloths that features kosher northern Italian cuisine.

Chaim Lazar Weiss, owner of the Kosher Nostra pizza restaurant and a Peking Tam restaurant ( tam means taste in Hebrew) on Fairfax Avenue, said he will soon clone both cafes in the San Fernando Valley. He also plans to open a kosher Chinese deli and a Mexican restaurant.

“There’s nothing that an Orthodox Jew needs that isn’t here and readily available. It’s just that it often costs more than it would in New York,” said Paul Glasser, executive director of Beth Jacob Synagogue in Beverly Hills, which has grown from 550 to 850 families in the last six years.

But schools, kosher food and synagogues are not the only requirements for a flourishing Orthodox community.

Perhaps the least understood demands of Orthodox Judaism are the laws of family purity, under which husband and wife do not touch each other for at least two weeks out of every month.

Only after the wife immerses herself in a ritual bath, known in Hebrew as the mikvah, can conjugal relations resume.

Believers swear by the procedure, saying that two weeks of longing make the night of the monthly reunion as joyous as a wedding night.

Timed to maximize passion during the most fertile weeks in the monthly cycle, the mikva is yet another reason for the increase in Orthodox numbers. Mikva use is also on the rise.

“When we opened seven years ago, 80 women came in here every month. Now we have almost 400 a month,” said Leah Grossman, one of the attendants at Mikvat Esther in the Pico-Robertson District.

The Magan Avraham synagogue on La Brea Avenue recently refurbished its own mikva, adding Jacuzzi baths, a sign of the times that the Orthodox Jews of an earlier generation would have found unimaginable.

“I remember when I was younger, my father was talking to another Orthodox rabbi who said the job of Orthodox rabbis in those days was to hold the reins while the cart was going downhill,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Summers of Congregation Anshei Emes on Robertson Boulevard.

Summers, who grew up in Los Angeles, left to study in Israel and New York for 12 years, returning to take over his father’s old synagogue.

He said most of his congregation is made up of ba’alei tshuva, “but now, even the people who were born into it are also being swept up. They want to study more, to dig deeper into it.

“If you believe in God like we do, it’s the fulfillment of a prophecy,” he said. “The prophet Amos said people will not hunger for bread or thirst for water, but to hear the word of God. I don’t know how else to explain it.”