Folks,
Taking five on a bed of jacaranda flowers, it felt good to get out this week and avail myself, once again, of nature. Like Ruth, the main character in the book we read on Shavuot, we are about to set out, in these days when we hope the health officials rule, on an uncertain journey in search of a renewed life and identity. Our future, like hers, will depend on the kindness of family and community, wisdom, and a little luck. (If you haven’t, read the book HERE.) In the next weeks, beginning with this issue, I wish you and your families every possible kindness.
Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.
Edmon J. Rodman
GUIDE FOR THE JEWPLEXED
It's purple people time
Edmon J. Rodman
The jacarandas are blooming in West Hollywood. Photo EJR
Opening their purplish-blue blossoms all over Los Angeles, at a time when the city is about to re-open, the jacarandas have a message for us. In a city where the day-to-day has been suspended, the flowers reappearance, especially as we approach Shavuot, a festival to which flowers are linked, can been seen as a hue of hope.
Their extraordinary reappearance, coming in these days, reminds us, that after so much confinement, we, too, want to bloom.
Driving through the hills of Westwood, the streets of Venice, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Koreatown, glimpses of the intense blue flowers open the mind’s eye. Forgetting for a moment the tsuris caused to cars from the sticky droppings (honeydew) from aphids feasting on the tree’s flowers, walking down a street where larger trees, some of them 60-80 years old, form a violet canopy, puts one in a kind of short-lived urban wonderland.
Bluish flowers are few in nature, and their unexpected show leaves a space for both excitement and contemplation. Like Dorothy in Oz, what would happen if we were to lie down on a bed of their fallen flowers? Would we have a Covid dream of flying monkeys? Or ride a rhapsodic joyful blue wave of a George Gershwin classic.
Yet, as inspiring flowers go, the jacaranda, unlike roses, have no great artwork, poetry, or popular song dedicated to them, nor is there a movie titled “Don’t Eat the Jacarandas.”
They cannot be purchased at a florist, and for a wedding, they would not hold up well in a bouquet. Yet, even a city where they compete with forever blue skies, and preternaturally tall palms, they somehow standout.
They have been with us for a while these jacarandas. The Jacaranda mimosifolia, originally a transplant from South America, has been bathing Angelenos in its stripe of purple reign since before the turn of the 20th century. Though the trees were originally introduced to Southern California by botanist and horticulturalist Kate Sessions, who planted them in Balboa Park in San Diego, in the early 1890’s, a Los Angeles company begun by Jewish businessman Eugene Germain, as early as 1900, and most likely before, was growing and selling Jacarandas both locally and nationally.
From the pages of the Germain‘s yearly catalogue, which described the jacaranda as “a handsome tree with fern-like foliage, and magnificent clusters of light blue flowers,” you could order seed pods, “containing from 30 to 40 seeds,” for 5 cents each, or buy a living plant, for a quarter, half dollar, or 75 cents, depending on size.
Grown as a shade tree and as an ornamental, by 1904, a Los Angeles Times article noted this addition to the California tree family as “one of the most beautiful trees.” With “immense lilac flowers,” the tree as a whole created “an effect of bewildering beauty.” said the story.
For a Jewish Angeleno, the violet beauty of a blooming jacaranda can connect us to our story in colorful ways. Looking to the Bible, we are people tangled up in blue. A thread of blue-violet on the fringe on the corners of a garment was specified in the Torah, and related to that, there is the blue-striped flag of Israel. The Torah words “am segula,” or special people (am), used to denote Israel, can also be interpreted, playing off the Hebrew word “segol,” purple, to suggest we are a “purple people.”
In earlier times, purple was the color of royalty. Today, with it being a color of the Lakers, one might think that Randy Newman should have worked the jacaranda into the lyrics of “I Love L.A.”
The jacaranda, a semitropical tree, is also popular in Israel. Blooming there in May, it’s branches and blossoms have the potential to reach out to Jews in L.A. and Jerusalem as we both head into Shavuot.
Like the jacaranda itself, the connection that flowers have to Shavuot is both beautiful and a little mystical. A classic interpretation of why flowers on Shavuot begins in the Torah. Before Moses went to Mount Sinai to receive the 10 Commandments, God warned Israel that not only “shall no one else shall be seen anywhere on the mountain, but “neither shall the flocks and herds graze at the foot of this mountain.”
So how did the animals find food? A midrash explains that a miracle occurred: The desert was temporarily turned into fertile land complete with presumably grazeable greenery. As a result, a custom developed to decorate synagogues and homes with flowers and branches.
But this year, when the synagogues are closed, and we are tired of being holed up, we yearn to connect with the flowers outside. As the city begins to open a petal or two, and we again venture out, a lovely wave can be miraculous. On that day, when we celebrate the receiving of the Torah, the basis for much of what colors our lives, in a show of nature that no official can order, or pandemic prevent, the lovely, intense purple-blue of the jacaranda awaits us.
Torah on the streets of LA
In matters of sheer jubilation and creativity, Shavuot the least observed of the major Jewish holidays in the U.S., has so much unrealized potential. Also known as the holiday of Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah, at its heart, Shavuot is a holiday about receiving a great a gift and the customs that have evolved to help us celebrate the occasion. This Saturday’s (5/30) holiday Torah portion Re’eh, tells us how to countdown till the days of the celebration: “You shall count off seven weeks; start to count the seven weeks when the sickle is first put to the standing grain,” says the text. Shavuot, at first, was celebrated as a harvest festival, a time when you gave a freewill contribution “according as the Lord your God has blessed you,” says the Torah. For those who have been spending the last couple of months out in the garden as a way to keep your sanity, it’s time to begin the harvest, and feel blessed for your harvest. “You shall rejoice,” the text tells us. Later interpretations gave us another reason to rejoice. Using the text, they calculated that 50 days after Israel left Egypt was when Israel assembled before Mount Sinai, on a day filled with lighting and thunder, to receive a great gift—The Law. To remember that day, on the first day of Shavuot we read the portion which contains the 10 Commandments. Adding beauty to that act, beginning around the 14th century, it became a custom on Shavuot to spread greenery and flowers on the floors of German synagogues, and later homes as well. No one is certain why, but an explanation that has appeal for our time is that since Shavuot is a harvest holiday, we remind ourselves of the blessings of the earth by surrounding ourselves with a harvest of fruits, vegetables, grains and flowers. Helping us to visualize those blessings, on the streets of L.A., 7315 Melrose to be exact, a mural of vibrant flowers painted by David Flores on the wall of Ronan, a restaurant which specializes in serving food created from sustainable sources, resonates with this spirit of bounty and beauty.
Portrait of Rachel Rosenthal, ca. 1990, Photo by Steven Arnold. Image Courtesy of The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives.
Rosenthal gets encore at the Getty
The archive of Los Angeles performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who died in 2015, was acquired recently by the Getty Research Institute. The archive documents her entire career as a pioneer of performance and feminist art.
The collection covers every phase of Rosenthal's career, said the Getty, including her early years in Paris and New York, her formative time in the artistic scene surrounding Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns through the 1950s, her development of the experimental theater company Instant Theatre in the 1950s and 60s, and her awakening into the feminist movement in the 1970s, and beyond.
The collection includes many diaries and sketchbooks, extensive correspondence, and photographs and audiovisual documentation of Rosenthal’s major projects.
In 1964, coming to the attention of the L.A. Jewish community, Rosenthal’s Instant Theater company gave a performance at Temple Isaiah, as part of a fundraising luncheon to help raise funds for Cedars-Sinai Hospital, according to a story in the B’nai B’rith Messenger. “Miss Rosenthal studied with famed pantomimist Marcel Marceau in Paris, was drama and dance coach at the Pasadena Playhouse, and was a member of the outstanding Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York,” said the story.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Rosenthal was born in Paris in 1926. As a young girl, she studied ballet with the former Russian National Ballet prima ballerina Olga Preobrajenskaya. In 1940, with the Nazi occupation of France, her upper-middle class family was forced to flee, first to Portugal, and then to Brazil. They traveled to New York in 1941 and settled in the United States.
In 1945, Rosenthal became a U.S. citizen and studied painting. She also took classes at the New School for Social Research between 1945 and 1947.
Rosenthal moved to Los Angeles in 1955 and remained here for the rest of her life. She married actor King Moody in 1960, and the two ran the Instant Theatre, located at 804 North El Centro Avenue in Hollywood., until it closed in 1966. In 1980, Rosenthal bought the current location of the Rachel Rosenthal Company, a storefront on 2847 South Robertson Avenue, where she also lived.
In 1990, she was awarded a J. Paul Getty Fellowship and the College Art Association award for Distinguished Body of Work, and in 1994 she received a Women’s Caucus for Art Honor Award.
To see a Rachel Rosenthal performance piece was a startling and sometimes amusing experience. In the 1980s, in an art space on La Brea, this reporter saw a Rosenthal performance where she appeared with a large bird cage over her head, along with an occasionally fluttering live bird inside the cage with her.
A Zoomish Jewish U
Zooming around the Jewish communities of L.A., San Francisco and Orange County these last weeks was a new kind of peripatetic learning experience. Yes, there were the de rigueur candid camera moments: a boomer-zoomer participant thoughtfully licking a large wooden cooking spoon, a man asleep at his pc, and a woman, who did not realize she was unmuted, talking baby talk to her dog, but overall, the format made it easy for me to consume some nourishing little squares of Jewish history, and even spirituality.
Through a program hosted by American Jewish University, I joined artist Hillel Smith in a visual exploration of the “Lost Synagogues of Los Angeles.” Smith paints Jewish murals, among other things, and during his trips around the U.S., he has photographed and researched many buildings that were former synagogues (See photos of his finds HERE). “Does it make him sad to see them?” a participant asked via text. “No.” replied Smith, who sees the re-use of these former synagogues, sometimes by other religious groups, in a positive light.
The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco (remember when we had one of those in L.A.?) presented via zoom an interview with Rachel Biale about her new biographical book “Growing Up Below Sea Level.” (Find it HERE) During the interview by J. The Jewish News of Northern California editor Susan Fishkoff, Biale revealed some of the trials of growing up on a kibbutz, and in particular, the sociology of a childhood spent often away from her parents in the community’s children’s house.
Finally, on the week before Shavuot, Rabbi Lilly Kaufman, one of the editors of the Lev Shalem prayer book (Read more about it HERE), presented a teaching session on how, in this age of distance, to get a bit more out of prayer. Using Lev Shalem as a guide, she pointed out how various interpretations of the text provided a space for better understanding and contemplation of the liturgy. “How do we strengthen each other?” she asked. How do we strengthen “our prayers so that they are received?”
In answer to a question, Kaufman also provided a refreshing perspective on some of the aural difficulties and latency issues encountered in Zoom services. “What is the sound of prayer?” she asked. Talking about the sounds of murmuring in traditional Jewish prayer, she recalled that those praying in traditional synagogues do not always do so in unison and that praying in unison was only a more recent development.
Seen on the Way/DTWN
In the days before the digital age, toys ruled, and in the Western U.S., Pensick & Gordon, a toy wholesaler owned by two Jewish businessmen, was the ruler of the kingdom. When the company was founded in 1925, they sold firecrackers too, but then focused on wholesaling toys. In the 1940s, the company had its showroom in a downtown brick building (shown above today, and in the 1940s) at the corner of 3rd St. and Santa Fe. By the 1950s, they touted themselves as “The West’s Largest Exclusive Toy Wholesalers.” Samuel Pensick and Albert P. Gordon also put their organizational and salesmanship talents to work in the Jewish community. In 1956, Pensick was president of Mount Sinai Hospital and Clinic, and in 1957, he was chairman of the United Jewish Welfare Fund; raising over $6 million. In support of that campaign, Gordon was chairman of the UJWF’s commercial section. When it came to toys and fundraising, these two were players.
LETTERS
Re: Quarantine time trip with Grandpa Joe (5/1/2020) My grandmother was from Chernovitz. She loved living there. She said she went to fancy balls and loved to dance. Her father owned a lumber yard, so I guess they lived well. She said her older sisters marched in a parade for Emperor Franz Joseph. I think her older brother(s?) fought in WWI. I met one of them, Benjamin, and his family, at his 90th birthday party in Israel (Tel Aviv) in 1965. However, I learned from a friend's mother (much younger than my grandmother) that life for Jews in Chernovitz went downhill after WWI; at one point becoming part of Romania and under control of Nazi Germany. What provided happy girlhood memories to my grandmother became a living nightmare for my friend's mother. Now, apparently, Chernovitz is part of Ukraine. I have talked to my Soviet-trained engineer major appliance repairmen about it. They say it is a beautiful place, pleasant to visit, wooded and in the mountains.