Yom Kippur Observance to End Today : Religion: Jews here and around the world are fasting, refraining from work and filling their hours with prayer during the Day of Atonement.

As they gather today to observe the holiest and most solemn day on their religious calendar, Orange County Jews will consider current events such as the lingering recession and the newly signed Middle East peace pact, along with timeless themes of self-improvement, freedom, life and death.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in which observant Jews fast, refrain from work and fill most hours with prayer, began Friday night at sundown and continues until sundown tonight. Yom Kippur, the culmination of a 10-day period of repentance, is a spiritual time in which Jews beg God to inscribe them in His “Book of Life” for the coming year.

“Yom Kippur is your appeal process,” explained Rabbi Joel Landau of Beth Jacob, Irvine’s Orthodox synagogue. “We’ve been judged on the first day of the year, Rosh Hashanah. Being that we don’t know the verdict, we’re basically assuming that we might not have been judged favorably. This is an appeal for our own lives.

“God is not interested in lip service, God is interested in behavior modification,” Landau said in an interview Friday as he finished preparing sermons he would deliver throughout the holiday. “The acceptance of their appeal is going to be predicated upon not what they say but what they do.”

While Landau and many other local rabbis discussed the historic peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization last week during Rosh Hashanah, a few chose to wait until Yom Kippur to address the topic.

Rabbi Allen Krause, who has long advocated a Palestinian state and often talks politics from his pulpit at the Reform Temple Beth El in Aliso Viejo, said the importance of the new treaty makes Yom Kippur, perhaps the most important day of the year for Jews, an ideal time to discuss it.

“I’m not planning on talking about a lot of details . . . in previous years I’ve been very concerned about the details, I’ve been fairly academic in my approach,” Krause said. “This year I don’t really feel a need to talk like that. Right now all I want to do is sort of express the emotional impact of this on me, a sense of gratitude.”

Other rabbis chose more theoretical topics. Rabbi Arthur Seltzer, for example, planned to use the story of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon service on Yom Kippur, for a discussion of the essence of freedom.

“True freedom is not just doing what we want, not just working ourselves free of external obligation,” said Seltzer, who heads the 550-family Temple Beth Emet, a Conservative synagogue in Anaheim. “True freedom is the acceptance of Torah. The yoke of the Torah is what makes people truly free because it raises us from the instincts and the drives of the animal world and allows us to exercise our minds and our souls and to choose freely.”

This Yom Kippur, many local rabbis said, marks a rejuvenation in the 70,000-member Orange County Jewish community.

“We’re really growing,” said Shelton Donnell, rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana. “There’s a whole new spirit here.”

Landau’s congregation in Irvine, which is nearly two-thirds South African immigrants, will celebrate the completion of its first synagogue building. Since 1986, Beth Jacob has grown from a handful of members to 150 families.

On the other end of the Judaic spectrum, the county’s Reconstructionist University Synagogue in Irvine has spurted from 60 to 300 member families in the past two years, and now holds Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in a ballroom at the Red Lion Inn in Costa Mesa because its 1,000 worshipers cannot fit in its year-round sanctuary.

Reconstructionism is a humanistic branch of Judaism that defines God as a force within people. At University Synagogue’s Yom Kippur services, meditation, poetry, and reflections on problems ranging from AIDS to breast cancer to homelessness will be interspersed with traditional liturgy.

“So many services are outward expressions of words and music and sermons, but Yom Kippur is a very inward kind of holiday, so we stop the outward service and have meditative silence,” Rabbi Arnold Rachlis explained.