Cultural Center to Tell Story of Jews in America : ‘Project Americana’ to Search Nationwide for Commonplace Objects to Exemplify Everyday Life

A menorah with a tiny brass Statue of Liberty on every branch. A prayer for the United States government written in Yiddish, Hebrew and English. A Confederate Army jacket with a label from a Jewish tailor shop. A candy-filled Lucite piano--the table favor from a Southern California bar mitzvah.

Each, in its way, tells a little of the story of Jewish life in America.

Members of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion have acquired these and other objects as part of a Los Angeles-based search to fill a cultural center that will be built on a site in Sepulveda Pass by the end of 1990.

Titled “Project Americana,” the search is set to go national this summer, with slide shows and publicity events planned for synagogues and community groups in several major cities.

Project coordinator Lynne Gilberg said the new center will feature a museum of Jewish life modeled after the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which recreates typical rooms from various periods and places.

“We’ve already collected enough for a bubbe’s (grandmother’s) kitchen. And we’re hoping to fill a turn-of-the-century tailor shop and other exhibits,” Gilberg said.

Materials gathered in the search will be supplemented by a collection of Judaica currently housed at the Skirball Museum on the college’s downtown campus, Gilberg said. When the cultural center opens, an enlarged Skirball Museum--incorporating the American items--will move to the new location.

The downtown museum will then be converted into classroom space for the college, which ordains Reform rabbis and confers graduate degrees in a variety of Jewish subjects. The college has three other campuses worldwide.

Skirball Museum director Nancy Berman said Project Americana was begun a year and a half ago, when it was determined that the existing museum did not have enough material for an exhibit on the meaning of America to the Jewish people.

Berman said the new museum will showcase American life styles of most immigrant Jewish ethnic groups, even those that arrived as late as last year from countries such as South Africa, the Soviet Union and Iran.

“We are focusing on the material culture of ordinary people and everyday life,” she said.

In addition to the museum, the Cultural Center for American Jewish Life will contain a conference and teaching facility and an auditorium in its $40-million, 150,000-square-foot complex.

Uri Herscher, Hebrew Union College executive vice president, who has overseen the cultural center plan since its inception five years ago, said the complex will be built on a 15-acre site in a ravine between Rimerton Road and Mulholland Drive.

The center’s architect is Moshe Safdie, who designed the starkly modern Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem. Herscher said ground-breaking ceremonies are scheduled for some time this winter.

“My premise in creating this project was that we have a very rich heritage that needs to be transmitted to the total community--the people in the street beyond the Jewish community,” he said.

“In the last 50 years, Jews have had emphasized in their lives two vivid events: the Holocaust, and the birth of the state of Israel. The glorious story of American Jewish life has essentially been left untold. I think it’s time to emphasize a story which has been essentially positive and joyful.”

Herscher said the story can even be told by an object as commonplace as a can of scouring powder. The museum recently acquired one from the 1880s that bears a Star of David and instructions in English and Yiddish.

“You have to feel fairly secure to use Jewish images on something sold widespread in grocery stores,” Herscher said. “In Eastern Europe at the same time, you could not have done this. It was the period of the pogroms, and Jews were not making a habit of wearing their Judaism on their sleeves.”

Herscher distinguished the new cultural center from the Jewish Museum in New York which, he said, does not focus upon American Jewish life. That museum and the Skirball comprise the two major collections of Judaica in this country, he said.

Large Jewish Community

Los Angeles County has the second largest Jewish community in the United States, after New York City. According to Hebrew Union College estimates, about 500,000 Jews live here.

“L.A. is the Ellis Island of the 1980s,” Herscher said. “There are very few restrictions or boundaries here for people who wish to attempt new designs for Jewish life.”

But he warned that the cultural center will fail, in his view, if it is seen as primarily a Los Angeles project.

“We want to tell the story of Dubuque, Iowa, as well as that of Hollywood,” Herscher said.

Funds for the center were contributed by both Jewish and non-Jewish philanthropists. Seventy-five percent of the $30 million collected so far came from Los Angeles sources, Herscher said.

“We’ve gotten money from big foundations that haven’t traditionally supported the Jewish community--Disney, Getty, Ahmanson, to name a few,” he said.

According to Herscher, many non-Jewish contributors voiced their appreciation of the Jews as an early immigrant group in a nation of immigrants.

For their part, the college official said, many Jews supported the project because they felt somewhat ignorant of their own history in this country, and wanted a place to learn more about it.

“This center will take into consideration audiences who may not bring with them formal Jewish learning,” Herscher said.

He said the most difficult aspect of the search for items has been convincing people they actually have museum-quality objects in their attics and basements.

Marty Ricks, a financial controller from Thousand Oaks, heard about the new museum when he attended a convention of Reform Jews about two years ago.

Ricks agreed to donate a 1920s ceramic butter crock--one of several given to the best charge customers at his aunt’s store in Missouri Valley, Iowa, where his was once the only Jewish family.

Florence Robins of Sherman Oaks contributed her mother’s wedding gown.

“Why keep it in a cedar chest, where it will only disintegrate, when I can give it to the Jewish community?” she said.

Project Americana’s Gilberg told of rummaging with a flashlight in a crawl space beneath a Boyle Heights church, Iglesia Casa del Dios. Sixty years ago, the church was a synagogue called Congregation B’nai Jacob.

With the permission of church leaders last January, Gilberg and her staff carted off Yiddish signs and a stained-glass window inlaid with Jewish symbols.

“If someone has an item we can use, I put it in my car trunk and schlep it back here,” she said.

Gilberg is also compiling a list of people willing to lend objects on a temporary basis.

Still needed are a tailor’s work table and signs from Jewish-owned stores. Gilberg said she hopes her traveling slide show on Project Americana will get out the word.