RELIGION : Minister and Rabbi Team Up to Ease Tensions, Help Riot Victims

As riot-related fires still burned, a black minister from the targeted area and a rabbi from the San Fernando Valley, independently seeking to offer help to South-Central Los Angeles residents, struck up conversations with people standing in line for food supplies in a parking lot.

Noticing the clergy garb worn by the Rev. John Bowie, Rabbi Steven Jacobs introduced himself and the two men began forging yet another religious link across racial and cultural lines in the troubled city.

They are part of a multi-faith, multi-ethnic network which made last Sunday’s “Hands Across L.A.” possible on short notice and makes spiritual leaders hopeful for healing.

“We both felt something special about our meeting,” said Bowie, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles. “Our congregations have crossed religious lines out of love and compassion for our city.”

The initial result was a stream of food staples and clothing from Jacob’s Shir Chadash-New Reform Congregation to the community food pantry run by Bowie’s church, a congregation of nearly 1,000 members.

The rabbi, accompanied by synagogue leaders, went to preach at the church on Mother’s Day.

On Friday night, Bowie, along with Calvary church leaders and the choir, took part in the Sabbath services at Woodland Hills Community Church which the 550-family Jewish congregation rents for its services.

Beyond the pulpit exchanges, the two congregations are planning programs to fight racial stereotypes and to help inner-city businesses make a recovery.

As such, the relationship is the latest “covenant” encouraged in recent years by the Black Jewish Clergy Alliance, co-chaired by Rabbi Harvey Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the Rev. Joe Hardwick of Praises of Zion Baptist Church. The alliance had formed amid charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism during assorted black-Jewish controversies in the last decade.

After the April 29 not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial and the subsequent riots, the clergy alliance folded into the Interfaith Coalition to Heal L.A.--largely under the leadership of Fields, who is also president of the Interreligious Council of Southern California.

The coalition was pleased with the turnout for its symbolic “Hands Across L.A.” demonstration of religious unity. “We think we got close to 15,000 people,” said Fields, who said his prediction of 10,000 participants holding hands along Western Avenue somehow got transmuted into 100,000 in press and television reports of the event.

Jewish leaders have recognized the need for more than just black-Jewish dialogue. The weekend after the riots, the Rev. William Epps of the predominantly black Second Baptist Church of central Los Angeles, joined the Rev. Hee Min Park of the large Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Sabbath services at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Fields also spoke that Sunday to Park’s Korean congregation located near Chinatown.

A black congregation from South-Central Los Angeles, Faithful Service Baptist Church, has had an ongoing relationship with Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood, said Rabbi James Lee Kaufman. But, closer to home, Kaufman said, “my main involvement has been with Hispanics and VOICE,” the interdenominational, community activist group in the San Fernando Valley.

Another sign of the conscious attempt to bring diverse religious and racial voices into the recovery process is a paperback book of post-riot clergy sermons and statements published this week. The words of Anglo, black, Latino and Korean clergy and faith perspectives of Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Buddhists were collected from tapes and manuscripts by the Rev. Ignacio Castuera of Hollywood United Methodist Church, the book’s editor.

“That which appeared to divide our community, our ethnic diversity, holds also the promise of richness and vitality,” Castuera wrote. Royalties from “Dreams on Fire, Embers of Hope,” published by Chalice Press, will go to the reconciliation work of the Interreligious Council of Southern California.

Included in the anthology was Rabbi Jacobs’ sermon on Mother’s Day to Calvary Baptist Church.

Jacobs told the Baptists then that the answers to the city’s problems will come from a national commitment to spending money on domestic needs, cooperative community efforts, breaking down stereotypes and “spelling out what hurts us.”

“The fact is, we don’t know you as brothers and as sisters,” the rabbi said. “I realize that just as white Americans by and large fear blacks, I’m told numbers of Americans distrust Jews. I know that hurt and you know that hurt.”

In an interview, Bowie of Calvary Baptist echoed Jacobs’ words.

“Part of the problem in racism is a matter of ignorance about each other; we see each other in stereotypes from the jokes and other negative things we hear,” said Bowie, the church’s pastor since 1987.

Calvary Baptist Church, affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., the largest black denomination, was the pastorate of the Rev. Manuel Scott Sr. for 35 years. Scott also established ties with the predominantly white American Baptist and Southern Baptist denominations.

A spiritual empathy between Jews and black Christians exists, Bowie said, because of many African-American spirituals recalling the ancient Israelites’ suffering under Egyptian slavery.

Nevertheless, Bowie said that links with a synagogue might have been too difficult for the Baptist congregation to form if it were not for the crisis produced by the riots.

“As godly people, we know it’s wrong not to get together,” he said. “By coming into my community, despite the danger that is supposed to hold, the synagogue is serving as a model.”