At least one synagogue destroyed as unprecedented wildfires rip through Los Angeles

By Louis Keene
January 8, 2025

The wildfires ripping through the Los Angeles area Tuesday destroyed at least one synagogue and had other local Jewish leaders wondering if their spiritual homes would still be standing in the morning.

The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, a Conservative synagogue whose campus dates back to the 1920s, was among the hundreds of structures ravaged by the Eaton Fire. The main sanctuary could be seen on live television engulfed in flames, stunning news reporters and onlookers.

Fueled by roaring winds, the fires began Tuesday morning in the Pacific Palisades, a tony coastal suburb that is home to a large Jewish population and at least two synagogues: Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist congregation, and Chabad of Pacific Palisades.

As of 11:00 p.m. Tuesday, the Palisades Fire had consumed nearly 3,000 acres, destroying swaths of the city’s residential areas. Rabbi Zushe Cunin, the Chabad’s director, said he believed his complex was still intact, though many of his community members had lost homes. The status of Kehillat Israel — whose congregation moved into the building in 1997 — was unclear.

“Don’t know about the synagogue yet,” Cantor Chayim Frenkel wrote in an email just after midnight Wednesday. “It was build to stand a fire like this, but we’re not sure.”

The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even in a city where fire season is year-round, the scale of devastation to L.A. Jewish community institutions and homes seemed unlike anything since at least the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Tuesday’s fires were accelerated by the driest start to winter in L.A. in decades, and gusts reaching up to 80 miles per hour eventually forced aircraft that were helping control the infernos to retreat.

The Los Angeles Fire Department recalled its reserve firemen to join the efforts and departments from the Bay Area were dispatched to assist the efforts, but the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire were both at 0% containment at midnight Wednesday with other fires breaking out. Large parts of the city’s Westside, a Jewish stronghold that includes Brentwood, Westwood and Santa Monica, had been evacuated or were under evacuation warning late Tuesday.

Mendelson said on X that the Federation was “fielding calls from so many community members who have lost their homes. Our hearts go out to them tonight.”

Cunin said he ordered an evacuation of the Chabad preschool Tuesday morning when he saw flames spreading on the hillside. But traffic jams caused by Palisades residents fleeing the fire en masse made getting there difficult for some parents. So staffers walked with some of the children a few blocks closer to the ocean, where they awaited pickup in a grocery store parking lot.

Cunin and his fellow Chabad emissaries packed up the Torah scrolls when they left the Chabad complex at around 1 p.m. He didn’t consider taking more valuables, he said, because he didn’t consider the possibility that the building was in serious danger.

“Over 30 years that I’ve been here there’s never been that kind of a fire. So we didn’t think in those terms,” Cunin, 55, said in a phone interview from a hotel near the L.A. airport.

He said the Chabad lost two Chevrolet Suburbans and 16 public menorahs that he would place around the city on Hanukkah. But a community member who had delayed evacuating his home overlooking the Chabad complex until nightfall reported that it looked secure when he left.

Cunin said his brother, who runs the Chabad of Malibu, reported that the synagogue there was also safe.

While his home and synagogue seemed to have survived for now, Cunin knew many in his community were not as lucky.

“We are going to survive and get through this,” was Cunin’s message to them. “From the ashes we will rebuild, bigger and better.”

La source de cet article se trouve sur ce site