Jews Across U.S. Turn Attention to Israel After Attack : Air raid: Telephone links families, carries prayers and moves some television viewers to gentle action.

In a televised instant, the muffled wails of air raid sirens broadcast from thousands of miles away trapped another of Southern California’s myriad ethnic communities in the uncertainties of war. This time, after the Kuwaitis, after the Iraqis, it was the region’s Israelis and Jews who had cause for fear.

The televised sounds of klaxons and images of landsmen scrambling to don gas masks provoked communal anxieties that have surfaced repeatedly since Israel became an independent state in 1948. Four wars and 43 years later, Jews throughout Los Angeles and elsewhere in the nation were again reciting familiar prayers for a quick end to war in voices tinged with worry and anger.

American Jewish leaders fretted about the outcome of Thursday’s attack. Rabbis sharpened sermons for Friday night services. And the telephone became almost a hallowed instrument, linking families, carrying prayers and prodding some passive television viewers to gentle action.

In Hancock Park, Marcia Abrams answered the telephone, nodded her assent and hurried to her family room. There, she lit three candles, an act urged on her as part of a burgeoning telephone chain of Orthodox Jews that in a single night married age-old devotion to phone-link technology.

As they spread the word from Jewish seminaries in New York to friends and relatives on the West Coast, each caller urged those who answered to light candles in solidarity with their religious homeland.

“They say we should light candles, recite psalms and pass on the word to three more people,” Abrams said. “I called my neighbor and another friend, but they already got their own calls.”

Religious leaders throughout the country called on congregants to pray for a speedy peace.

In Washington, Malcolm I. Hoenlein, executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said the members of his 46 groups were “outraged. . . . I’m worried about the dangers to American troops, and now I’m worried about the citizens of Israel.”

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Paul Dubin, executive director of the Southern California Board of Rabbis, lamented the military strikes as “familiar territory. . . . We live in a bad neighborhood. And when you live in a neighborhood like that you suffer, obviously.”

Israeli-born Americans were quickest to react to the first rumors of war. In Los Angeles, where the Israeli population is estimated at 75,000 to 150,000, many rushed to the first telephones they could find, quickly overloading international circuits.

At the Downtown Sales electronics warehouse on Alameda Street, co-owner Meir Zinar, 50, used an office telephone, repeatedly trying to get through to his family in Tel Aviv. The line was busy.

As he tapped the buttons again and again, other Israeli-born workers crowded around a television. There was no shortage of sets in the warehouse. Several workers ripped open a box, hauled out a brand-new factory model and plugged it in.

As he watched and dialed, Zinar was frightened for his family, but unflinching in his assessment of the retaliation he was sure would follow.

“I am the first to say that we are a little country,” he said. “But we don’t take (this) from anyone or any country. It will be a bigger war now.”

His partner, Meir Cohen, 38, interrupted Zinar’s calls to voice his own bitter warning.

“This is the end,” fumed Cohen, who counts more than 50 relatives in Tel Aviv. “It will be over now. We will have to take care of Saddam the right way. We will do the job better than the Americans. The did a good job, but they didn’t mop up.”

On the second floor of a house in Silver Lake, baby-sitter Rachel Nissim, 28, wept as she tried to divide her attention between a fidgety 10-month-old child and early news reports of the missile attack on Tel Aviv. Her sister lives in a fifth-floor apartment in the center of that city.

When she telephoned her sister, she was one of the few who threaded through the overwhelmed circuits. When she made contact, Nissim could barely make out her sister’s replies. Dina Nissim was trying to calm her sister’s fears with a gas mask clamped over her face. Adjusting the mask, she explained that her family had heard the sirens and blacked out their apartment, but did not feel the missiles’ impact.

“Thank God it didn’t land on us,” Dina Nissim said. After a few emotional minutes, Rachel Nissim hung up, still frightened, but slightly more reassured.

On Fairfax Avenue, customers and merchants gestured excitedly at one another as the day wore into dusk. Hebrew mixed with heavily accented English.

“Everybody worried, everybody scared,” said Fairfax Grocery manager Yari Sami, 50. “Everybody shaking because everybody has family and everybody feels Israel is mother.”

The news tore at two peace demonstrators with relatives in Israel. They were among an estimated 1,500 students protesting at UCLA. As one student, David Barlavi, 22, thought of the danger posed to his uncles, aunts and cousins in Israel, his yearning for peace evaporated momentarily, sadness replaced by anger.

“All I could think of,” he said, “is retaliation.

But as he continued to watch the demonstrators, his quicksilver mood changed again. “I think the war there goes to the sanctity of the Israeli state,” he said. “But war itself, because it involved the loss of human life, that to me is the dilemma.”

Another student, whose grandparents are in Tel Aviv, ran to a pay telephone when the first radio reports sounded.

“Hello, Mom, is it true they’ve bombed Tel Aviv?” she asked.

There was a pause. Then the young woman burst into sobs.

The Israelis’ anxieties were shared by many in Los Angeles’ Jewish population--estimated at 600,000 to 700,000. At many synagogues, rabbis tried to calm worried congregants and, at the same time, voice those fears to outsiders.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called the missile attack a “new equation.”

“It’s a desperate act, trying to split the coalition, he said, adding: “I have no doubt the government of Israel will assess the damage and make the only decision that counts--what’s best for her citizens.

Times staff writers Mathis Chazanov, Sam Enriquez, Shawn Hubler, Judy Pasternak, Ronald L. Soble, Cheryl Stolberg and Henry Weinstein in Los Angeles, John Goldman in New York and Alan C. Miller and Don Shannon in Washington contributed to this story