THOUSAND OAKS : Ancient Jewish Holiday Arrives on Wheels

Promising to spread simcha --the Hebrew word for happiness--a rabbi in a flatbed truck mounted with a makeshift hut pulled up to a Thousand Oaks home for seniors.

The anxiously awaited Sukkah Mobile had arrived, giving a small group of senior citizens at the Thousand Oaks Hillcrest Royale Senior Home the unusual opportunity to celebrate an ancient Jewish holiday some said they had long ago forgotten.

The hut--made of plastic gray tarps with a roof of bamboo branches--was meant to replicate the temporary dwellings the ancient Jews used in the desert after fleeing Egypt in search of the holy land.

During the seven-day, October holiday called Sukkot, Jews remember the journey of their ancestors by eating, praying and sometimes sleeping in huts which they build next to their own homes.

But according to Rabbi Yisroel Levine, few Jews in Southern California go to the trouble of building the huts, known as sukkahs .

So, through the Chabad of the Conejo, Levine and two rabbinical students from New York toured eastern Ventura County this week bringing the sukkah to them.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, they visited various retirement homes, schools, and shopping centers.

“In a place like this, we don’t see sukkahs ,” he told the Hillcrest group on Thursday. “I’m from New York and over there everyone has a sukkah . So how are we going to show the idea of Sukkot here? We put it on a flatbed truck to make sure that in our area every single Jew should know the Sukkot,” he said.

Some of the seniors said it had been decades since they saw a sukkah. Mary Wexler, an 87-year-old Hillcrest resident who grew up in New York, recalled her father building a sukkah when she was a child.

“I miss all that,” she said. “I thought it was the most beautiful thing.”