Palm Fronds in Demand After Thefts : Religion: They’re used for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Three truckloads of them were stolen right before the holiday began.

Los Angeles officials and Jewish leaders are looking for a better way to distribute the palm fronds used during the festival of Sukkot after three truckloads of them were stolen from a municipal parking lot several weeks ago, shortly before the holiday began.

The thefts and the increased demand for fronds, to roof the huts where many traditional Jews eat and sometimes sleep during the weeklong holiday, made for shortages and unpleasant scenes at distribution points in the Fairfax District and North Hollywood, witnesses said.

The fronds come from city-owned trees that would be trimmed in any event. But instead of throwing the cuttings away, city workers distribute them to synagogues and individuals during the week before the holiday, which began this year on the evening of Oct. 3.

The holiday commemorates the period when the ancient Israelites lived in small temporary huts as they wandered in the desert for 40 years after their expulsion from Egypt, as recounted in the Bible. Sukkot is the plural form of the Hebrew word sukkah, which means hut or booth.

In anticipation of the first day of distribution, Oct. 1, the previous weekend workers stockpiled several truckloads of palm fronds in a city lot on Chandler Boulevard in North Hollywood, said Raymond Gandera, the city’s street-tree superintendent.

When the lot opened Monday morning, two truckloads were gone, he said. Later in the week, another batch turned out to be missing, apparently after someone drove in through an unlocked gate early one morning and made off with the fronds.

“We notified the police,” Gandera said. Los Angeles Police Detective Jeff Dunn, who investigates thefts in the area, said he was not familiar with the case, however.

The clamor for palm fronds is “a good problem, because we have such an increase over the last 10 years of people who have become traditional or observant and are putting up sukkahs, “ said Stan Treitel, a leader of the Agudath Israel organization, a lobbying group for the Orthodox Jewish community, which observes holidays in the traditional manner.

But the unpleasant scenes at the West Wilshire Recreation Center and at the city lot on Chandler Boulevard cry for a better way to distribute the cuttings, he said.

“You go to the park now, they have a sign-up sheet, but people are yelling and screaming at each other,” Treitel said. “If somebody comes with a letter from a synagogue they get first priority, and the people standing there for hours, they’re going crazy. They start hitting each other. ‘Why did you go first?’ At the park they were cursing at me. They thought I’m a city employee. A better method will have to be worked out.”

Treitel said many synagogues now use bamboo to roof the big sukkahs they build for communal use, and that the real need is for palm fronds for individual homes.

But Gandera, who has been supervising the program for the last five years, said distribution to individuals would be even more chaotic than the current system, under which people with letters from synagogues are promised 100 fronds. Individuals are only served on the last day if any fronds are left over, he said.

There are an estimated 600,000 Jews in Los Angeles, but community officials say that only one in four are committed enough to join synagogues.

The number of sukkahs built is unknown, but in another sign of the increased demand, Gabriela Horowitz, regional director of B’nai Akiva, a Zionist youth group, said its yearly supply of 12,000 fronds is always sold out at least three weeks before the holiday.

B’nai Akiva gets its fronds from a contractor who trims palms for the city of Ontario, then distributes them to homes for a $37 donation.