City’s Tolerance Is Tested at Park in West Hollywood : Urban life: Gays and elderly Jews have long coexisted. But harmony is strained by arrival of Russian emigres.

A scruffy, five-acre park has become the meeting ground for the three groups that dominate West Hollywood: Gay men, elderly Jewish women and recent emigres from the Soviet Union.

Each night, as day fades to dusk, the three groups intersect in Plummer Park, sharing the cramped space amiably if not intimately, studying each other’s habits and testing the boundaries of the fabled tolerance that put this young city on the map.

The old Jewish women have been here the longest, sitting on these benches for decades kvelling about their children. They long ago made their peace with the homosexuals, and watch calmly now as a group of sleek young men in tank tops, hair still damp from the gym, arrive at the park for one of the nightly activities that the elderly say they can barely imagine, like single-sex country and Western dancing or meetings of ACT-UP, the AIDS activist group.

Now the ladies are clucking about the Russian newcomers. Will they ever share gossip with these women in bright lipstick and flowered dresses, so unaccustomed to America’s plenty that they shove to the head of the line at the weekly Farmers Market? And will they ever coax a smile from the men playing dominoes in a shroud of cigarette smoke, who, it seems to these women, discourage the kindness of strangers with suspicious scowls and dark mutterings in their native tongue?

West Hollywood’s leaders know that hard questions like these are being asked beneath the shade trees of Plummer Park. Outsiders might see this place on Santa Monica Boulevard as a testament to diversity, a patch of land shared by three disparate groups. But city officials do not take harmony for granted.

They know that the soul of their city is being tested by the influx of Russians, most of them Jewish, many with rough manners and a reliance on public assistance that offends the more Americanized Jews, and some with attitudes toward sexual orientation that alarm the homosexuals.

With stirrings of tension between the seniors and the emigres and a handful of homophobic incidents between the Russians and the gays, the city has launched an educational campaign to explain each group to the other. Uneasiness is common in large cities with shifting demographics and tides of immigration, but transcending mean-spiritedness has special meaning in this progressive enclave, carved from the heart of Los Angeles.

So flyers have been distributed, in English and Cyrillic, teaching Americans why Russians can seem so pushy and why they are entitled to government benefits if they have refugee status and explaining to Russians why they should treat gays with respect and how AIDS is transmitted.

And the city has broadcast a panel discussion on cable television designed to soothe misunderstandings and is encouraging sensitivity training for Russian teen-agers by threatening to withhold city funds from certain youth programs.

“We’ve gotten a group of people here who were raised with different values, because of the repressive nature of the country in which they were brought up,” said John Michael Horne, chairman of West Hollywood’s human services commission. “So the formula’s changing a little bit.”

The formula for West Hollywood, born more than a decade ago in an alliance between gay activists and elderly Jews, has always been one of unlikely combinations.

The Jews came here first, spilling westward from the Fairfax area where they had settled after World War II to give Los Angeles a solidly Jewish dimension--not only in the verdant neighborhoods where movie people built grand homes but in the dull flatlands where immigrant garment workers and their families lived.

The homosexuals soon joined them, some drawn by the burgeoning local design industry and others by the relative safety of living in the then-unincorporated pocket of Los Angeles County, where they would be under the jurisdiction of the sheriff and not the Los Angeles city Police Department, with its penchant for raiding gay clubs.

Like their aged neighbors, many of the gay men were apartment dwellers. So when their low rents were threatened, the two groups launched a successful campaign for cityhood. And their 1.9-square-mile city, steeped in progressivism, became the first in America to declare Yom Kippur a legal holiday and outlaw discrimination against people with AIDS.

The latest group to seek refuge in West Hollywood is made up of Russians, attracted less by the thriving Jewish community here, since they had been prohibited from practicing their religion in the former Soviet Union, than by the Russian speakers who preceded them. The Russians, many fleeing persecution and privation or seeking to unify their families, are now a force in the city of 37,000, where one-third of the residents are gay, one-fifth elderly and 12% Russian.

The gay men of West Hollywood and the American seniors have had years to develop their relationship, which was encouraged from the start by a set of common interests, including safe streets and neighborhood beautification.

And as AIDS cut its deadly swath, they shared other concerns as well. Both needed community-based health care programs such as meals for the homebound and transportation and day care for the disabled. And both needed legal advocates to help them through the maze of medical benefits, powers of attorney and wills.

Some people argue that it was these common needs that bound the gay men and elderly women of West Hollywood. Others think that the two groups were predisposed to mutual tolerance because they knew the sting of oppression.

To be sure, the relationship between gays and seniors in West Hollywood--whether in Plummer Park, in the aisles of Trader Joe’s or poolside at the Sports Connection health club--is more often a passive live-and-let-live than an active embrace.

Typical is the attitude of David Epstein, an 84-year-old resident of the New Garden of Roses retirement home, right down the street from Plummer Park.

“If they didn’t tell me who was who I wouldn’t know,” said Epstein. “They never bother you. Anyway, they can’t help it. I read about it. It’s something they didn’t take on. It’s in them. They try to be regular, but they can’t. Even in Jerusalem, there’s gays.”

Occasionally, one group extends a hand to the other. When elderly residents wander off from the New Garden of Roses, lost in the haze of dementia, it is generally a gay neighbor who brings them back, said Saul Bernstein, the home’s owner.

“They’re very nice with the old people,” Bernstein said. “They buy them a soda and an ice cream, drive them home, even call a few days later to ask how so-and-so’s doing.”

Some of the elderly acknowledge uneasiness with the habits of the gay men in their midst, particularly those who engage in daring displays of affection.

“We see them embracing violently in public,” said 90-year-old Frances Eisenberg, “and some of my friends, I can see in their faces, are physically revolted.”

But the unease of some of the elderly about their gay neighbors pales by comparison to how they feel toward the Russians. They are noisy and pushy and won’t wait on line, the longtime Americans say of the new Soviet emigres. There are complaints that the newcomers double-park their cars, refuse to recycle their garbage or pay sales tax and avert their eyes when strangers try to greet them.

“Their habits can be annoying,” said Eisenberg, a former schoolteacher who tutors some of the Russians in English and is gradually coming to understand their ways.

More irritating, as far as some of the American elderly are concerned, is the fact that Soviet emigres with refugee status can claim benefits including supplemental Social Security, MediCal, food stamps and subsidized housing.

“They see it as a threat,” said Bernstein, the retirement home owner. “They say, ‘It’s taking away from what I have, which is being cut every year. This may make it worse and I may end up with nothing.’ ”

The Russians, despite the daunting language barrier, know that their habits irk their American neighbors. But old ways die hard, particularly for the elderly.

Take Tsiliya Genadinik, who left Moscow to join her son, an electrical engineer, just two years and seven months ago. The elderly woman is aware that she cuts into line at the market, grabbing the bright lemons and juicy tomatoes.

“Because of my experience in Russia, I feel if I don’t get it, it will be gone,” she said through an interpreter. “I catch myself and remember today, tomorrow, 10 days from now, it will still be there.”

Genadinik noted that American resentment toward the newcomers’ benefits is often misplaced. She, for instance, is considered an immigrant and not a refugee because her son is here and thus does not receive aid.

And her neighbors who do qualify for assistance exude gratitude. “We must kiss this land that invited us and helped us,” said a woman sitting on a nearby park bench, who asked not to be identified.

The American elderly who reach out to their Russian neighbors are often rejected, or so it seems to them.

At the Farmers Market recently, Frances Eisenberg tried her best, exclaiming “Big family!” and admiring the children of a woman pushing toward the produce. But the Russian woman recoiled and sharply turned her head.

“Sometimes we simply don’t understand,” said Dora Polonsky, a recent arrival from the Ukraine, who was eager to explain the behavior of her countrywoman.

But Yiddish can be the key that unlocks a Russian heart, as it did when Eisenberg offered to help another woman at the market, who was staring dumbly at a handful of coins.

In Yiddish, the elderly American wished the Russian stranger well in her new homeland and helped her make change. The woman wept at the kindness, let forth with a torrent of stories about a husband killed in the war and the arduous task of learning English.

“Sei gesund,” Eisenberg said as they parted. “Be healthy.”

While the tension is thickest between the two groups of elderly, many of the gay residents of West Hollywood are leery of a people schooled in homophobia. In the Soviet Union, where the emigres were raised, gay men were sentenced to five years in a hard labor camp and lesbians were institutionalized with the mentally ill.

Tolerance for their gay neighbors is a struggle for many Russians, who have never witnessed anything like the same-sex hand-holding and buff fashion statements of West Hollywood.

“Back in our country, we do not see this,” said Lyuba Egonyamts, from the Ukraine. “I don’t understand it, to be honest. It is something absolutely foreign to me.”

The woman beside her pursed her lips as if to expel something bitter. “They are dressed sometimes in ways so obnoxious to see,” she said, with unvarnished disgust.

Now Egonyamts raised a hand to hush her. “Stop! We don’t need to talk about this!” she said.

Interpreting their conversation was Eugene Albers, a community outreach worker for the West Hollywood city government and himself a recent immigrant. “They all have negative feelings about this,” Albers said. “But they try to suppress it.”

What may bind the Russian immigrants to their neighbors, over the generous spread of time, is love for a city that embraced them and let their culture flourish, just as it had welcomed the earlier group of Jews and the homosexuals.

And that, according to Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, is and always has been the glory of cities. “West Hollywood is a gathering of outsiders, which is classically what cities were,” Kotkin said. “It is a place where gays, Jews and immigrants can feel part of the mosaic.”