A Leap of Faith : Holidays: Dan Shuster may be Jewish, but he provides Christmas trees for families all over the Valley and the nation.

Dan Shuster is among the jolliest of the jolly and filled with generosity when the Christmas season rolls around, and for good reason--he owns the third-largest Christmas tree business in the nation, which expects to take in nearly $12 million this year.

It’s not just the money but the joy of the season. “It’s a great pleasure for me to go to a tree lot and see a family choose a tree that’s going to be their home’s centerpiece for two, three or four weeks,” he says.

He never has a tree of his own, however, because the Christmas tree magnate is Jewish.

And Shuster, 62, a committed Jew who grew up in a traditional Jewish family, has been president of one synagogue and is on the board of another, serves on the board of the Jewish Federation Council’s semiautonomous San Fernando Valley Alliance and is chairman of the large Valley Jewish Festival planned for May 21 at Pierce College.

Shuster says there has never been a conflict between his religion and his main livelihood for 25 years, Yule Tree Farms.

“I don’t see where one thing interferes with the other, because if I weren’t doing it, somebody else would be,” said Shuster, who lives in Woodland Hills and has an office in Oxnard.

Nor, Shuster said, has he ever compromised his faith by placing what some Jews jokingly call a “Hanukkah bush” in his home--evergreen trees that critics regard as subterfuge for sneaking a popular Christian custom into the Jewish holiday.

“Hanukkah is not ‘Jewish Christmas’ and should not be observed as a substitute,” he said.

To each his own, he says. “Everybody has to have some beliefs, and they ought to enjoy them, particularly for the sake of their families.”

At Encino’s Valley Beth Shalom, where Shuster is a board member, Rabbi Jerry Danzig, executive director of the synagogue, said Shuster is widely respected in the Jewish community. “He’s a gentle person and a delight to be with,” the rabbi said.

Shuster even displays what Christians praise as the “true Christmas spirit.”

“He does incredible work with food banks,” Danzig said.

Due to the seasonal nature of his primary business, Shuster and his partners also run a company that sells canned and frozen food to prisons. “We do this mainly to keep our crew together for Christmas,” Shuster said.

The company donates some food to charities, notably to One Voice, a Santa Monica-based organization that works with Head Start educational programs and has an annual Christmas giveaway for the needy.

“We give them Christmas wreaths to go with the food boxes,” Shuster said. “At the very end of the season, I give One Voice a couple thousand Christmas trees.”

Susan Silbert, founder-director of One Voice, said that the generous Shuster “sends us between 5,000 and 6,000 fresh, full, wonderful trees--not dead leftovers” to distribute to the needy.

“The kids scream with joy,” said Silbert, a former sociology professor at Cal State Northridge who started One Voice in 1981. “I’ve been so moved because sometimes they are more pleased with the trees than the food because they didn’t expect to have a Christmas tree.”

It was only by chance that Shuster got into the Christmas tree business. He earned a master’s degree in poultry husbandry at Penn State and had a fast-growing chicken ranch in Norco when he decided that that business was too time-consuming and became a food broker.

Meanwhile, a friend of Shuster’s moved to Oregon and started growing Christmas trees as a hobby. “The thing grew,” Shuster said, “and all of a sudden he didn’t know what to do with them.”

Asked by his friend to become a partner, Shuster first protested that he knew nothing about Christmas trees because he never had one in his home. But his friend persuaded him, saying that he needed someone who was unafraid to meet people and was based in Southern California.

“The business has grown every year since,” said Shuster, who is in charge of marketing and sales. “We ship trees all over the country and as far away as Singapore, and this year we expect to ship out 650,000 trees.”

In Southern California, his retail clients include Albertson’s and Vons grocery stores, Home Depot and places such as Cicero’s on the northwest corner of Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

The firs and pines are farmed on 4,000 acres around Canby, Ore.

“It takes six years to grow a tree and we have more than 4 million in the ground at present,” he said.

In March, however, Shuster will cut his workload in half, turning over more of his business to a son-in-law, Barry Kodish of Agoura Hills, he said.

Shuster has volunteered to direct arrangements for the Valley Jewish Festival on May 21, an outdoor cultural fair sponsored by the San Fernando Valley Jewish Alliance that he hopes will exceed in scope the Valley’s Exodus Festivals of 1989, 1991 and 1993.

“We’re hoping we’ll get 50,000 people,” he said. “I think it’s important to have good entertainment, ethnic food, booths to learn about Jewish agencies and a time when people can meet one another in one of the largest Jewish communities in the country.”