Jewish Center Opens, Unifies 3 Programs

Music, song and storytelling celebrated the opening Sunday of the new Jewish Heritage Center on Los Angeles’ Museum Row, bringing together the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the Jewish Community Library and Jewish Historical Society of Southern California.

The center, located on Wilshire Boulevard across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, combines the resources of the three community-based organizations, which had been housed in temporary quarters for the last year and a half because of earthquake retrofitting work.

“It affords a person who wants to learn about the Jewish community, Jewish history or Jewish tradition an opportunity to do that in one place,” said Stephen Sass, president of the Jewish Historical Society.

The center contains exhibits, artifacts, artwork and historical displays from local Jews who survived the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

Marcia Reines Josephy, director of Museum of the Holocaust, said the center includes the work of many generations.

There are exhibits of dolls and a tapestry by Holocaust survivor Trudie Strobel called “Badges of Shame,” and collages of personal and historical photographs and family records by Alfred Benjamin, 82, a retired Santa Monica College photography instructor.

Other pieces include an assemblage of Nazi trading cards by German artist Ursula Kammer-Fox and the work of Rachel Teitelbaum, 13, a youth interested in the continuity of her Jewish heritage.

“This is a very special, exciting, cheerful, celebratory day,” said Josephy. “In one location you can learn about the past, mourn the past--the Holocaust--and celebrate the future through the information from Jewish Historical Society.”

Sass said the historical society’s collection “preserves and interprets the history” of the Los Angeles Jewish community, the second largest outside of Israel. Through books, records and historical materials, the society traces the growth and change of the Jewish community here from the arrival of an itinerant merchant and tailor in 1841 to the more than half a million Jews who live in the Greater Los Angeles area today.

The society conducts tours of Jewish Los Angeles landmarks in Boyle Heights, downtown, South L.A., the West Adams district and Venice.

As affiliates of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the organizations are also involved in the planned restoration of the Breed Street Shul, a synagogue that was once the center of the thriving Jewish community in Boyle Heights.

Smaller than the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, the Jewish Heritage Center serves a different purpose. “This is a community-based institution,” said Josephy. “Our museum is contemplative. A visitor can get close to the material and interact with it in a personal way,” she said. “There is room for both. It is not a contest.”