The Breed Street Shul which I visited this past week is interesting considering the current festival of Passover and its themes of freedom, exodus and wandering…
Street view of the Breed Street Shul
This synagogue was built in 1915 in Boyle Heights, a working class neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles. At that time many residential subdivisions in western Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley had restrictive covenants in place prohibiting Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Irish, from purchasing property. Boyle Heights was free of such covenants resulting in a thriving working class community of new immigrants.
During the course of the 20th century those immigrants slowly moved out of the area, taking advantage of greater acceptance, improved economic conditions and new laws that outlawed racial discrimination. Today Boyle Heights is still predominantly first generation Latino, but recent Asian and Jewish immigrants typically settle in other areas. So the synagogue was no longer used and suffered from decades of neglect, vandalism, earthquake damage and abandonment.
Beginning in the late 1990s a movement began to try and save it, with designs for it to be used as a community center for the Latino neighborhood while keeping & restoring the old synagogue’s interesting features (for example frescos with the signs of the zodiac paired with the 12 tribes of Israel!). There are not enough jews in the area to justify a functioning synagogue.
The main sanctuary of the Breed Street Shul (synagogue) in its glory days…
