COLUMN ONE : L.A. Jews Look Past the Riots : The violence has forced an influential community to reassess its role in a city of rapidly shifting demographics and increasing Balkanization.

Zev Yaroslavsky’s view of his native Los Angeles changed in three sharp jolts.

Late on the night of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, the veteran city councilman--long a high-profile symbol of liberal Jewish activism--left First African Methodist Church in Mid-City and discovered that a mob had shattered the windows of his city car, tearing the hood off and kicking in the sides.

Heading back the next day to recover items from the trunk, he found himself dodging indiscriminate gunfire at 18th Street and Western Avenue.

Then, back at the office that afternoon, he got a call.

The riots had reached the councilman’s Fairfax neighborhood, a friend said: “Samy’s Cameras is on fire, and your wife is in the middle of Beverly Boulevard directing traffic.”

“I’ll never forget that feeling of total anarchy,” Yaroslavsky said. “April 29 and 30 was a demarcation point in the history of this city. . . . The fires left an indelible mark.”

Some in Los Angeles’ large Jewish community, including Yaroslavsky, say the spread of rioting into the heavily Jewish Fairfax and Pico-Robertson neighborhoods inspired a renewed offensive against the urban woes that drove desperate people to extremes.

Others hint that the increasingly tenuous old order shattered completely with the windows at Bullock’s Wilshire and Samy’s, crystallizing anger and fear and accelerating the Jewish community’s retreat from commitment to the city.

What no one disputes is that with Balkanization now the defining cliche of city politics, Los Angeles’ Jews are in the eye of a confusing vortex of change--drawn inward, but also compelled to reach out by countervailing traditions unique to Jewish faith and culture.

It was concern about the community’s direction, and the direction of the city, that spurred the Jewish Community Relations Committee to sit down with Police Chief Willie L. Williams and two members of the Rebuild L.A. board at a town hall-style board meeting today, said committee director Steven Windmueller.

The same concern has triggered meetings and lectures--and quiet conversations and introspection--citywide.

Like many colleagues, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom temple in Encino wove the city’s woes into his sermons for the recent High Holy Days.

Jews, he said, are an urban people; their loyalty to the city is crucial to their survival and to Los Angeles: “What is now being challenged is the soul of Judaism. Is it going to be insular and parochial or live up to the call to be ‘a light unto the nations?’ ”

Even non-Jews are pondering similar questions, as the Jewish community’s coveted votes and political funding suddenly seem up for grabs.

“There is a lot of soul-searching going on within the Jewish community that I’m aware of, with leaders trying to figure out what is the role of the Jewish community within the city’s shifting demographics, said Councilman Michael Woo, a candidate in what is likely to become the most factionally complex mayoral race in Los Angeles history. “The Jewish community is really pivotal politically in this city.”

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There is really no pigeonholing Southern California’s 600,000 to 700,000 Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and “secular” Jews--individuals with roots in Europe, Russia or the Middle East, who subdivide into a panoply of subgroups and world views.

The Jewish community includes conservative essayists and socialist organizers. There are poor Jews and middle-class Jews. And there are wealthy Jews who contribute substantially to all sorts of political and philanthropic enterprises--including the United Jewish Fund, which collected $45 million in its 1992 campaign.

Still, many observers, Jewish and otherwise, concur that Jewish interests collectively drifted in the years leading up to the spring unrest, and continue to drift.

Attorney Melanie Lomax remembers her mother marching side by side with Jewish activists during the civil rights era.

Things were different then, said Lomax, a black woman whose appointment to the board of the Department of Water and Power was recently blown away by the city’s shifting political winds.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Jews and African-Americans, each identifying as oppressed outsiders, bonded to fight for social justice. It was from those bonds that Los Angeles’ most enduring modern political alliance formed, bringing together activist blacks from the inner city and progressive Jews from the Westside and San Fernando Valley. Their coalition propelled Tom Bradley into the mayor’s office in 1973 and largely defined city politics for two decades--in spite of rifts that had begun developing nationally and locally even before it coalesced.

The Six Day War of 1967 diverted the attention of many Jews, shifting their political interest from the ghettos of New York and Los Angeles to the bulwarks of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, the rise of the Black Power movement prompted some African-Americans to reject their Jewish allies as paternalistic.

Over the years, new schisms would appear over busing, President Jimmy Carter’s dismissal of U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young for secretly visiting PLO leader Yasser Arafat, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 reference to New York City as “Hymietown,” and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s visit to Los Angeles in 1987.

Amid that turmoil, however, many Jewish and black leaders forged lasting relationships. Rabbis appeared at inner-city churches. Ministers preached at synagogues. Congregations got together to work for social change. Because of those ties, many temples raised relief funds in the days after this year’s riots, and Jews flocked to the inner city to sweep up rubble and distribute food.

After Rodney G. King’s videotaped beating was broadcast, Rabbi Laura Geller, West Coast executive director of the liberal American Jewish Congress, attended meetings with African-American and Latino clergy to discuss the tape. Her horror at the beating was amplified, she says, as she listened to her African-American and Latino religious peers recite their tales of abuse at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department. The American Jewish Congress quickly called for Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to resign.

There is evidence, though, that such bonds are increasingly rare and frayed.

As Marlene Adler Marks, managing editor of the weekly Jewish Journal newspaper, pointed out at the time, the American Jewish Congress was virtually on its own in the role of political gadfly. “Jews--well-to-do, professional, living in suburbs or secure neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, fearing crime and needing police protection--are responding as whites in what is increasingly a black-white issue,” she wrote.

Lomax, then the acting president of the Police Commission, has a similar assessment. “The views of the Jewish community are indistinguishable from the larger white community in most (black) peoples’ minds,” she says.

And most whites, as Lomax sees it, ignore the impoverished parts of the city that exploded into rioting. “The Jewish community has tended to move toward political conservatism,” she says, “while the black community has remained progressive and liberal.”

In fact, pundits have reported a Jewish drift to the right every now and then since the Watts riots, which fueled an exodus to the San Fernando Valley. Jewish parents who place their children in private schools face the same challenge to their motives as other whites. Jewish politicians who get tough on crime or immigration at election time--such as Rep. Mel Levine (D-Los Angeles) in his failed Senate campaign or Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles) in a tough reelection drive--risk alienating allies in the African-American and Latino communities.

Clearly uncomfortable with the right-wing label, some Jewish leaders say the political spectrum has been transformed by issues such as busing and racial quotas.

Rep. Howard L. Berman, (D-Panorama City) sees no conflict in liberal Jewish leaders who reject the old equations that consign “law and order” issues to the right.

“A candidate in Los Angeles’ (mayoral race) who doesn’t speak to the issue of crime . . is not going to get a lot of support,” he said. “I believe the riots, the gang problem, and the growing incidence of senseless murders and burglaries and acts of violence will make the Jewish community and every other part of Los Angeles that has its head screwed on straight more sensitive to what a candidate for mayor is going to do about the inadequate size of our Police Department.”

Windmueller, of the Jewish Community Relations Committee, said that as old political alliances unravel, the Jewish community may gravitate toward new types of ad hoc interethnic coalitions based on issues such as education or economic development.

“Different constellations of groups will form around different issues,” he said. “The Jewish community probably needs to undergo this internal process of defining its basic interests and how those interests match up with other communities.”

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As Windmueller and other Jewish leaders well know, however, the city’s political factions are in flux, as Asian and Latino communities gain political clout and old allies encounter a new array of potential partners.

Some Latinos have taken what might be called a “What are we, chopped liver?” approach to the coalition question.

“The tension is there,” said Joe Sanchez, a successful retail grocer and founder of the Mexican American Grocers Assn.

Five years ago, a Latino-Jewish business round table came together to discuss socioeconomic issues of mutual interest. That group fell into disarray after disagreements over racial quotas and reverse discrimination, Sanchez said, but re-formed a year ago.

Many other Jewish-Latino alliances emerged over the years in support of causes, candidates, or organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Still, Sanchez said, Latinos long have envied the links between Jews and African-Americans in Los Angeles--ties which, while admirable, “made the Mexican-American community invisible.” Now, Sanchez said, “the Jewish community has to understand that we’re here, and we’re going to be here for a long time, and we’re a good ally to the Jewish community, (if the) Jewish community is a good ally to us.”

Like other ethnic groups, some in the Jewish community are fighting for greater representation on the board of Rebuild L.A., the post-riot reconstruction agency. But given Jews’ history of persecution, many find the notion of “tribal” or “identity” politics discomfiting.

“I think the Jewish community as a whole remains committed to the city, to the urban agenda,” said David Lehrer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But to the extent that people believe a commitment to the urban agenda is congruent with the notion of Balkanizing--of group rights, of group entitlements--we probably part company.”

Others say that with increased fractionalization a post-riot reality, the Jewish community must assume a new bridge-building role.

Windmueller said that efforts to bring the Jewish community together with other ethnic communities had accelerated long before the riots. On the Monday after the unrest, he said, the Jewish Federation Council assembled 100 rabbis who mobilized their congregants to do everything from offering legal counsel to riot-affected businesses to consoling frightened students.

Later in May, Jewish leaders and other clergy from the 21-year-old Interfaith Coalition organized “Hands Across Los Angeles--All People, One City,” which, for one hour one afternoon, linked folks across 10 miles of the city’s patchwork of religions and ethnicities.

Rabbi Harvey Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who helped plan the event, says that if the Holocaust taught Jews anything, it is that “wherever one minority in society is allowed to suffer, and allowed to be persecuted, no minority is safe.

“Most Jews have recognized right along that we are participants in the greater society,” he said. “If that society is strong, it will be good for us. If it is deteriorating, it will be bad for all of us.”

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Traditionally, it was the more liberal branches of Judaism that were politically active, while Orthodox Jews tended to focus their energies on the religious life or on Israel, said Rabbi Alan Kalinsky, West Coast director of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

In Los Angeles, he says, that is starting to change: “With the riots, there’s an understanding that everyone has to be involved.”

Though it remains the smallest branch of Judaism, Orthodoxy’s numbers are growing in the city as many Jews embrace a renewed commitment to the rituals of Judaism, represented in a movement termed baal tshuvah, or “the returning son.”

Another term some rabbis and lay leaders increasingly emphasize is tikkun olam, a Jewish precept that means “to heal, repair and transform the world.”

Kalinsky, for one, believes that the seemingly divergent courses implied by the terms enhance each other, that the introversion of spiritual commitment can bring Jews to an increased understanding of their responsibility to reach out.

At Yom Kippur services last week, Rabbi Schulweis asked his Encino congregation to consider the blowing of the ram’s horn, the shofar, not only as a “call to conscience,” but as a metaphor for their commitment to the city:

“You blow through the small end of the horn, which means you begin with your own people. But the sound has to come out to the world itself. In other words, you need a loyalty to your own people, but that loyalty to your people does not end with your people.”

Similar thinking has led the American Jewish Congress to boost its civic commitment. A new Urban Affairs Center is in the works to address the increasingly complex problems of the city.

And in an effort to meet the real or imagined Jewish retreat from city problems head-on, the Congress and 18 other Jewish groups will sponsor a daylong conference Nov. 22 titled “If Not Now, When?” The conference will offer workshops on community action, criminal justice, education, health care, housing, hunger and refugees, among other issues.

The flyer for the event reflects the concerns that Rabbi Geller and other Jews have voiced for their community’s ties to the city as a whole: “If you have ever been frustrated when friends talk about moving out, buying guns, building higher walls . . . if you have ever believed that as a Jew you have a responsibility to be involved . . . this conference is for you.”

Fields, who is president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and the Interreligious Council of Southern California, is among those who say that Jewish commitment to the city never waned.

With the riots and shifting alliances, the Jewish community’s political role as a force for social change has become more crucial, he said.

“My greatest fear is that the Balkanization that is occurring, the separation of each community from the other, is happening so quickly that we might not be able to stop it,” Fields said. But the Jewish community, he added, may be uniquely positioned to “change the heart of the city. . . . We’ve got to make people realize we’re not going to have a city unless we pull together.”