Fewer Jews in L.A. Belong to Synagogues

Only about 25% of the half-million Jews in the Los Angeles area are members of synagogues--the lowest percentage of Jewish congregational affiliation in an American urban area--despite wide-ranging opportunities for worship.

Jewish religious trends seen nationwide are especially evident in Los Angeles, said Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen, president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

“More and more Jews are almost voluntarily giving up their religion . . . even though there is a tremendous multiplicity and variation,” said Cohen, who is the rabbi of Congregation Shaarei Tefila.

Cohen said Orthodox religious groups have proliferated within a two-square-mile area of Fairfax Avenue and Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He said they now include a community synagogue, a group linked to the activist Chabad Lubavitch movement, Hungarian-Czech and Polish groups and “maybe 10 little fundamentalist groups, each one manifesting a different strain of Hasidic background.”

However, the small, storefront Orthodox groups and various specialized or experimental synagogues that have appeared in recent years usually do not have large memberships, said Conservative Rabbi Paul Dubin, full-time administrator for the Board of Rabbis.

And although established Reform and Conservative synagogues continue to attract new members, those gains are offset by deaths and dropouts. “Some families drop their membership after a while, maybe after their son has had his bar mitzvah,” Dubin said. In some cases, he said, specialized congregations may be picking up dropouts from more conventional synagogues.

Within the Reform branch in Los Angeles, the weekly Jewish Journal noted recently that there exists a “temple for gays and lesbians; for the deaf; a halfway house for former Jewish prisoners, and . . . at least two synagogues for the performing arts. There seems to be a Reform synagogue for everyone.”

Reform Rabbi Harvey Fields sees in the last several years “the return to Jewish spirituality.” At his Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which once downplayed many aspects of Jewish tradition, Fields cited a growing Torah study group Saturday morning, a reborn second Friday night service, revitalized Shabbat dinners and--at a temple that never had a cantor under the long tenure of Rabbi Edgar Magnin--a “cantorial soloist” complementing the choir.

Independent groups renting churches for meeting places include Rabbi Ted Falcon’s 12-year-old Makom Ohr Shalom, a Synagogue for Jewish Meditation, now gathering twice monthly in Tarzana, and a new synagogue in Santa Monica for Jewish singles. Called Beth Shirah, the singles synagogue was created this year by Cantor Esther Garber Schwartz.

‘Being Jewish’

For many Los Angeles Jews, however, religious self-identity and observance are not central to “being Jewish,” according to sociologist Neil Sandberg in a 1986 book, “Jewish Life in Los Angeles.” Sandberg wrote that whereas a generation ago most Jews in Los Angeles would say that being Jewish meant being a member of a religious group, he found that three of every four now say it means being a member of an ethnic and cultural group.

But that has not translated into great success for the Society for Humanistic Judaism, founded in 1963 by a Reform rabbi in Michigan, as a non-theistic, unabashedly secular movement. Its more than two dozen affiliated groups include only single chapters in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.

West Coast urban areas generally have lower rates than the rest of the nation in church membership and attendance, so the lack of “joiners” is not a uniquely Jewish problem.

But rabbis here still worry openly about the well-documented attrition through the marriages of Jewish offspring to non-Jewish partners.

“The intermarriage rate is beyond our control and no one knows how to contain it,” Cohen said.

Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark of La Mirada, executive vice president of the Pacific Assn. of Reform Rabbis, says that his colleagues are constantly reminded of the trend by requests from longtime members who ask their rabbis to conduct a Jewish wedding for a child who fell in love with a non-Jewish partner. Goldmark said that he resists the pressure at Temple Beth Or in La Mirada but that many other Reform rabbis do not.