My dad’s ark had thirteen points along the top — a reference to Maimonides’ principles of faith — and bore a Hebrew epigraph that read, “Know before whom you stand.” Photo by Louis Keene
By Louis Keene
July 13, 2025
There were two things 9-year-old me was sad about giving up when my family made the leap into Orthodox Judaism: 8-piece chicken McNuggets, and the holy ark my dad had built to hold the Torah scroll for our Reform synagogue.
My dad, a pediatrician who never saw a scrap of wood that couldn’t be saved, had volunteered to make it for our congregation, Ohr HaTorah. At the time, the congregation was meeting at a Baptist church in West Los Angeles, and storing its Torah scroll on a table when it wasn’t in use.
Laboring for months at his table saw, he created something both formidable and beautiful. Thirteen points around its roof paid tribute to Maimonides’ principles of faith. A spotlight in the ark’s ceiling illuminated from within Hebrew letters sawed into its doors. The ark was large enough to hold several scrolls — or at that age, me and my two sisters.
The ark appears in the background of my older sister’s bat mitzvah photos, but by the time I turned 13, we had long since changed synagogues. In our new and insular environment, I often wished I could show off Dad’s ark to my Orthodox classmates to affirm our family’s ability to contribute. The Honduran mahogany! The glowing doors! The subtleties — the craftsmanship! It would belong in any Orthodox shul — and so would we.
But the ark wasn’t done with us — and we weren’t done giving it away.
On the night of Jan. 7, as the Eaton Fire roared through Northeast Los Angeles, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris rushed into the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center with a few others to rescue the Torah scrolls. The century-old, two-acre complex, which in addition to the Conservative synagogue housed a K-12 religious school, did not survive the night. When I visited the site seven days later, the ground was still smoldering.
Reporting on American Jewish life is always a personal undertaking, but the wildfires that laid waste to swaths of Los Angeles earlier this year hit home, well, literally. My mother’s family arrived in the Pacific Palisades half a century ago and has been rooted there ever since; it’s where I took swim lessons as a kid and quarantined during the pandemic.
My grandma’s house survived the Palisades fire — she was never in danger, having moved into a senior living home a few years prior — but she will never step foot in it again, the fire having set in motion its dismantling and sale. My mother’s sisters, who live nearby, stayed briefly with my parents after they evacuated. One has still not moved back home.
The two Jewish communities most affected by the fires, situated about 30 miles apart, were a kind of tragic inverse of each other. The Palisades fire destroyed hundreds of Jewish residences, but spared the town’s synagogues; fewer members of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center were displaced, but their spiritual home was leveled. In the days and weeks following the blaze, I reported these stories — b’nai mitzvahs that went on in borrowed auditoriums; precious family heirlooms found in the rubble; a forgotten mural revealed by the flame.
What’s the opposite of shehechiyanu? The rabbis of old knew that as long as Jews have standing houses of worship, there would be fallen ones; they prescribed a blessing for one who beholds a synagogue in ruins. As I looked out over the ashes of the Pasadena synagogue, I couldn’t recall what that blessing was. So I recited a Psalm from memory: The Ashrei, a prayer that evokes the eternity of people, not places.
Sometime in fall 2024, my parents got a call from Ohr HaTorah’s founders, Rabbi Mordechai Finley and Meirav Finley. The Reform congregation of my childhood was going remote. Did we have any interest in taking back the ark my dad had built?
By January, it was collecting (saw)dust in my parents’ garage. They couldn’t find a taker for it — it was too big for one, too far away for another. Then the fires happened.
Like the synagogue of my youth, Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center had been convening in a church when my dad reached out. “I’m thinking, ‘Is this guy completely out of his mind?’” Berman Harris, the cantor, told me last week. A few days later, a team from the temple — including some of the same people who saved the Torah scrolls from the fire — picked up the ark my dad built. The congregation has been using the ark since February.
Six months after the fire, Berman Harris says Shabbat turnout is double what it was before. Most of the 30 or so families who were displaced by the Eaton Fire are back in their homes, though a few are still in long-term rentals. PJTC has hired a new spiritual leader, Rabbi Joshua Ratner, and organized a committee to plan a new building.
“We are great,” Berman Harris said. “We are exhausted, we are beaten, and we are great.”
Among the treasures lost to the Eaton Fire was PJTC’s first ark. The congregation had hired local Jewish artist Peter Krasnow to create it in the 1940s for its new home on Altadena Drive, where it lived until January.
Both the Krasnow ark and the Keene ark were modeled, of course, on the original — the Aron HaKodesh that traveled with the Jewish people as they wandered in the desert. Dad’s ark may not have stayed with the family on our religious journey, but now it will accompany the Jews of Pasadena on theirs. This time, I was happy to part with it.
