Building Bridges : Efforts to Improve Latino-Jewish Relations Bloom

Lee Baca, the highest-ranking Latino in the county Sheriff’s Department, is at first glance an unlikely ally of the Emek Hebrew Academy in Sherman Oaks.

But when Baca is honored Sunday by the academy as it celebrates the construction of its long-awaited new building, it will be another small victory for a budding movement to improve racial relations between Latino and Jewish residents of Los Angeles.

Latino-Jewish relations are scarcely noticed in the racial and ethnic swirl of the nation’s most demographically perplexing city. The subject pales in comparison to the sporadic dialogue between blacks and Jews, a relationship often energized by biblical themes of freedom from slavery shared by synagogues and African American churches.

No comparable dramatic image shapes Latino-Jewish relations other than the fact that both communities have struggled to accommodate recent influxes of immigrants from a variety of countries.

Three years ago, however, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League began the Latino-Jewish Business Roundtable to bring together professionals and merchants on a regular basis.

The ADL was honored for that work by a coalition of elected and appointed Latino officials at a Latino-Jewish Unity Day luncheon in October. The organizer and co-chairman of the event, which raised nearly $15,000 for the ADL to use in multicultural school programs, was a Catholic: Lee Baca.

Baca, 52, said his interest in furthering Latino-Jewish relations stems from his fond recollection of the many Jewish teachers he had in junior high school in Boyle Heights, a section of Los Angeles’ Eastside that was still 30% Jewish in the 1950s.

“The seventh, eighth and ninth grades are when one’s life starts to be crafted, and when you decide whether education will be important in your life,” said Baca, who holds a doctorate in public administration from USC and is chief of field operations at a sheriff’s regional office in Dominguez Hills.

The unusual relationship between Baca and Emek Hebrew Academy, which has 600 preschoolers through eighth-graders at three locations, began when Orthodox community leaders in North Hollywood and Sherman Oaks sought law enforcement advice after verbal and physical assaults by young Latinos.

A Los Angeles Police Department representative told a meeting of Jewish residents that patrols would be increased in the area on the Jewish Sabbath, Baca said. Baca told the group that he would work with the Latino community to protect Orthodox Jews, who are more vulnerable in public because they must travel on foot on the Sabbath, prohibited by Jewish law from riding in vehicles between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

“I told them that practicing religion in this country is an inalienable right,” said Baca, who serves on Sheriff Sherman Block’s Cultural Diversity Committee and has helped teach courses for deputies on the subject. “What the Orthodox community needed then, I think, was a recognition of their fears and a sense of support.”

Baca also talked with the daughter of Rabbi Eliezer Eidlitz, who is development director for the traditional Jewish school. She had been harassed by a carload of young Latinos, one of whom pointed a gun at her.

Eidlitz, who made Baca an honorary member of the academy board, said he was an inspirational force in the academy’s ability to build its $3.3-million facility, which will be “topped off” in a Sunday afternoon ceremony that is expected to attract more than 500 Latino and Jewish leaders. “He’s a one-man cheering squad. We had been talking about a new building for eight years, but his words crystallized our determination to move ahead.”

Just as Baca has carried with him warm memories of his Jewish teachers four decades ago, Eidlitz remembers with pleasure his exposure as a boy to Cuban culture in the pre-Fidel Castro years.

“My family used to fly from Los Angeles to Havana to visit my grandfather, who was the chief rabbi of Cuba,” Eidlitz said. “My first Jewish studies were with him in Havana.” Castro exiled the chief rabbi in the mid-1960s and he moved in with the Eidlitz family, which had relocated then to Israel.

Eidlitz said Emek Hebrew Academy has no special educational program to enhance Jewish understanding of Latino culture, ever widening in the San Fernando Valley.

“I think Latino and Jewish communities more and more find themselves working at the same purposes,” Eidlitz said. “Both are family-oriented, for one thing.”

In a separate series of cultural exchanges, about 25 Jewish students from the Stephen S. Wise Community Junior High School in the Sepulveda Pass ate lunch Friday with two dozen Latino students at Sun Valley Junior High School.

Soon afterward, they were doing the pata-pata together, a kind of African line dance the two groups had learned during an earlier get-together.

“It’s a great way to help us learn Spanish and it’s lots of fun,” said Millie Marner, a seventh-grader from Encino.

Another element bridging the gap is food, said Eidlitz, who runs a kosher information service on food products that meet Jewish dietary rules.

“There are at least 13 Mexican restaurants in Southern California that are kosher,” the rabbi said. “The current favorites among Jews are kosher burritos and kosher tacos.”