Photoessay #2873 - Past California Jewry

Maybe a new research topic.  As my professor this quarter said, I already had an hypothesis in mind.  She teased me that I was her only student who would tell her she was flat out wrong.

I've already written about questioning the dominant Jewish narrative of the Jews coming from eastern Europe to the lower east side of NYC.  That did happen but there was another major migration before.  Which is why I probably will be eternally stuck in nineteenth century New Haven.  Hey, I'm the one who just spent an hour at the library reading through the New Haven Journal and Courier for January 1868.

The main point I challenged was the idea that conservative judaism 'won the battle of the suburbs' according to Jonathan Sarna.  My professor grew up in Detroit, only a few years younger than me and she remembered that the conservative congregations had the new fancy buildings in the suburbs.

What?  What?

That wasn't what I experienced at all.  My experience in California in the 1960s was that the big temples with the grand buildings and the big congregations were reform not conservative.  Just about every Jewish person I knew in high school and college was connected with a reform congregation if they were connected at all.

In Sacramento, there was a small conservative shul.  And a much larger reform temple which eventually split (but that's another story out of my view).

Related was that most of the Jewish families that I knew were headed by parents (like mine) who were from somewhere else.  And had no hesitation (like my parents) to move somewhere else.  It was all about the father's job.  So though, there were older people in the congregation, nobody I knew had their grandparents or other extended family around.  They were all back east.

So was this a California thing or am I just out of my mind????  Is there a story here?

Thinking about this, I ran into some interesting pictures from B'nai Israel where I grew up.  The temple building, way on the other side of town was built in 1954.  The first picture is a picture of the old building which was more downtown.  Never seen that before.  The second picture was at the groundbreaking ceremony on Riverside Blvd on the site of the old Riverside Baths and swimming pool.  Never knew that but there was a mighty mysterious water something or other across the street.  See all the kids?  That's in 1953.  My parents showed up only a few years later.  They likely didn't join until I was in kindergarten (1957) so I could go to Sunday School.  Which was on Sunday.  So that building was pretty new when I first happened upon it. Got the pictures from the Valley Community Newspapers site.