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She helped rescue the Torahs from their burning synagogue. A year later, Pasadena’s mishkan is thriving.
PASADENA — A year after fire reduced the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center to ash, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris stands in the rain on the empty lot where it once stood. Beneath her boots, the ground is slick; above her, the San Gabriel Mountains fade into fog — the inverse of the dry, wind-driven night when flames tore through this block.
As smoke filled the building, and ash began falling in the parking lot one year ago, Berman searched for her husband through the darkness, calling out to make sure the Torahs were being carried out. Joined by the synagogue’s president and custodian, they worked quickly, loading the 13 scrolls into two cars as the fire, a beast consuming Los Angeles, roared closer. By night’s end, the building was destroyed, the flames claiming it all.
Over the past year, the synagogue has been doing the work of recovery in plain sight and in borrowed space. It has not seen a collapse in membership; as many families have joined since the fire as in the year before it. The calendar has remained full. In 2025, the shul celebrated 25 bar and bat mitzvahs — one nearly every other week — even as services moved to a church chapel across town. And as the community continues to grieve what was lost, leaders are already imagining a rebuilt synagogue designed to better reflect how the congregation lives and gathers now.
For Berman, 55, that rhythm felt familiar.
She grew up in Buenos Aires and lived through two acts of mass violence that targeted the Jewish community there — the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, which killed 85 people, including friends of hers. In those moments, she was the one making sandwiches for rescue workers, helping others absorb shock.
The Eaton Fire that razed Pasadena was different.
“What surprised me,” she said, “was how loving and caring and strong and vibrant a community can be in the midst of tragedy. There was no doubt that we were going to be OK.”
Over the past year, she has watched people return to Jewish life who had once drifted away from it — not out of fear, but out of need.
“It surprised me how relevant a Jewish community can be in times of crisis,” she said. “I knew it from books. I had never experienced it.”
Some losses, she knows, cannot be replaced. On her office walls hung artwork painted by her mother. On her desk, a constant presence was a prayer book she had studied from since cantorial school, filled with notes, highlights, and the handwriting of her teachers.
“I can buy another siddur,” she said. “But I can’t replicate their writing.”
She speaks plainly about the trauma. Nightmares. Compartmentalization. What she calls a lockbox she has learned to keep sealed so she can continue doing her job. Only recently, she said, has she begun to feel steady enough to open it — helped by the arrival of a permanent rabbi, and by the knowledge that the community is no longer just surviving.
A temporary sanctuary
Shabbat arrives inside a side chapel at the First United Methodist Church, where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been gathering since the fire.
During Sukkot, the church opened its courtyard for a sukkah. Shul congregants found themselves explaining the holiday — its temporary walls, its invitation to dwell with uncertainty — to church members who stopped to ask questions. What might once have been an accommodation became, instead, a point of exchange: Jewish ritual practiced openly, and neighbors eager to understand it.
The chapel feels like a sanctuary in its own right. There are no crosses on the walls. The space is rectangular and airy, with wood arches vaulting toward the ceiling like the hull of an inverted ship. Gold-rimmed stained-glass windows run the length of the room on both sides. One of them, inexplicably, bears a purple menorah.
Only small details reveal the building’s Christian life: a New Century Hymnal tucked into the back of each pew, a Bible containing both the Old and New Testaments, a small tithing envelope resting beside it.
About 100 people fill the pews on Saturday morning. At the front of the chapel, Berman and Rabbi Joshua Ratner lead services alongside a bat mitzvah girl, while a guitarist and mandolin player keep the room humming.
The portable ark behind them has an unlikely backstory. It was crafted decades ago by a Los Angeles pediatrician (and father of Forward reporter Louis Keene) who had built it for his own shul which, at the time, was temporarily meeting at a Baptist church.
In recent years, the ark sat unused in the doctor’s garage. After the January 2025 wildfires, the family donated it to Pasadena — carried in and out of the church chapel each week, suddenly suited to a congregation without a permanent home.
For a year now, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has lived this way. “It’s a mishkan,” Ratner said. “A traveling tabernacle.”
As the service continues, Ratner delivers the sermon. He began the job in August, months after the fire, at a moment when the synagogue no longer had a building to offer him — only a congregation in flux.
Ratner, 50, spent his early career as a lawyer before pivoting to the pulpit. He applied for the Pasadena job before the fire, drawn by what he had heard about the community. When the building was destroyed, he thought the search would be called off.
“I assumed that would be the end of it,” he said.
Instead, synagogue leaders doubled down. They wanted a rabbi not after recovery, but in the middle of it.
When Ratner visited Pasadena after the fire, he was struck by what he found. Hundreds of people filled Friday night and Shabbat morning services — not out of obligation, but solidarity.
The community, Ratner sensed, was grieving, but not frozen. “There’s no doubt or existential fear,” he said. “While we’re still mourning what we lost, we’re already morphing into the future.”
Since his arrival, the momentum has held. “Every week almost feels new,” Ratner said. “Like a simcha.”
A family without a home
For some of the shul families, the losses were not only communal.
In neighboring Altadena, Heather Sandoval Feng and her husband, Oscar, stand on the front steps of what used to be their home. The fire left behind a pile of rubble and a concrete staircase leading nowhere.
Three weeks after the fire destroyed their house, their daughter Hannah became a bat mitzvah.
Like the congregation itself, the family was displaced. They moved in with Heather’s parents nearby. Life became provisional — borrowed bedrooms, borrowed routines, borrowed time. And yet Hannah’s bat mitzvah went ahead as planned, held in the church chapel where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center now gathers each Shabbat.
“There was something strangely comforting about that,” Heather said. “The synagogue had lost its home. We had lost ours. We were going through it together.”
Oscar described the year as one long exercise in adjustment — learning how to live without the assumption of permanence. “We’ve had to be a little nomadic,” he said, looking over as their son, Noah, 10, played in the dirt where his bedroom once stood.
The bat mitzvah ceremony became a life lesson — not just about Torah, but about continuity without certainty. “It turned into a teachable moment,” Oscar said.
What sustained them, both parents said, was the congregation’s steadiness. Tutors kept showing up. Shabbat kept coming. People checked in — not performatively, but persistently. The synagogue did not treat their family as a separate tragedy. It folded them into its own.
“There was never a question of whether things would still happen,” Heather said. “The answer was always: Of course they will.”
Holding steady and looking ahead
In the months after the fire, synagogue leaders worried about what displacement might do to membership. Instead of a drop-off, the numbers told a different story. Since the fire, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has welcomed 49 new families — roughly the same number it added the year before. A handful of families have moved away, some because of the fire itself, but overall membership has remained remarkably consistent, hovering around 430 families.
An added bonus: Some relatives who flew in from out of town for bar and bat mitzvahs found themselves so moved by the congregation that they later joined it themselves.
What surprised Melissa Levy, the synagogue’s executive director, was not just the endurance, but the momentum behind it. Families kept calling. Local Jews who were not members wanted to now join the congregation.
“It’s amazing,” she said, “but it’s also a testament to how strong this community already was.”
That strength has been built over more than a century.
Founded in 1921 as Temple B’nai Israel, the congregation moved onto its current property in 1941, a campus of Mission Revival–style buildings arranged in a U-shape — a midcentury synagogue just beyond the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that had expanded over decades to include classrooms, playgrounds, and a social hall. At one point, it even had a swimming pool. During World War II, the synagogue hosted USO-style dances for servicemen stationed nearby.
Members have included NASA engineers, Caltech professors, and those who built their dreams among the stars. “I used to joke that growing up in Pasadena, our shul had doctors, lawyers and rocket scientists,” said Rabbi Alex Weisz, whose family has been members for generations.
As Jewish demographics shifted, the congregation absorbed others — merging with Shomrei Emunah and later Shaarei Torah — eventually becoming the singular Conservative synagogue serving the western San Gabriel Valley.
That history now informs the future, and what rises in its place will not be a replica of what was lost. The new building will be more intentional: fewer walls, more flexibility, and spaces designed around how congregants actually spend time together now.
Plans call for open gathering areas where parents can linger when their children are in classes — places to work, talk, or simply stay — rather than treating the synagogue as a drop-off point. There will be more glass and fewer corridors, designed to draw the San Gabriel Mountains into view. Outdoor areas are meant not just for overflow, but for prayer and meditation — quiet spaces that look outward, toward the hills that rise behind Pasadena.
“We were fitting a circle into a square,” Levy said. The new building is being imagined as a place where different generations can overlap rather than pass through on separate schedules.
The goal is not grandeur, but usability. A synagogue that can hold worship and study, celebration and stillness — and that reflects a community that has learned, over the past year, how to gather without relying on walls at all.
The scale of what lies ahead is substantial. Rebuilding is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars. Insurance will cover roughly half of that amount — money that was paid out quickly and is already in an account collecting interest — but the rest will need to be raised by the congregation itself. The cost is immense, especially for middle-class Pasadena, but leaders describe it as something to be faced, not feared.
They hope to open the new building by the High Holidays of 2028 — not as a return to what was lost, but as an expression of what the community has become. For now, those plans exist alongside grief. But Jewish life continues — weekly, seasonally, insistently.
Asked what it feels like to stand at the site of the fire a year later, Cantor Berman pauses.
“I don’t really have words for it,” she said.
Rain dots the cracked pavement beneath her feet, darkening the outline of the lot where the synagogue once stood.
After the fire — after the Torahs had been rescued and the building reduced to rubble — she returned to the site and took one small thing that was still standing. Not a ritual object. Not a book. It was the sign from her parking space — Reserved for the Cantor — something ordinary that had marked the rhythm of returning to the same place, day after day.
There were other losses, she said. Some she remembers clearly. Others she does not.
“The things I don’t remember having,” she said, “will haunt me forever.”
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JD Vance continues to minimize right-wing antisemitism as fringe influencers gain ground
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance again downplayed the idea that conservatives should safeguard their ranks against antisemitism, a week after his ally Tucker Carlson hosted yet another antisemitic conspiracy theorist on his web show.
Vance’s latest brief comments, made Tuesday during an interview with conservative radio host and CNN pundit Scott Jennings, came in response to Jennings asking, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?”
“No it doesn’t, Scott,” the vice president replied, toward the end of their interview.
Vance continued by asserting that conservatives, drawing on Christian influences, were welcoming of all backgrounds.
“I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the great things about the conservative coalition, is that we are, I think, fundamentally rooted in the Christian principles that founded the United States of America.”
He added, “And one of those very important principles is that we judge people as individuals. Every person is made in the image of God. You judge them by what they do, not by what ethnic group they belong to.”
Vance’s comments follow a series of similar remarks by the vice president over the past month as major right-wing groups such as Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation grapple with the growing influence of Nick Fuentes and other openly antisemitic forces. Vance has also indicated his own skepticism in the U.S.-Israel relationship and stated that stopping immigration is the best approach to fighting antisemitism.
One Jewish conservative analyst still employed with Heritage — after a slew of employees left for a competing group — criticized Vance’s latest comments.
“Need a better answer from @JDVance on why the conservative movement should not tolerate antisemitism than what is effectively the equivalent of @TheDemocrats’ ‘…and Islamophobia’ response,” Daniel Flesch, a Heritage policy analyst for the Middle East and North Africa, posted on the social network X.
Flesch referenced his contention that Democratic leaders’ stock answer to addressing antisemitism is that it must be paired with addressing Islamophobia, rather than treated as its own unique problem.
Among Jewish conservatives’ biggest areas of consternation within the party right now: Carlson, the media figure who has platformed Fuentes and other conspiracy theorists while also maintaining close ties with Turning Point, Heritage and Vance himself. This week in Israel’s Knesset, a lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party denounced Carlson and fellow podcaster Candace Owens by name in an English-language speech.
Last week Carlson continued to fan the flames by hosting Ian Carroll, a conspiracy theorist who has proclaimed “Israel did 9/11”; that “Israel did their best to embellish and enflame the history books” on the Holocaust; and that sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was “working on behalf of Israel.”
Carroll has made inroads in the conservative media sphere for a while. He appeared on Joe Rogan’s mega-popular podcast last year and, in 2024, moderated a campaign event for then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., today President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Carroll’s appearance on Carlson’s show came after both Trump and Vance refused to denounce Carlson for his friendly interview with Fuentes last year.
In their Jan. 2 interview, Carroll and Carlson primarily discussed the 2017 mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. Carroll shared numerous conspiracy theories about the events of that evening, during which the shooter also fired rounds at a jet fuel tank stored at a nearby airport.
“And then there’s things happening at the airport that are strange, that there’s some shooting happening at the airport. So it’s like, is this a gang war between the Italian mob and the Jewish mob? Is this a CIA operation that went wrong?” Carroll muses at one point. “Is this, like, a Mossad operation? Any of those things would need to fit the facts.”
Carroll continued, “In lieu of enough facts, you can try to fit a perpetrator to the facts and invent explanations that will work.”
Later in the interview, Carlson muses about Carroll directly to him, “I’ve never seen anybody come to prominence faster, ever, in our world. And that’s led to a lot of speculation that you’re, like, a CIA officer in disguise.”
Carroll then offers, “Or I’m like, Mossad.”
To which Carlson concludes, “My personal explanation is you’re just an amazing explainer and a diligent researcher, and you’re really interested in what’s true. And those are the three qualities that make a successful person in our world.”
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EU-Funded NGO Backed Online Platform Targeting Jewish Businesses in Catalonia
Supporters of Hamas demonstrate outside the Israeli Embassy in Madrid, Oct. 18. Photo: Reuters/Guillermo Yllanes Gonzalez
The controversial online platform mapping Jewish-owned businesses, schools, and Israeli-linked companies in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain, was promoted by an EU-funded non-governmental organization.
On Tuesday, NGO Monitor — an independent Jerusalem-based research institute that tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations — released new information showing that Engineers Without Borders – Catalonia (ESF-C) and Universities with Palestine (UAP) jointly promoted the BarcelonaZ project on social media, identifying themselves as its primary backers.
First reported by the local Jewish outlet Enfoque Judío, the interactive map was launched by an unidentified group claiming to be “journalists, professors, and students” on the French-hosted mapping platform GoGoCarto.
As a publicly accessible and collaboratively created online platform, the map marked over 150 schools, Jewish-owned businesses — including kosher food shops — and Israeli-linked as well as Spanish and international companies operating in Israel, labeling them as “Zionist.”
“Our goal is to understand how Zionism operates and the forms it takes, with the intention of making visible and denouncing the impact of its investments in our territory,” the project’s website stated.
According to NGO Monitor’s newly released report, ESF-C is a European Union–funded NGO running a Youth Internship Program subsidized by the Public Employment Service of Catalonia, with 40 percent co-financing from the European Social Fund Plus — the EU’s primary program for funding employment, education, and social initiatives.
The EU Financial Transparency System shows that ESF‑C partnered on two EU grants worth about $2.8 million from 2019 to 2023 and received at least $164,000 in funding.
Jewish leaders in Spain have strongly denounced the BarcelonaZ initiative, warning that it fosters further discrimination and hatred against the community amid an increasingly hostile environment in which Jews and Israelis continue to be targeted.
“The mapping and boycotting of Jewish businesses in Catalonia is an echo of some of the darkest chapters in history, including the prelude to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany,” the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Director of European Affairs, Shannon Seban, said in a statement.
“The organizers of this initiative put a target on the backs of Spanish Jews, at a time when Jews are being hunted across the globe, as seen so horrifically in Australia just three weeks ago,” she said, referring to the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which killed 15 people and wounded at least 40 others.
“Clear incitement to violence of this nature must not be platformed or tolerated by internet companies or government authorities,” Seban continued.
On its website, ESF-C describes its mission as promoting “a fair international society, which does not exclude anyone,” and highlights its commitment to “non-denominationalism and non-partisanship.” Yet, the NGO’s 2024 annual report also asserts that it “cannot ignore the Palestinian resistance, a clear expression of the struggle for freedom of all oppressed peoples.”
In a social media post, the NGO also accused Israel of “genocide” during its defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, describing its platform as “a resource designed to inform, raise awareness, and mobilize the educational and student community in Catalonia.”
“The attacks that began on Oct. 7 have involved water and electricity cuts, the boycott of essential water infrastructure, and the contamination of Palestinian water sources,” ESF-C wrote in an Instagram post, without mentioning the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.
“The violation of these basic rights is a key weapon used by the State of Israel to perpetuate genocide,” the statement read.
NGO Monitor also revealed that UAP is a network of Catalan faculty- and student-led anti-Israel organizations that co-sponsored the BarcelonaZ project.
Last year, UAP organized a “People’s Court” at Complutense University of Madrid on what it called the “Palestinian genocide,” with attendance from several terror-linked NGOs and individuals, including Samidoun, Masar Badil, Al-Haq, and Raji Sourani, NGO Monitor reported.
Several community organizations have filed complaints with GoGoCarto, demanding the site’s removal and arguing that it violates French laws against hate speech and discrimination.
Earlier this week, GoGoCarto announced it had removed the BarcelonaZ project from its website after local groups denounced the initiative as blatantly antisemitic and dangerous.
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Knesset member from Netanyahu’s party decries ‘new enemy’: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens
(JTA) — In an address to the Knesset on Monday, Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz decried what he said was a “new enemy” rising within American politics: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
“We are used to enemies from outside. We fight terror tunnels of Hamas. We fight the ballistic missiles of Iran. But today I look at the West, our greatest ally, and I see a new enemy rising from within,” said Illouz, who is originally from Canada originally, in an English address. “I am speaking of a poison being sold to the American people as patriotism. I’m speaking of the intellectual vandalism of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.”
Illouz’s comments come as the Republican party has been roiled in recent months by debates over the mainstreaming of antisemitic influencers within the GOP.
טאקר קרלסון וקנדיס אוונס הם לא פטריוטים – הם ונדלים אינטלקטואלים. הם טוענים שהם נלחמים בשמאל הקיצוני, אבל הם בדיוק אותו דבר: אותה שנאה למערב, אותו רלטיביזם מוסרי ואותו ניסיון להחריב את המורשת שלנו ואת המערב. pic.twitter.com/ygN70WtGEw
— דן אילוז – Dan Illouz (@dillouz) January 7, 2026
In October, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson hosted far-right antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes on his platform, igniting outrage from Jewish conservatives who warned of the growing reach of antisemitic voices.
Owens has long made antisemitic rhetoric a hallmark of her YouTube channel, which has 5.7 million subscribers. A recent analysis of her content by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that three-quarters of her videos that mentioned Jews were antisemitic.
“They claim to fight the woke left. They are no different than the woke left,” said Illouz. “The radical left tears down the statues of Thomas Jefferson, Tucker Carlson tears down the legacy of Winston Churchill. The radical left says Western civilization is evil, Candace Owens says the roots of our faith are demonic. It is the same sickness.”
Carlson and Owens are among the right-wing influencers who have made opposition to Israel a centerpiece of their output, at a time when support for Israel is declining among conservatives, particularly younger conservatives.
In November, Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Diaspora minister, echoed Illouz’s concerns in an interview with the New York Post, telling the outlet that he was “far more concerned about antisemitism on the right than on the left.” The comments were notable because Chikli is himself a right-wing, anti-“woke” warrior who, in a first for Israel, has stoked relationships with far-right European parties that in some cases have ties to the Nazis.
“One of the worst moments was when a popular conservative broadcaster called one of the most vile Holocaust deniers in America ‘one of the most honest historians.’ That legitimizes hate — it normalizes it,” Chikli told the New York Post, appearing to refer to Carlson’s past praise of the Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper.
Chikli also warned against the rising influence of Fuentes and Cooper among young Americans.
“Antisemitism has become fashionable for Gen Z,” Chikli continued. “They listen to podcasts, not professors. When people like Nick Fuentes or Darryl Cooper are treated as thought leaders, that’s dangerous. These are neo-Nazis.”
The Times of Israel asked Illouz whether he was worried about appearing to interfere with American politics. “Defending the alliance between America and Israel is not interfering,” he said. “I am in touch with many pro-Israel conservatives who know that Candace and Tucker are a threat to America as much as to Israel.”
Top GOP officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have largely dismissed calls from Jewish conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, and others to draw a line against antisemitic influencers.
“Do you think you are the first to try to delegitimize the Jewish people? We are the people of eternity,” said Illouz toward the conclusion of his address, adding that “we will be here long after your YouTube channels are forgotten dust.”
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