This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
LOS ANGELES — There will be Shabbat services in Pasadena this weekend.
That’s far more remarkable than it seems, considering the utter devastation the community faced just days ago. On Tuesday, the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena and parts of Pasadena, destroying the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. The congregation’s four buildings, a center of Jewish community life for 100 years, went up in flames.
But the community isn’t collapsing. The leadership quickly arranged for space at the nearby Mayfield School, a private academy, while it plans for the future.
“We’re definitely rebuilding,” said Peter Mendel, a sociologist at the Rand Corporation who joined the synagogue in 2004, and chairs its religious life committee. “It’s just a matter of figuring out things.”
Mendel, whom I reached by phone Thursday evening, said up to 100 people attend Shabbat services. This Saturday it might be even more.
“There’s something that you can’t replace about being in person,” Mendel said.
It’s true that Jewish communities have invested a lot in buildings, sanctuaries, halls and campuses, but none of those actually are the community. Perhaps our Jewish past, or at least the stories we tell about it, accustom us to wander — which is to say, to move on in order to survive.
And there’s no better symbol of that for the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center than the Nehdar Torah, which Mendel said will be in the holy ark when it’s opened during Sabbath services.
The Nehdar Torah’s survival and re-emergence echoes the story of the synagogue that shelters it.
In 1934, Samuel Nehdar, a leading importer in the Iranian port city of Khorramshahr, commissioned the Torah to mark the death of his first wife, the daughter of a famous rabbi in the region.
Nehdar remarried and moved to Tehran, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1967.
Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, fierce battles during the Iran-Iraq War destroyed Khorramshahr. The synagogue housing the Torah was ruined.
Iran recaptured Khorramshahr in 1982, and someone — it’s unclear who — took the Torah to Tehran for safekeeping.
By then, Nehdar was living in Pasadena. According to his son Raymond, Nehdar, who was a devout Jew, sent a 10-page letter directly to Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, to request “from one holy person to another” the Torah that had been part of the family for so many years.
“He knew they’d go and destroy the synagogues,” Raymond said in a temple history of the Torah in 2018. “He argued that since Khomeini was ordained he must have learned Hebrew and knew that the Torah was a holy book, so his Revolutionary Guards might have kept it.”
About six months later, the FBI notified Nehdar that a crate had arrived at the port of San Pedro from the Islamic Republic of Iran, addressed to him. Who mailed the crate remains another mystery.
When the crate made its way to his home, Nehdar opened it and found the Torah carefully wrapped inside. There was also a letter from the Ayatollah confirming that he did study Hebrew as part of his religious training. Afraid such a letter might appear suspicious to authorities, Nehdar crumbled it up and threw it out.
The Nehdar family donated the Torah to the temple, where it stands out among the more typical velvet-covered scrolls. The traditional Persian Torah is encased in a tall, hinged silver cylinder, or tik, which is engraved with flowers and leaves and crowned with a silver turban.
Samuel Nehdar died in 1993. His sons, Ray and Nate Nehdar, moved out of the Pasadena area. But until the pandemic, they used to come every Yom Kippur to hold the Torah, which the congregation still reads from every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — a symbol of enduring faith and community.
Then came Jan. 7.
As my Forward colleague Benyamin Cohen reported, four temple members and staff ran into the synagogue as flames closed in and ashes rained down. Choking on smoke, they were able to grab the Persian Torah just before the fire consumed the building.
All the Torahs survived, but the community, at least its physical manifestations, was devastated, as were the homes and businesses around it. Entire neighborhoods were wiped out. Altadena, a quiet foothill community filled with smaller, wood-framed houses, all but disappeared. It will take years to rebuild.
“We are in the process of beginning a marathon, and we are only in the first 100 meters,” said Jason Moss, executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys.
Moss, speaking at an emergency online information session organized by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, said the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center was “the spiritual home” of the community, “and we are grieving its loss.”
“What we are experiencing is unprecedented,” Moss said. “And yet, through all of this, I think we are seeing the example of what community really is all about.”
So far, 12 of the synagogue’s 440 families have reported losing their homes, and many more have been displaced from homes and apartments that are damaged. Temple staff are calling every member to assess the fire’s impact.
But while houses and temple buildings are gone, the community persists.
This Shabbat the rabbi will open the ark to reveal the Torahs, with the Nehdar Torah in its usual place, centered between the others.
Its shiny silver cylinder belies an important, telling part of its story. When the Nehdars first unwrapped the Torah after its long journey from Iran, they found the silver case covered in black soot and ash — a sure sign it had once survived a devastating fire.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
