Downtown’s New Center of Jewish Life Hits a High Point With Torah Dedication

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The Jewish Community Center-Chabad of Down­town Los Angeles has had its own space for five months, and it served the community’s Jewish population in temporary locations for approximately a year before that. But in September, the proceedings at what its proprietor calls the first new full-time synagogue in Downtown in 60 years will go to a different level.

Like other synagogues, the Downtown JCC will celebrate Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, on Sept. 19 and 20. Services for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, will follow on Sept. 27-28.

Still, Moshe Greenwald, the 27-year-old founder of the temple, which occupies a 1,300-square-foot space on the second floor of a Jewelry District building, is looking forward to Thursday, Sept. 3. That is when the temple will mark a milestone by dedicating its new Torah.

Getting a Torah is more complex than simply ordering one. A special scribe in Israel known as a sofer created the JCC’s Torah especially for the Downtown synagogue. The scribe spent a year transcribing each of the Torah’s approximately 350,000 Hebrew letters onto a 19-inch scroll made of parchment paper, for a cost of approximately $30,000.

This week’s ceremony will mark the completion of the Torah scroll. During the dedication, the scribe who penned the rest of the Torah will be in Downtown to ink its final letters. After that, synagogue members will march the Torah through the streets under a chuppah, a traditional Jewish canopy.

“We already have our police permits,” said Greenwald. “One of the greatest joys of the Jewish community is getting a new Torah. It is the glue that keeps the Jewish people together.”

In this case, it also marks a coming-of-age for a new community gathering point, one that already has about 100 local residents and workers attending services each week.

Family Business

The Downtown JCC is on the second floor of the Haas Building, an apartment complex at 219 W. Seventh St. The space boasts an exposed brick ceiling, original concrete floors and a row of windows that look onto Broadway.

The location is a far different world from Long Beach, where Greenwald grew up and where his father serves as a rabbi.

During his late teens, Greenwald traveled on Chabad outreach missions to places such as New York, London, Israel, Hungary and Ukraine. The photo albums he keeps in a closet in the JCC space chronicle those years: snapshots show a towering pile of fish on a kitchen counter, part of the preparations for a 400-person Passover dinner in Ukraine; a 1,000-person menorah lighting in Budapest; a visit to the bunkers that were once part of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The trips and the family background had a not surprising effect on Greenwald — he was ordained as a rabbi when he was 20.

He married his wife, Brooklyn native Rivky, 25, in 2005 and lived with her in New York for two years before moving to Downtown L.A. in 2007. While he had no reservations about heading west, he said, “Other people had fear for us. People told me, ‘You’ll be the rabbi of Skid Row.’”

Greenwald began his work here in Downtown by running Torah classes, lectures and other programs out of his home at the Library Court lofts. He also works as a rabbi for the LAPD and local hospitals.

While Greenwald is an Orthodox Jew, the Downtown JCC is one of more than 2,500 branches of Chabad, an international organization that serves all Jews regardless of affiliation. His past services have included ample portions in English to ensure that all worshippers can understand the proceedings.

Greenwald met Haas Building owner Zuri Barnes not long after arriving in Los Angeles through one of Barnes’ sons-in-law. Serendipitously, Barnes was privately funding the $10 million conversion of the 12-story, 1915 building into 68 residences, and he was looking to house a Chabad synagogue in the project.

“My father was a rabbi,” said the Israeli-born Barnes, who donates the JCC space rent-free. “Where we used to live in [Israel], on the second floor there was a synagogue. So I grew up in that environment, and it makes me feel good to come back to that environment.”

Filling a Need

Downtown is home to numerous religious institutions, the most well known being the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Temple Street, the mother church for the Los Angeles Archdiocese. The area also has Buddhist temples in Little Tokyo, the First United Methodist Church in South Park and several centers of Christian worship.

Gaining a full-time Jewish synagogue is a significant addition to Downtown’s religious landscape, said Rabbi Chaim Cunin of the Westside-based Chabad of California.

“At some point in time the Jewish community was very well-represented in the Boyle Heights area, but not in Downtown,” said Cunin. The JCC, he said, “speaks volumes for Downtown Los Angeles and how far Downtown has come. It’s not just developing in a material way but also in a spiritual way.”

Camille Goldsmith, 67, knows all about the previous lack of Jewish services in Downtown. She moved to the area in 2002 and had trouble finding a local synagogue.

“I saw in the Yellow Pages that there was a Chabad on Fifth and Olive,” she said. But when she went to check it out, “It was shuttered up, and in the daytime it was a little storefront.”

Until Greenwald opened the JCC in March, Goldsmith said, she walked nearly six miles every Saturday to a synagogue in Los Feliz. In addition to the convenience of a Downtown synagogue, Goldsmith and others also appreciate Greenwald’s traditional yet forward-thinking approach.

“He comes from an ultra-orthodox background, but I find him to be extremely progressive,” said attorney and Los Feliz resident Jonathan Kaplan, who helped raise funds for the JCC’s Torah. “He really accepts people as they are. He’s not trying to change anybody.”

Downtown resident Barrett Morse, 30, agrees.

“I was never hugely religious, but [the JCC] is convenient and full of Downtown people like myself,” said Morse. “There’s no pretense. Everyone goes to dinner afterwards, people go to each other’s houses. If you told me two years ago that there would be a debate about where to go Downtown for Shabbat dinner, that would have been like a stand-up joke. Last week there were three different Shabbat dinners going on.”

The Torah dedication is Thursday, Sept. 3, at 3 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center-Chabad of Downtown Los Angeles, 219 W. Seventh St., Suite 206, (213) 488-1543 or downtownjcc.com. RSVPs are requested.

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