Jews Debate Fate of Ruins of Old Religious Center

Pigeon carcasses lie where worshipers once stood. A tangle of tattered prayer shawls fills the Holy Ark, normally reserved for the sacred Torah scrolls.

Graffiti obscure a mural of the Ten Commandments, gang monikers mar Stars of David. Books that Jewish law say must be buried in the earth rather than tossed in the trash are splayed on the synagogue floor--bindings torn, pages soiled by urine and bird droppings.

Once the religious center of the largest Jewish community west of the Mississippi, the Breed Street shul--a Los Angeles cultural-historic monument that was memorialized on film in both the original and remake versions of “The Jazz Singer”--now teeters on the brink of collapse.

Preservationists, Jewish community leaders and local politicians want to restore the shul as a testament to Boyle Heights before World War II, when barrels of pickled herring lined Brooklyn Avenue--now named for Cesar Chavez and filled with the smell of freshly baked churros.

“If we tear down the past, then yesterday has no meaning--we’re all just living for today and uncertain about tomorrow,” said 85-year-old Bel Air resident Morton Silverman, a synagogue member from the 1930s until its last worship services in 1993.

But an Orthodox rabbi who claims title to the building wants it razed and the land sold, insisting that using the structure as a museum or community center would desecrate its origins.

One week after the Los Angeles City Council voted to delete St. Vibiana’s Cathedral from its list of historic monuments to help clear the path for its destruction by the Roman Catholic archdiocese, the same lawmakers plan to use the shul’s landmark status in a last-ditch effort to save it.

The council today is expected to pass an emergency motion to erect new barricades around the old synagogue, known in its heyday as “the queen of shuls.” Councilman Hal Bernson, who became a bar mitzvah at the shul, and Councilman Richard Alatorre, who represents the now-Latino neighborhood, plan to use the city’s power of nuisance abatement to clean it up. And the Jewish Historical Society is pondering legal action to buy or otherwise take control of the building, then launch a fund-raising campaign to restore it.

“We need to save it,” said Bernson, who at age 10 attended services at the shul three times daily to recite the mourner’s prayer for his father. “Whatever it takes.”

Complicating the situation is a debate over who should control the property, which is owned, according to property records, by Congregation Talmud Torah. Unlike in the Catholic Church, there is no broad hierarchy in the Jewish community; each synagogue is independent. When congregation members die or move away, decisions are often left to the last one standing.

On Breed Street, that was Rabbi Mordechai Ganzweig, an ultra-religious Jew who lives in the Fairfax district and, along with his recently deceased father, shepherded Talmud Torah’s dwindling flock in its final days.

Ganzweig declined to be interviewed, but his former attorney, Stanley Stone, said the rabbi’s opposition to restoration stems from a prohibition in Talmudic law--which governs traditional Judaism--from using a former synagogue for any less-sacred purpose. To Ganzweig, that includes non-Orthodox services, never mind secular uses.

After the Whittier earthquake in 1987, Ganzweig applied for a permit to demolish the place. The handful of remaining, elderly congregants lacked the resources for retrofitting--not to mention the city’s fines for having a hazardous building. There were virtually no Jews living in the neighborhood to support the synagogue. Orthodox Jews must live within walking distance of their houses of worship because they do not drive on the Sabbath. “They were between a rock and a hard place,” Stone recalled of his clients. “Their concern was if it were left standing, it would be used for something other than an Orthodox synagogue. . . . [Ganzweig] didn’t want it turned into a teen center, a basketball court.”

Now, after another decade of decay, even nostalgic members of the grand shul have conflicting sentiments about what should be done: They hate to watch a sacred symbol of their childhood crumble, but are daunted by the prospect of saving it.

“I would love to see it in its original splendor,” said David Shonholtz, who was born in 1921 as the shul was being built and who owned a jewelry store around the corner until 1985. “But who would come? The ‘Field of Dreams,’ you build it and they come. This is real life. Who would come?”

Rabbi Harry Silverstein, whose father presided at Breed Street from 1935 until his death in 1973, says the site should be paved as a parking lot for the Social Security building across the street.

“It’s too far gone. I don’t know if it can be saved,” he sighed. “To build something is one thing, to keep it going is another.”

That’s why Jewish Historical Society President Steven Sass envisions a mixed-use building that honors the shul’s past while serving the neighborhood’s new immigrant residents. Upstairs, the restored sanctuary would be available to Jews of all denominations for holiday services or weddings; in the basement, an exhibit about the Jewish community of Boyle Heights, which once numbered 60,000, would share space with community meeting rooms.

“We’re very quick to come to the conclusion that we, as Angelenos, don’t have a history,” said Sass, who leads monthly tours to the Breed Street shul and other Eastside Jewish remnants. “In fact, we have a variety of histories, we have layers of history. We need to record that history and make it relevant to the current generation.”

Sass notes that the revived effort to save the shul comes just before the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’av, the date on which both the ancient temples of Jerusalem are said to have been destroyed.

“We can’t do anything about the first and second temples except mourn them,” Sass said. “But here in our backyard, we do have a chance to say the period of destruction is ending and will be part of the past.”

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Congregation Talmud Torah said its first prayers in a living room at the corner of 1st and Rose streets in 1904. A decade later, the burgeoning group moved to Breed Street, building a wooden house that now stands behind the main building and served for decades as the Beit Midrash, a chapel where men gathered for daily prayers each morning and evening.

The huge brick edifice, which reflects the Eastern European roots of its congregants, was dedicated in June 1923. Twelve stained-glass windows depicted the tribes of Israel, a sign of the zodiac above each. The cantor, who leads prayer, stood in the center, surrounded by benches for the male congregants. Women sat in a balcony upstairs, beneath a grand crystal chandelier.

“There were a number of shuls in Boyle Heights, quite a few, but Breed Street was the gem,” recalled Rabbi Paul Dubin, who was born in the neighborhood in 1925 and now is executive director of the Southern California Board of Rabbis. “We don’t have cathedrals like the Catholics do, but if you were to say one was considered the largest--and I don’t mean only in size--that was it.”

Breed Street thrived, with morning prayers at 6, 7 and 8 each weekday to accommodate the crowds. Famous cantors from around the country came to chant from the pulpit. The rabbi’s sermons were in Yiddish. Outside, throngs of bored kids played “nuts”--setting a plank against a wall, dropping one nut on the ground and rolling another down to try to hit it.

During Prohibition, Sass said, membership swelled to 1,200, many lured by the wine used in prayer. It remained at 500 or more through the 1950s, with Jews returning to Breed Street each Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish new year and Jewish Day of Atonement, long after they had moved out of the neighborhood.

“I’m always surprised when people say, ‘What does it mean to you? You don’t live there.’ It’s like saying, ‘What do your mother and father mean to you even though they’re no longer alive?’ ” said Silverman, whose mortuary, Molinow & Silverman, buried many Breed Street members.

Dean Zellmann was born in 1956, long after the shul was built. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, far away from Boyle Heights. Still, when his children--now ages 10 and 13--were born, Zellmann brought them to Breed Street for the traditional Jewish naming ceremony.

“There’s something about the history of the shul. My father went to the shul, my grandfather went to the shul,” he said recently. “There was more feeling.”

Since age 7, Zellmann has worked in his family’s men’s clothing store, now the neighborhood’s sole surviving Jewish business. From there, he helped the congregation survive, often rushing over to serve as the 10th man required for group services. But he also watched it die: When an old man came recently to light a candle next to his parents’ names on the synagogue’s memorial plaques, Zellman had to tell him the plaques had been torn down, some used for firewood by desperate people camping inside.

Today, the elaborate chandelier is just a few shards of dirty glass. An empty space on the front of the building marks the missing stone replica of the Ten Commandments that crashed to the sidewalk in the Whittier quake.

Half the stained glass windows are shattered. The place is littered with empty milk cartons, a cigarette box, a beer bottle.

Everywhere, Jewish symbols collide with spray paint from neighborhood street gangs claiming their turf.

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When Ganzweig first applied for a demolition permit in 1987, Bernson vowed the building would only fall “over my dead body.” To delay its destruction, the council declared the shul a historic monument, a move Ganzweig opposed. In discussions then, the councilman told the rabbi he would attend services at the shul once it was restored.

“He said, ‘We couldn’t have that. You’d desecrate it,’ ” Bernson recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I didn’t desecrate it when I was bar mitzvahed there.’ ”

Talmudic authorities who are not involved in the local dispute say there is, indeed, a prohibition against using a former synagogue for a less sacred purpose. But as American Jewish communities have fled the immigrant neighborhoods where their congregations were born, rabbis have often made exceptions.

In Boyle Heights, where 30 synagogues flourished in the first half of the century, one is now a school, another the local Boys’ Club. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the old Sinai Temple in Pico-Union is now a Welsh Presbyterian church, and Congregation Beth Jacob’s former home in the West Adams area belongs to the Southern Missionary Baptist Church.

United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis, the oldest synagogue west of the Mississippi, houses a library; preservationists recently restored the Eldridge Street shul on the Lower East Side of New York as a museum.

“If you’re looking for a way to get permission to sell it or tear it down, ultimately, that permission could be found. The preference would be for it to remain and be used for Jewish services,” said Rabbi Ronald D. Price, executive vice president of the Union for Traditional Judaism, based in Teaneck, N.J.

“Maintaining it, even as a museum where Jewish things at least can take place, is still better than throwing it away, tearing it down,” Price added. “Leaving it in disrepair is probably the worst. Something has to be done. The way it is now is certainly the most disrespectful.”