Security Added for Jewish Holiday

With extra police patrols guarding synagogues, rabbis in the Southland and nationwide Monday spoke gravely of moral choices to congregations prepared for their most sacred period of Jewish religious observance, the High Holy Days.

At a moment of transcendent importance for Jews, religious leaders evoked varied themes in their sermons. One rabbi talked about firefighters, police and rescue workers as models for personal choices people can make. Another discussed being angry with God, one spoke to his congregants about the uncertainty of life and others addressed directly issues raised by terrorism.

LAPD officers conducted periodic checks on synagogues, while the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sent frequent patrols, officials said. Sheriff’s representatives in Orange, Riverside and Ventura counties said their departments were on similar alert for threats against synagogues as well as mosques.

The High Holy Days, a 10-day period of introspection and repentance that includes the Jewish new year celebration of Rosh Hashana, culminates Sept. 27 with Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, somber reflection and atonement.

In the nation’s capital at Washington Hebrew Congregation, where Cabinet members have worshiped over the years, members were told to arrive early. For the first time in memory, they were required to pass through metal detectors.

In Los Angeles, the service at the Skirball Center filled the Cotsen Auditorium, where Gov. Gray Davis addressed the gathering. “In some sense we lost our own innocence, but we will not lose our way,” Davis said.

Rabbi Harvey Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple said, “The immediate question is the sense of, ‘Are we going to be safe, and is the terrorism going to continue?’ “The second one is more deep because it strikes at the spiritual core of who we are as Americans. In effect, ‘Are we going to make democracy and liberty safe?’ ”

The Jewish new year service includes a prayer that grabs people and shakes them, said Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. “The prayer reminds Jews that in the coming year, some will live and others will not. It’s a reminder of our mortality. This year, we’ve already received the wake-up call to our vulnerability,” she said.

Rabbi David Wolpe at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles planned to talk about how to combat evil without becoming hateful, citing Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty the brave. I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino spoke about finding in this moment an opportunity for understanding between Jews and Muslims. “We’re seeing more clearly that people of one faith are not all cut from the same cloth.” Schulweis said that after the holidays he will offer a his congregants a course on world religions, including Islam.

Moral clarity was the theme of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of the Hillel Center for Jewish students at UCLA, who challenged Muslims and Jews to be specific about the differences between good and evil, right and wrong. “It is immoral to explain away acts of violence,” he said. “A ‘yes, but’ response to terrorism leads to moral muddiness.”

Rabbi Eli Herscher, the senior rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles, related the actions of fire fighters, police and rescue workers at the World Trade Center to those in the Bible’s book of Deuteronomy. There, he said, God tells Moses and his followers to choose life.

“Countless stories in the news reminded us, at every moment in life we have choices to make,” Herscher said. “We have choices: to make a cell phone call from a hijacked airplane, to say ‘I love you.’ And heroic choices to try and take back a plane from hijackers. That is the message of the holidays. People made choices in favor of life.”

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Times staff writers Annette Kondo contributed to this report.