Immigrants Bring New Diversity to L.A.’s Jewish Communities

Shoppers in a market along bustling Pico Boulevard seek succulent sweets, smoked fish, dried dates, nuts and other delicacies arranged below signs in both Persian and English.

Browsers at a Fairfax Avenue bookstore pick through Middle Eastern newspapers, magazines and compact discs.

Refugees from the former Soviet Union line up for citizenship classes, religious instruction and social services at West Hollywood storefronts featuring Cyrillic lettering.

The scenes portray very distinct pieces of Los Angeles’ cultural mosaic, but all involved have one thing in common: Judaism.

A massive wave of immigration has dramatically reshaped Southern California’s demography over the past two decades. It has also transformed Los Angeles’ Jewish community, the nation’s second largest.

Newcomers from Iran, Israel, South Africa and parts of the former Soviet Union have imported a vibrant new cultural diversity to the region.

They have revitalized many neighborhoods--a change that is easy to see in areas like the Pico-Robertson corridor, Fairfax and the “Little Odessa” section of West Hollywood, where the new immigrants have brought a thriving commerce and maintained Jewish centers once threatened by the move to the suburbs.

“To do business I have to speak Persian, Hebrew, English, Arabic, whatever,” said Mike Boutehsaz, proprietor of Shalom Pizza on Pico Boulevard and one of many Iranian Jews who have settled here and thrived since the 1970s.

The economic boost has come in part because many of the immigrants--especially Iranians and Israelis--tend to be successful entrepreneurs in construction, real estate, apparel manufacturing and other industries. Surveys show that even Jews from the former Soviet Union, who came with little material wealth and faced problems adapting to a capitalist system, are also rising rapidly into the middle class.

“The immigrants create jobs for other people; they’re not displacing anybody, and in many cases they’re bringing capital for investment,” said Mehdi Bozorgmehr, a sociologist at City University of New York who has studied the newcomers in Los Angeles. “They’re adding to the economy.”

The newcomers’ presence also challenges the prevalent U.S. image of Jews as a group mostly generations removed from the immigrant experience.

Nationwide, only about one in 10 American Jews are foreign born--largely elderly immigrants of the World War II generation. In Southern California, the foreign-born now account for roughly one in five Jews--some of them longtime residents, of course, but also tens of thousands of more recent arrivals.

The new groups represent the nation’s largest bloc of Jewish immigrants since the turn-of-the-century Great Wave that lasted until a Congress alarmed about “cosmopolitan” influences shut the door in the early 1920s.

Adjusting to Life in U.S.

Each of the major groups that make up the bulk of the new Jewish immigration has faced hurdles in adjusting to American society.

The sense of displacement is perhaps most acute for Israelis. Even Israelis who have lived in the United States a decade or more often insist that they plan to return to their homeland, however unlikely the prospect.

“Israel is our mother; it is the place where our brothers and parents literally shed their blood into the ground,” said Nili Shalev-Sachs, a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist who has written extensively about the emotional topic of Israeli emigration.

“To be an Israeli is forever.”

Perhaps because of this fierce emotional bond, the Israeli community of Southern California is exceptionally well-organized, including dozens of cultural groups, charities and clubs and two Hebrew-language newspapers.

About two dozen Israeli restaurants have sprung up in recent years. Israelis tend to socialize together and find jobs through common networks. Community members routinely put their numbers at more than 50,000--including a substantial number of illegal immigrants--more than triple the Jewish Federation estimate of 14,000.

Whatever the correct figure, virtually all Israeli immigrants live with the lingering guilt of the yordim--a disparaging Hebrew term for those who “descend” from the land of Israel to the diaspora. Their presence--as voluntary immigrants, not refugees forced to leave by circumstances--seems to some to mock the essence of Zionism and the traditional declaration that closes the Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

For decades, the Israeli government and U.S. Jewish organizations were openly hostile toward Israeli immigrants, regarding them as virtual turncoats, betrayers of the revered concept of aliyah--return to the Jewish homeland.

That official antagonism is now a thing of the past. Yet the desire to return to Israel still tugs at the psyches of its expatriate sons and daughters, most of whom make frequent trips home.

“There’s a great feeling of nostalgia, a feeling like we deserted something,” said Gita Zeltzer, who directs a nonprofit Hebrew theater affiliated with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity.

“Many people are really torn apart. It’s something we must learn to live with.”

Fleeing a Revolution

Iranian Jews, by contrast, generally fled to the United States as refugees, escaping the Islamic revolution. But for many, the initial hope was that they would one day return to their comfortable lives in their former home, where an insular, 2,600-year-old Jewish community had prided itself on being the longest-settled Jewish population in the world.

Many were initially stunned to find that mainstream Jewish groups knew virtually nothing about them.

“People asked, ‘What is an Iranian Jew?’ ” recalled Dariush Fakheri, who arrived in the United States to study 20 years ago, was stranded by the revolution and now runs a bilingual monthly magazine, Chashm Andaaz (Outlook).

For centuries, Persian Jews had withstood cycles of severe repression in a nation long dominated by Islam. But the Jews of Iran thrived under the shah and his father, who mostly viewed them benignly.

The shah’s abrupt overthrow, and the eventual consolidation of the Islamic Republic under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, was a cataclysmic event for the cohesive Jewish community, which feared for its future.

“We had always lived as a minority, but this became a very difficult time,” recalled Rabbi David Shofet, son of the former chief rabbi of Tehran, who now heads a congregation in Santa Monica, including a Jewish school.

The Jewish community of Iran, once 60,000 strong, worked out a fragile coexistence with the ruling mullahs. Inside revolutionary Iran, life sometimes took on absurd twists.

“Every day at school we would chant, ‘Down with the USA! Down with Israel!’ ” recalled Shoshanha Essakhar, 27, who emigrated with her family in 1988 as part of the burgeoning exodus.

Having maintained their distinctive culture for millenniums, Iranian Jews here deeply fear that they may become the end of the line of a storied branch of Judaism. They proudly recount the tales of the dispersal that took Jews from the Holy Land to Persia at the time of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the 6th century BC. To this day, some immigrant Iranian Jews fiercely resist the notion of their children marrying American Jews--never mind non-Jews.

And as with other immigrants from traditional societies, many Iranian Jewish families here face fierce conflicts with their daughters over dating and other social issues.

“Families are very afraid of losing their kids to TV, violence, sex, drugs,” said Shideh Hanassab, a counselor at UCLA who has studied Iranian American students at the Westwood campus. “Some families are practicing their religion here more than they did in Iran. They feel this is a way to hold on to their Jewish culture.”

But, notwithstanding their singular traditions, the younger Iranian American Jews are integrating quickly into mainstream American Judaism, experts agree.

Already, Persian-language ability, particularly writing, is on the decline among the younger generation. “Our children, our grandchildren, are becoming American,” said Rabbi Shofet.

‘We Hardly Knew What Passover Was’

Former Soviet residents, leaving a nation where religious practices were severely suppressed, typically arrived with little basic knowledge of their faith.

“We hardly knew what Passover was,” acknowledged Inna Rogachyova, 20, who came to America 10 years ago with her family. She now works at the West Hollywood office of Chabad, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic group that has a sprawling social service organization and has made strong inroads among former Soviet residents.

But those arriving since the fall of the Soviet Union generally have more awareness of Judaism, as do Central Asians from insular Jewish communities in Uzbekistan and elsewhere.

South African Jews have enjoyed a generally smooth cultural transition--arriving as they do with English-language abilities and Western ways.

Jewish families from South Africa have clustered in parts of San Diego and Irvine, but are also spread throughout Los Angeles County. A monthly newsletter circulates among the community. Yet, in general, Jewish South Africans tend to shed the kind of close kinship with Jewish life that characterized their tight-knit community back home, adopting the more distant U.S. model.

“I don’t think immigrants from South Africa brought the same kind of commitment to an organized community that they left behind,” lamented Rabbi Abner Weiss of Beth Jacob Temple, who recounted how many now-unaffiliated South African expatriates regularly stand outside his Beverly Hills synagogue on Yom Kippur night, seeking some contact with their lost tradition.

“It’s a sad phenomenon for me, because I know where they came from,” said Weiss, former chief rabbi of South Africa’s Natal province.

Some Are Slow to Join Temples

The Jewish establishment has welcomed the latest waves of newcomers to the U.S. with a social-assistance infrastructure that is the envy of other ethnic groups. The tradition of Jewish philanthropy that arose a century ago to aid the pogrom-fleeing Jews of Eastern Europe has underwritten wide-ranging resettlement services.

“The Jewish community puts their money where their mouths are,” said Yolanda Vera, a Los Angeles attorney who works on issues that predominantly affect Latino immigrants.

But the new immigration has, of course, brought some tensions, often focusing on cultural practices that rub either American Jews or newcomers the wrong way.

Unlike U.S.-born Jews, for example, heavily secularized Israelis often view their Jewishness in nationalist terms and feel little initial motivation to join a temple.

“In Israel we don’t have to go to the synagogue to show we’re Jewish,” said Yair Gavrielli, manager of Hataklit, a Fairfax Avenue storefront that is a major Israeli hangout and distributor of Hebrew-language books, newspapers, CDs and videos.

Yet affiliation is the backbone of U.S. Judaism, a guarantor of cultural continuity in a predominantly Christian society.

The lack of religious knowledge on the part of many Russian immigrants has also drawn complaints from some native-born Jews.

“Some American Jews say, ‘We went through all this effort to bring them here--they should have gone to Israel in the first place--and now they’re not even religious,’ ” said Steven J. Gold, a sociologist who has studied the immigrant Jewish community.

Paradoxically, some Soviet Jews, particularly the elderly, feel more comfortable with the ultra-Orthodox practices of groups like Chabad than with “modern” Judaism.

“We American Jews like our propriety, we like our gender equality, yet when some new immigrants come here and see a woman rabbi singing with a folk guitar, they don’t see that as authentic,” said Gold, now based at Michigan State University.

Some recent arrivals cite a paternalistic or condescending attitude among U.S. Jews, a complaint that echoes back a century to the strained relations between new immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, and a then-established German Jewish population aghast at the penury and customs of their co-religionists.

With U.S. activists having invested so much in the effort to liberate Soviet Jewry, Russians and others say they often feel that Americans anticipated an influx of country folk out of the pages of Sholom Aleichem, the chronicler of Yiddish life in the prewar Eastern European shtetl, or village.

“There was a perception that Soviet Jews would be like, you know--’Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” said Igor Kotler, a 41-year-old former refusenik from St. Petersburg who arrived in Southern California 11 years ago with his wife and children and is completing his dissertation on Jewish history at UCLA.

“Instead, they got highly educated people from large industrial centers who were very much motivated to succeed. We shared the same grandparents as American Jews, but we are as different from our grandparents as they are from theirs.”

Many Iranian immigrants, meantime, report initially finding American Judaism’s denominational distinctions somewhat baffling.

“In Iran,” recalled Essakhar, now a Westside lawyer, “we were all just Jews.” Also unheard of in Iran was the notion of paying for membership in a synagogue--a standard U.S. practice. In Iran, as was once the case in Eastern Europe, worshipers make voluntary contributions and also bid for synagogue honors, such as being called to the Torah to make a blessing--a fund-raising custom that mostly died out long ago in the United States, where it was judged to lack decorum.

And yet, while issues of that sort continue to cause tensions within some congregations, the quick success of many new immigrants belies the inevitable comparisons to the earlier wave of Jews from Eastern Europe.

“We’ll see that the next generation will be more Americanized, and will translate a strong sense of Jewish commitment into the general Jewish population,” said Bruce A. Phillips, a professor at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

Hebrew Schools See Rapid Growth

In concrete terms, the recent arrivals have revitalized many aging congregations, spurred the creation of new temples and contributed to a rapid growth in Hebrew schools now in high demand among both immigrants and native-born Jews.

If they can afford the tuition, many immigrants send their children to Jewish schools, where instruction is in English but Hebrew lessons and religion are integral parts of the curriculum. Often, it is immigrants themselves who have filled teaching slots.

“I think many immigrants find Jewish day schools a kind of filter,” said Nira Eloul, an Israeli immigrant who directs the Temple Emanuel school in Beverly Hills, where about a third of the students have at least one immigrant parent.

“Your child is becoming American, but you can be sure the child remains connected to the parents culturally.”

The rich cultural mix, and the occasional tensions, that the influx has created are evident at the venerable Sinai Temple in Westwood, the oldest Conservative congregation in the West.

Almost one-third of the members are Iranian, but, on a given Saturday, perhaps half the worshipers are Persian families, including many who, as is customary in Iran, do not pay membership fees--making some U.S. Jews bristle.

“When someone gets their dander up about it,” said David Wolpe, senior rabbi, “I remind them that I’m absolutely delighted to come into a place where the problem is too many people coming to pray.”

On Passover, he said, the main sanctuary was filled to capacity with more than 2,000 worshipers. Their religious dedication, the rabbi said, underscores how the new arrivals have invigorated L.A. Judaism.

“We have every reason to be extraordinarily grateful for immigration and for new immigrants,” said Wolpe.

“Immigration has saved us in many cases, and immigrants continually enrich our community. . . . In a certain way, it helps us revisit what happened to our grandparents and our parents. It reminds us that adjusting to a new land is a very complicated business.”