Settlement for a Community

In the San Fernando Valley, 1999 is likely to be remembered best for its worst day.

The Valley--the world--was stunned by the Aug. 10 shooting rampage that wounded a receptionist, a teenage counselor and three young boys at the North Valley Jewish Community Center and killed a Filipino American mail carrier.

Buford O. Furrow Jr., a self-proclaimed white supremacist, has been charged with murder and with violating all six victims’ civil rights. He reportedly told FBI agents after surrendering that he wanted to send a “wake-up call to America to kill Jews.”

There was some bittersweet symmetry, then, in a ceremony at another Valley Jewish Center last Sunday, four months after the August shootings.

The dedication of the Gerry and George Gregory and Family Gymnasium at the West Valley Jewish Community Center closes the year out with a remarkable story of justice and reconciliation.

The 12,000-square-foot gymnasium is the centerpiece of the new, state-of-the-art Ferne Milken Youth & Sports Complex in West Hills, funded by the Jewish Federation and by donors such as the Milken Family Foundation.

At Sunday’s dedication, speakers emphasized how the complex reinforces the importance of community and the need for a children’s haven--concerns that are more on the forefront than ever since the August shootings.

The new gym was financed by George and Gerry Gregory’s $268,000 donation to the Jewish Federation.

At 82, George Gregory, a retired Encino corporate executive, holds a special appreciation for the role sports play in a community. As a teenager in Nazi Germany, he was prohibited from playing sports with other teenagers because he is Jewish.

But there’s even more to his story.

The sum he donated came from a settlement with a conglomerate that now owns the company that seized control of his father’s metal business when the Nazis came to power.

In an extraordinary quest, documented in an article in The Times of Dec. 11, Gregory set about persuading the company to voluntarily reimburse him for the business his family lost 63 years ago. He did this without a lawsuit and without the help of Jewish groups leading the fight for reparation. He did it, initially, with a phone call.

More extraordinarily still, he succeeded.

After talking with Gregory, the president of the multinational corporation undertook his own research. Later, in a face-to-face meeting, he offered, as a moral obligation and a gesture of reconciliation, to donate to a charity of Gregory’s choice.

At Sunday’s dedication celebration, Gregory said the new gymnasium represents closure for his father, who died in 1978 after unsuccessfully trying to win restitution, and a legacy for his grandchildren to understand the tribulations their family endured under Hitler.

For a Valley community traumatized by that dark day in August, it offers a needed reminder that a sense of right and wrong, of fairness and honor, remain in the world after all.