Jewish Center Ponders Its Future

For 43 years it’s been a symbol of community unity and cultural togetherness.

But these days, the Westside Jewish Community Center in the Fairfax district has become the focal point of a dispute over the direction Judaism is headed in Los Angeles.

Some say that direction is west. They want to close the venerable center and open a new one closer to Brentwood.

Others contend that Fairfax is still the city’s most influential Jewish area, and they are fighting to keep the center open in hopes of keeping the neighborhood that way.

The dispute has been triggered by an offer from a private high school to purchase the sprawling community center, located near Olympic Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, and turn it into a school campus.

The center’s owner, Jewish Community Centers of Greater Los Angeles, says the $4-million purchase offer would clear the way for it to open a new community center a few miles to the west, closer to Jewish households that lack recreational and other family-oriented facilities.

The purchase offer, made by operators of Shalhevet High School, has stirred an angry outcry from supporters of the center.

“We feel absolutely stabbed in the back,” said Maggie Scott, a mother of three whose association with the community center began 34 years ago when her parents sent her to nursery school there.

Scott was at the same nursery school Thursday, checking on her son. In her coat pocket was a petition signed by more than 1,000 people demanding that Jewish Community Centers not sell the facility.

Across town, officials of that organization were taking note.

David Aaronson, president of Jewish Community Centers, announced that a board meeting scheduled for next Tuesday night to review the high school purchase proposal has been canceled.

In its place, a community dialogue meeting at the Olympic Boulevard site will be conducted, he said. A vote on whether to sell will probably not be made by his group’s 50-member board of directors until April, he said.

But Aaronson made it clear that he favors unloading the 75,000-square-foot community center.

The center is underutilized and expensive to run. It’s also in need of about $4 million in repairs and modernization and “there are some who wonder if a $4-million fund-raising campaign is viable or not,” he said.

And then there’s the issue of the center’s location.

Aaronson has indicated that a new site might draw higher-income families--the type willing to donate substantial amounts of money to help operate a new center. The current site costs $2.7 million a year to run, including $700,000 in facilities expenses, he said. “For example, we’re heating a huge building for just 37 people who use it at night,” Aaronson said.

“We believe we can be in an area that is closer to the Jewish community,” he said. “We want to place the services to the west and north.”

That kind of talk angers supporters of the center.

Helene Seifer, who is a member of the Westside center’s governing board and sits on Aaronson’s board of directors, said it is wrong to suggest that the Fairfax area is slipping as Los Angeles’ most important Jewish neighborhood.

She said two new demographic studies show that the Fairfax area is a stable neighborhood that is losing few Jewish residents to more upscale areas.

Although one new study found that 55,000 Jews live in the Fairfax area now, compared with 75,000 in 1979, Seifer said that the change is not the result of migration, but of an aging population.

“Sheer numbers are down. But they didn’t move to Brentwood. They died,” she said Thursday. Siefer said the community center has contributed to the Fairfax area’s stability.

“If this place closes, it will be a signal to Jews that this is no longer a Jewish neighborhood,” she said.

Seifer said operators of the Olympic Boulevard center have kept the place busy by inviting other community groups--including non-Jews--to use its well-equipped gym, exercise rooms and two indoor swimming pools. Six years ago it rented classroom space to Shalhevet High School, which now wants to buy the whole place.

High School President Jerry Friedman said his school will phase out community center programs slowly if the purchase is approved. The fast-growing campus, which charges $11,200 annual tuition, has an enrollment of 140 students.

“I think the building will still be a focus of the Jewish community. We’ll outreach to the entire Jewish community,” he promised.

If the Jewish Community Centers group refuses to sell the center, however, “we’ll have a major problem. We have no alternate place to go,” Friedman said.

Other Jewish leaders, meantime, were hoping Thursday for a peaceful end to the dispute.

John Fishel, head of the Jewish Federation, which helps support the Los Angeles area’s six Jewish community centers, said there is a definite need to extend services to Jewish families living outside the Fairfax area.

But “we clearly have an interest in the resolution of this matter in a way that people who feel so strongly about this center will continue to receive service,” he said.

Fishel agreed that closure of the Olympic Boulevard center “would signal a change” for the Fairfax area, but he disputed that it would be an indication of “the end of organized Jewish life” in the neighborhood.

Back on Olympic Boulevard, everyone was waiting see what happens next.

Parent Kathi Sweet was telling how senior citizens and young children alike interact at the center. “It’s the bottom of the ninth and we’re trying to save what is a really unique place,” she said. Shalhevet High student Ilan Graff, 14, said he hopes his school takes over the whole place--from its workout rooms to the swimming pools. “The school should buy it and maybe lease out parts it doesn’t need,” he said “It’s not as though we’re stealing anything.”