No Culture Clash : Jews, Latinos Build Dialogue Around Education and Friendship

A budding movement to improve Latino-Jewish relations in Los Angeles, featuring student exchanges and business lunches, is also blossoming at the San Fernando Valley’s oldest day school for Orthodox Jewry, a branch of Judaism not noted for cross-cultural activities.

Lee Baca, the highest-ranking Latino in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, will be honored Sunday for encouraging the school, the Emek Hebrew Academy, three years ago to go through with its long-contemplated plan to build a new facility in Sherman Oaks, despite ethnic tensions in the neighborhood.

“He’s a one-man cheering squad,” said Rabbi Eliezer Eidlitz, development director of the traditional Jewish school, which had made Baca, a Catholic, an honorary member of its board of directors in 1992.

“He is inspirational and speaks from the heart,” the rabbi said. “We had been talking about a new building for eight years, but his words crystallized our determination to move ahead.”

The ceremony Sunday afternoon, expected to attract more than 500 Latino and Jewish leaders, will mark the “topping off” of a $3.3-million, three-story building under construction on Chandler Boulevard near Sepulveda Boulevard. The 41,500-square-foot school is expected to open in the autumn.

Meanwhile, 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.

On Tuesday, the high school, operated by the Stephen S. Wise Temple, a Reform synagogue, will host about 30 Latino immigrant students from Van Nuys’ Birmingham High School in another cultural discussion.

“We want to dispel some of the kids’ inevitable stereotypes,” said Jerry Freedman Habush, a synagogue spokesman.

The activities build on three decades of sporadic black-Jewish dialogue in a relationship often energized by the biblical images of release from slavery shared by synagogues and African-American churches, as well as by memories of Jewish support for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

By contrast, Latino-Jewish relations have no such shared history, other than the fact that both communities have struggled to accommodate recent influxes of immigrants from a variety of countries.

Reflecting the pragmatic side of the new ethnic dialogue, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League began the Latino-Jewish Business Roundtable three years ago to bring professionals and merchants together 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. It was Baca who organized and co-chaired the event, which raised nearly $15,000 for the ADL to use in multicultural school programs.

Baca, 52, who holds a Ph.D. in public administration from USC, is chief of field operations at the sheriff’s regional office in Dominguez Hills. He serves on Sheriff Sherman Block’s Cultural Diversity Committee and has helped teach courses for deputies on the subject.

Baca that his interest in furthering Latino-Jewish relations stems from his fond recollection of the many Jewish teachers he had in junior high school in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles, which 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,” Baca said in an interview.

The unusual relationship between Baca and Emek Hebrew Academy, which has 600 pupils in preschool through the eighth grade at three sites, began when Orthodox community leaders in North Hollywood and Sherman Oaks sought law enforcement advice after verbal and physical assaults by young Latinos on young Jews in the neighborhood.

A Los Angeles Police Department representative assured a meeting of Jewish residents that patrols would be increased in the area on the Jewish Sabbath, Baca said. He told the group he would work with the Latino community to protect Orthodox Jews, whose religious practices prohibit them from riding in vehicles on Friday evening and Saturday.

“I told them that practicing religion in this country is an inalienable right,” Baca said. “What the Orthodox community needed then, I think, was a recognition of their fears and a sense of support.”

Baca also talked then with the rabbi’s young daughter, who had been harassed by a carload of young Latinos, one of whom, she said, pointed a gun at her.

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-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.”

When Fidel Castro exiled the chief rabbi in the mid-1960s, he moved in with the Eidlitz family, which by then had relocated to Israel, later returning to Los Angeles.

Eidlitz said that Emek Hebrew Academy has no special educational program to enhance Jewish understanding of Latinos, but older students are taken to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, which explores discrimination that has targeted many ethnic groups.

“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.”

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.”