Devastated Jewish communities rally to support members as California wildfires rage on

LOS ANGELES — A fast-moving fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday night, threatening one of Los Angeles’s most iconic spots as firefighters were already battling three other major blazes that killed five people, put 130,000 people under evacuation orders and ravaged communities from the Pacific Coast to inland Pasadena.

Nearly 1,900 structures have been destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires, and the number is expected to increase.

The fires that have been raging since Tuesday have ravaged some local Jewish communities, whose leaders are striving to offer comfort amid the disaster.

Though the fire in the Palisades continues to blaze, the building that houses the Kehillat Israel synagogue remains standing, for now. The same, however, could not be said for the homes of many of the community’s 920 families, including that of Daniel Sher, the associate rabbi.

“We lost our home today,” he told The Times of Israel as he choked back tears.

Still, he did not want to focus on his personal loss, saying, “It’s not even so much about the loss of your own home, though I will not lie that that is devastating.

“The whole area has been desecrated, and every five minutes, I’m learning of more families who have lost their homes,” Sher said. “The framework of our community, our communal centers, and our recreation center and libraries and restaurants have all been just ripped away from us.”

“Everyone will be holding each other while being broken,” he said. “And I cannot begin to understand exactly how we will do that, but we will.”

That the synagogue building is still standing “has been some of the only glimmer of hope and calm that I have heard from the community,” he said. “And I have talked to many brokenhearted congregants today, but we are a community, and we still stand. It is going to be painful, but we are going to get through it.”

Rabbi Sharon Brous, founder of Los Angeles’s IKAR congregation, told The Times of Israel, “This is so widespread, and it was so fast. We reached out to the two shuls that we had heard were hardest hit and invited them to come join us for Shabbat at IKAR.”

Many of IKAR’s members were directly impacted by the fires with some having to evacuate and losing their homes.

Brous said IKAR is “just helping a lot of people who are feeling tremendous anxiety and uncertainty as they wait to discover what has actually happened to their homes. There have been a lot of very hard phone calls over the last 24 hours, and there are a lot of people who will face a very uncertain future.”

One of those forced to evacuate was local playwright Wendy Graf, who lives in Mandeville Canyon.

When the fire started in the Palisades on Tuesday morning, she didn’t expect it to reach her home, saying there were blue skies and no smell of smoke all day.

Then around 7:30 or 7:45 p.m. “police came down Mandeville saying “Evacuate, Evacuate, Evacuate!”

She and her husband threw a couple of outfits, their passports, and medications into a bag and left for a hotel.

Graf said it’s almost impossible to take in what has happened.

“I know the synagogue burned down, the high school burned down,” she said. “The elementary schools, everything. It’s incomprehensible.”

Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, was up all night with his staff doing everything they could to support the Jewish community.

“This is all too familiar,” Farkas told The Times of Israel, referencing several fires over the years that have impacted Southern California.

“But in many ways, it’s also completely unprecedented,” he added, “having four fires simultaneously.”

Learning of the devastating loss of the Chabad of the Palisades and the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, Farkas said, “We’ve been in touch with Rabbi Cunin, and it’s just devastating to see. What’s good news is that the Torahs got out.”

The Federation has also been in touch with the Pasadena Jewish Temple.

“It was such a cute, beautiful, Pasadena-esque, stucco, Mexican tile shul,” Farkas said. “And to see it burned to the ground is just heartbreaking.”

Flames spread to Hollywood

Winds eased up some Wednesday, a day after hurricane-force winds whipped up fireballs that leaped from house to house, incinerating swaths of California’s most desirable real estate. Hundreds of firefighters from other states have arrived to help, but the four fires burning out of control showed the danger is far from over.

More than half a dozen schools in the area were either damaged or destroyed, including Palisades Charter High School, which has been featured in many Hollywood productions, including the 1976 horror movie “Carrie” and the TV series “Teen Wolf,” officials said. UCLA has canceled classes for the week.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said air operations were dousing flames. She warned they still faced “erratic winds,” though not like Tuesday evening, when aircraft had to be grounded and much of the destruction occurred.

In Pasadena, Fire Chief Chad Augustin said the city’s water system was stretched and was further hampered by power outages, but even without those issues, firefighters would not have been able to stop the fire due to the intense winds fanning the flames.

“Those erratic wind gusts were throwing embers for multiple miles ahead of the fire,” he said.

On the Pacific Coast west of downtown Los Angeles, a major fire leveled entire blocks, reducing grocery stores and banks to rubble in the Pacific Palisades.

The Palisades Fire was the most destructive in Los Angeles history, with at least 1,000 structures burned.

The scope of the destruction was just becoming clear: Block after block of California Mission-style homes and bungalows were reduced to charred remains dotted by stone fireplaces and blackened arched entryways. Ornate iron railing wrapped around the smoldering frame of one house. The apocalyptic scenes spread for miles.

Swimming pools were blackened with soot, and sports cars slumped on melted tires.

Beyond the burned areas, residents worked wearing N95 masks, unable to escape the toxic smoke wafting over huge sections of the city.

The flames marched toward highly populated and affluent neighborhoods, including Calabasas and Santa Monica, home to California’s rich and famous. Mandy Moore, Cary Elwes, and Paris Hilton are among the stars who said Wednesday they lost homes.

Billy Crystal and his wife Janice lost their home of 45 years in the Palisades Fire.

“We raised our children and grandchildren here. Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away,” the Crystals wrote in the statement.

In Palisades Village, the public library, two major grocery stores, a pair of banks, and several boutiques were destroyed.

“It’s just really weird coming back to somewhere that doesn’t really exist anymore,” said Dylan Vincent, who returned to the neighborhood to retrieve some items and saw that his elementary school had burned down and that whole blocks had been flattened.

The fires have consumed a total of about 42 square miles (108 square kilometers) — nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco.

Flames moved so quickly that many barely had time to escape. Police sought shelter inside their patrol cars, and residents at a senior living center were pushed in wheelchairs and hospital beds down a street to safety.

In the race to get away in Pacific Palisades, roadways became impassable when scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot.

Water shortages caused some hydrants to run dry in upscale Pacific Palisades, officials said.

“We pushed the system to the extreme. We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems,” Janisse Quinones, chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told a press conference.

Pacific Palisades relies on three tanks that hold about a million gallons (3.78 million liters) each, and the demand for water to fight fires at lower elevations was making it difficult to refill water tanks at higher elevations, she said.

By Wednesday afternoon, all three of those tanks and all 114 reservoirs throughout the city were refilled, Quinones said in a later press conference.

US President Joe Biden signed a federal emergency declaration after arriving at a Santa Monica fire station for a briefing with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dispatched National Guard troops to help.

Several Hollywood studios suspended production, and Universal Studios closed its theme park between Pasadena and Pacific Palisades.

As of Wednesday evening, more than 456,000 people were without power in southern California, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.

Several Southern California landmarks were heavily damaged, including the Reel Inn in Malibu, a seafood restaurant. Owner Teddy Leonard and her husband hope to rebuild.

“When you look at the grand scheme of things, as long as your family is well and everyone’s alive, you’re still winning, right?” she said.