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June 25, 2004/Tamuz 6 5764, Vol. 56, No. 40
A tour of Jewish San Diego
Beach city's Jewish community grows
DONALD H. HARRISON
Special to Jewish News
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz, formerly of Phoenix, stands outside Temple Beth Sholom in Chula Vista, which converted a former church building.
Photo courtesy of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage
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Drive west into San Diego on Interstate Highway 8 and you'll pass shrinking Jewish areas on your left and expanding Jewish areas on your right. San Diego's Jewish population, in other words, is moving north.
In fact, the dividing line could be drawn even farther north along California State Route 52, a roadway that runs approximately parallel to Interstate 8.
There are six Jewish areas in San Diego County where you can find clusters of synagogues and Jewish agencies. Three of them are located to the south of State Route 52 and three to the north. The three southern communities - including Chula Vista, central San Diego, and east San Diego - are older areas of Jewish settlement, with lots of history. The three northern communities - La Jolla, North County Coastal and North County Inland - are the newer, generally more expensive, areas, with lots of people.
Some synagogues and Jewish communal facilities have been following the northward migration of Jews even as other synagogues have been springing up in the northern areas to fill the needs of newcomers to San Diego County.
For example, historic Congregation Beth Israel, which opened its doors in 1889 and moved to a second home near downtown San Diego in 1926, relocated three years ago to a third, Jerusalem-inspired campus in La Jolla.
The Jewish Community Center, once a landmark in the San Diego State College area in the eastern part of San Diego, now is located in La Jolla, closer to University of California, San Diego. The Hebrew Home for the Aged, which had been the old JCC's neighbor, also departed the State College area and now is located on two campuses in the north county. One is in the coastal city of Encinitas; the other in the inland city of Poway. Besides having more posh addresses, the Hebrew Home also has a more upscale-sounding name: Seacrest Village Retirement Communities.
Just last month, the San Diego Jewish Academy decided to close its eastern San Diego campus, rented from Tifereth Israel Synagogue in the San Carlos area. Students were offered the option of transferring to its newer, more elaborate campus in the Carmel Valley community in the northern coastal portion of the city of San Diego. There were not enough students to warrant the expense of a separate campus in San Carlos, according to administrators.
The move was another blow to Tifereth Israel Synagogue, the second oldest congregation of San Diego, which will observe its 100th anniversary next year. The Conservative congregation, strapped for funds because of declining membership, recently could not renew the contract of a popular cantor, who quickly was snapped up by a congregation in Cherry Hill, N.J. (For several years during the 1980s, Tifereth Israel had a sister relationship with Har Zion Congregation in Scottsdale, resulting from the longtime friendship between the cantors who were serving those congregations at the time.)
There are, of course, pockets of exceptions in San Diego's Jewish geographical odyssey. After the second Temple Beth Israel, located at Third & Laurel close to downtown, was sold to a private developer, it was acquired by a Conservative congregation, Ohr Shalom Synagogue. Catering to a mixed Spanish-speaking and English-speaking membership, Ohr Shalom's prospects are expanding as pricey high-rise condominiums are being built near the rim of Balboa Park as well as in nearby downtown San Diego.
Near the border with Mexico, inland of the Interstate 805 freeway, there are semi-expensive residential areas like Eastlake and Bonita that are attracting Jewish settlers, fueling hopes that two Chula Vista congregations - Beth Eliyahu Torah Center, a Sephardic congregation, and Temple Beth Sholom, a Conservative congregation - may be beneficiaries of this new growth. Of interest to Phoenicians is the fact that the Conservative rabbi at Temple Beth Sholom, Jeffrey Lipschultz, grew up in the Phoenix area.
If one continues west on Interstate 8 all the way to Old Town San Diego State Park, an introduction to San Diego's Jewish history awaits. Turn off at the Taylor Street exit, go over the freeway, turn right and go to the traffic signal at Juan Street, where you should make a left and then find a parking space.
Park headquarters are located in the Robinson-Rose House, named after two settlers who arrived by wagon train from El Paso in 1850, James W. Robinson and Louis Rose. The mezuzah on the door on the right is in honor of Rose, a German Jewish immigrant. He had grown up along the busy Elbe River and wondered why San Diego was located a couple miles inland under Presidio Hill rather than flush against beautiful San Diego Bay.
The answer was that in 1769 when Franciscan Padre Junipero Serra and the soldier Gaspar de Portola founded San Diego, the Spanish had three criteria for where to begin a settlement: it should be up high so it could be defended; it should have a nearby fresh water supply; and it ought to be in close proximity to Indians to Christianize. Presidio Hill met all three criteria. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, soldiers were permitted to move from the fort, and they settled on land just below it - today the area known as Old Town.
The Mexican-American War resulted in California (as well as New Mexico and Arizona) being ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. That was the same year gold was discovered in California, bringing a flood of immigrants including Robinson and Rose. Robinson once had served as the acting provisional governor of Texas in the days leading up to the battle at the Alamo, and figured he could get rich in California with his knowledge of the law pertaining to Spanish and Mexican land grants. By 1850, the year Robinson and Rose arrived, California had enough residents to become a state.
Rose leased a building for a hotel and saloon on a small street paralleling Juan Street, today an alleyway inside the park. He later added a general store and a butcher shop to his group of enterprises. Other Jewish merchants located their stores near Rose's, and during the 1850s, when Jews constituted about 10 percent of the population, the street was called Avenida des Judios (Avenue of the Jews). Across the plaza, where the American flag first was raised over the town in 1846, another Jewish merchant, Lewis Franklin, built San Diego's first "skyscraper" in the mid-1850s - the three-story Franklin Hotel.
Franklin had hosted the first High Holiday services on the West Coast in 1849 in his tent in San Francisco, and the next year was the featured speaker at the observance. But in 1851, he moved to San Diego, meeting with a handful of other Jews for a Yom Kippur service with less than a minyan. Rose apparently was out of town.
Rose served in a variety of public offices, including the city Board of Trustees and the first County Board of Supervisors. He believed the city's future was on the waterfront, so he purchased property at auction on San Diego Bay, where he later developed a town called Roseville and donated to the Jewish community its first cemetery.
Today Roseville is part of the Point Loma community, with "Roseville" practically unknown except as a name on a map. However, another stretch of land to the north of Old Town, on the old stagecoach road between San Diego and Los Angeles, bears his name: Rose Canyon. The Jewish pioneer built the area's first tannery there, but among geologists, the site is far better known as the location of the Rose Canyon Fault, the city's prime earthquake zone.
While Rose was looking to develop the northern shore of San Diego Bay, another entrepreneur had more success on land along the eastern shore. Alonzo Horton laid out "Horton's Addition" after purchasing the land from city trustees, including another Jewish pioneer merchant, Joseph S. Mannasse. Today Horton's development has evolved into downtown San Diego, where the best-known shopping plaza is named for him.
Shortly after purchasing that land, Horton persuaded a new board of trustees to set aside public land near his project for the city park that later would become Balboa Park, the cultural heart of San Diego. On the Laurel Street Bridge entry way to the museum-laden park is listed the name of one of those trustees, Mannasse's partner, Marcus Schiller.
Jews had been observing holidays at each other's homes, but by 1889 they felt plentiful and rooted enough to celebrate Rosh Hashana in their own building, which was erected near Balboa Park at Second and Beech Street. The building featuring Star of David windows and Tablets of the Law jutting above the roofline today is located in Heritage Park, next to Old Town San Diego. The Save Our Heritage Organization considered the building a fine example of Victorian architecture and moved it in 1978 to the county-owned park, where notwithstanding its design it is used as a nonsectarian meeting place. An upstairs balcony was built not for women - as visitors often guess - but for overflow seating. The congregation began in the Reform tradition.
In 1905, Beth Israel had a small Orthodox minyan, which was dissatisfied about the amount of time available for its services. You guessed it: the Orthodox started their own congregation that was named Tifereth Israel Synagogue. The Orthodox moved to the east side of downtown at 18th and Market streets, and after becoming a Conservative congregation, Tifereth Israel moved in 1948 further east to 30th and Howard streets. Those members who wanted to remain Orthodox began a new congregation close by, which they named Congregation Beth Jacob. For decades the three synagogues - Beth Israel, Tifereth Israel and Beth Jacob - respectively Reform, Conservative and Orthodox - were the only ones serving San Diegans. Today there are more than 30.
The decade after World War II saw development of some Jewish "outposts." A combination Jewish community center and synagogue was started in Vista, up in the inland portion of North County. Another synagogue and community center, following the same architectural model, was built across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, where refugee Jews from Europe had built a community. Although today it is Spanish-speaking, it was Ashkenazic and not Sephardic in origin. Meanwhile, Congregation Beth El was begun in the Clairemont area of San Diego.
In those days La Jolla was prohibited to Jewish settlement, so many Jews moved instead to the eastern suburbs of San Diego, including the State College area, the communities of Del Cerro and San Carlos and the nearby cities of La Mesa and El Cajon. One of the most popular history professors at San Diego State was Abraham Nasatir, after whom one of the campus buildings is named. Another landmark on the campus is the Lipinsky Tower, named after Bernard Lipinsky who funded scholarships as well as SDSU's Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies.
San Diego's Sheriff, Bill Kolender, who previously had been San Diego's first Jewish police chief, likes to tell of the days when Del Cerro was called "Hanukkah Heights" by its Jewish residents.
It was to this area of Jewish concentration that Temple Emanu-El, a Reform congregation that had broken away from Beth Israel, moved. Later, so too did Tifereth Israel Synagogue and Beth Jacob Congregation. The first Chabad House in the area was opened in the 1970s by Rabbi Yonah Fradkin, today administrative head of a network of Chabad Houses stretching from Tijuana to Temecula in neighboring Riverside County. The area's first Hillel House also was opened at SDSU.
Jews in the 1950s and early 1960s referred to La Jolla as "La Goy-a" because of the covenant that forbade real estate agents from selling homes in the area to Jews. That covenant was broken when the Regents of the University of California told La Jollans, who wanted the prestige of a university nearby, that if Jews weren't permitted, UCSD would not be built.
Soon afterwards, another important educational institution was constructed nearby, the Salk Institute founded by the discoverer of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk.
Salk was among the Jews who happily made their homes in La Jolla. Today the upscale community is an important area of Jewish settlement, where Congregation Adat Yeshurun - with many Orthodox members from South Africa - makes its home, as does Congregation Beth El, the Conservative institution which moved from Clairemont and was the first to establish itself in La Jolla. Beth Israel, which operates its own day school, is the third largest synagogue in the area, and there are several Chabad congregations in such nearby areas as La Jolla Shores, University City and Del Mar.
Jewish contributions are in obvious evidence at UCSD, where students gather at the Price Center - named for Jewish entrepreneur Sol Price and family who created the Price Clubs. They also may study at the Joan & Irwin Jacobs School of Engineering.
A landmark on the eastern side of La Jolla is the Lawrence Family JCC, Jacobs Family Campus. The Jacobs family referred to at UCSD and here is that of Irwin Jacobs, a co-founder of Qualcomm, which developed the CDMA technology used by some cell phones. The company also paid for the naming rights at Qualcomm Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers football team plays in Mission Valley. The Lawrence family is that of the late M. Larry Lawrence who owned the famous and beautiful Hotel del Coronado on Coronado Island and was a powerhouse in California Democratic politics.
Jews did not stop their northward trek in La Jolla. They continued up the Interstate 5 to such places as Carmel Valley, where Congregation Beth Am has become one of the largest congregations in the county. Although Carmel Valley was named for Carmelite nuns who once had a farm there, their order was named for the mountain in Israel where Elijah defeated the priests of Baal.
For years, a Holocaust Torah that once had been used in the community of Roudnice, Czechoslovakia, was read during every bar and bat mitzvah ceremony. That forged an emotional connection, prompting congregants to find an example of Roudnice architecture on which to model elements of the Conservative congregation's building.
Further north in Encinitas, Temple Solel, a Reform congregation, had built a synagogue that it has now outgrown as a result of the mass Jewish in-migration. A new site is going up nearby. Meanwhile, smaller congregations ranging on the Jewish spectrum from Reform to Hasidic are dotted up the coast, all the way up to Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.
On the Interstate 15, meanwhile, there was another explosion of Jewish settlement. Today, working one's way north on 15 from the Interstate 8, one passes the turnoffs for the Soille Hebrew Day School (Orthodox), the United Jewish Federation, Congregation Dor Hadash (Reconstructionist) and the Agency for Jewish Education, all in the Kearny Mesa area.
Further up the road, in the Mira Mesa area, is San Diego's Humanistic Jewish Congregation. Beyond that, in the Scripps Ranch area, is the Chabad Hebrew Academy, where temporary buildings were burned in last October's wildfires but where a new main building under construction escaped the flames.
Continuing up the I-15 to the Poway turnoff, one encounters two large congregations, Chabad of Poway and Temple Beth Sholom (Reform). Ner Tamid Synagogue, a smaller congregation that is banking on its future growth, recently broke ground on another large parcel nearby.
Thereafter, there's a gap in Jewish institutions along the Interstate 15 until Temecula and Murrieta in southern Riverside County's wine country, where Congregation B'nai Chaim (Conservative) is benefiting from cheaper home prices that are drawing some people out of San Diego County.
San Diego County's Jewish community has approximately 89,000 Jews and approximately 40,000 non-Jews who are married to them or are otherwise members of their families. In size, the community is quite similar to that of Phoenix.
The community is facing many of the same issues with which Phoenix struggles - what to do about a soaring intermarriage rate, how to balance support for Israel and Jews overseas with support for local institutions, and where to locate other institutions for future growth.
Harrison is the former editor-in-chief and co-publisher of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage.
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