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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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Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win
(JTA) — It only took 25 minutes of play for the Irish national soccer team to build a 3-0 lead over Israel in the countries’ UEFA Nations League B match on Sunday. But there were decades of bad blood that preceded Ireland’s shutout victory in a game dominated more by the geopolitics of the Gaza war than about sports. One soccer writer described it as “arguably one of the most contentious football matches of this century.”
At the match, held in a mostly empty stadium in the neutral site of Debrecen, Hungary, the Irish players wore black armbands and bowed their heads in protest during the Israeli national anthem. There were no pre- or postgame handshakes, and one Irish player declined to participate altogether, citing his “personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.”
Ireland’s soccer federation did not reserve tickets for its fans, and the country’s public broadcaster scaled back its coverage of the game. The teams are set to meet again on Oct. 4 in Serbia, this time with Ireland as the “home” team.
Ireland and Israel have a long history of icy relations. Ireland became the first member of the European Union to call for an independent Palestinian country in 1980, and was among the first of the Western European countries to recognize an official Palestinian state in 2024. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin in response. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has rejected claims that his country’s sharp criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
In the months leading up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football governing body faced intense pressure to boycott the match. At a meeting in July, the Football Association of Ireland voted 75-32, with three abstentions, in favor of proceeding with the match, “while acknowledging the strength of feeling regarding support for Palestine.” The motion also noted that a boycott would come with UEFA sanctions, both financial and competitive: In League B matches, mid-tier nations seek to advance to the top division and boost their chances of qualifying for the quadrennial World Cup tournament. The Irish team itself also held a last-minute vote over whether to participate.
Earlier this month, more than 160 Irish athletes and sports figures signed an open letter calling on the national team to pull out of the match. The signatories included former Irish national team head coach Brian Kerr — who had led Ireland to a 2-2 draw against Israel in a 2005 match in Dublin that also took place amid protests.
Former Irish national team star Kevin Kilbane also authored a column in The Irish Times, writing, “Ireland should not play Israel. Not in Dublin, not in Hungary, not in Serbia. Not when Israel is committing genocide.” Israel denies the charge of genocide.
There were also a number of public barbs exchanged between leaders of the two countries and their football associations.
At a press conference last week, Irish coach Heimir Hallgrímsson replied to questions about the match by saying, “We are not playing with genocide, we are playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”
Israel’s football association responded to that comment with a post on X, writing, “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity. We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.”
That drew a rebuke from Martin, who told reporters, “They are unacceptable remarks and should be withdrawn.”
And on Sunday, the morning of the match, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted a lengthy tweet referencing the 1939 Irish squad that gave a Nazi salute before a game against the German national team.
“Almost 90 years have passed. Ireland’s unique talent for finding itself on the wrong side of history remains intact,” Sa’ar wrote. “Back then, they gave the Nazi salute. This time, they stand on the side of Palestinian terrorism. Above the black armbands the Irish players will wear tonight flies the black flag of jihadism.”
After the match, Israeli captain Manor Solomon said the Irish players who bowed their heads during the Israeli anthem “don’t interest me.”
“We have a country 10 times better than theirs, stronger, an amazing country with amazing people,” said Solomon, who plays in the English Championship league. “We are proud to wear the team shirt and to be Israelis. We are proud of our state and of our soldiers. [The Irish] can play all their tricks. We are Israelis and love the country. And that will always be the case.”
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Why is Karl Rove supporting a progressive Jewish candidate in Texas?
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish Texas state Sen. Jon Rosenthal has earned an unusual distinction: He is the first Democrat to win the vote of GOP guru Karl Rove in more than 30 years.
What did the only Jew serving in the Texas state house do to earn this distinction? It’s more what he didn’t do: run for statewide office with a track record of spewing racially charged and antisemitic comments.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad commissioner, has a history of rhetoric targeting people of color, Muslims and Jews, including a social media poll last year asking whether “Jews” or “Muslims” pose “a bigger threat to America.”
He also faced bipartisan blowback for a recent post targeting college students of color, and this week a CNN investigation revealed that French, in since-deleted posts, had called for public executions for former President Barack Obama, Jewish California Sen. Adam Schiff and government workers targeted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year.
The controversy has elevated the race for an obscure statewide office – albeit one that regulates the state’s all-important energy industry – into a larger referendum on the GOP’s tolerance for bigotry, including antisemitism, among its nominees.
Rove, for one, has made it clear where he thinks the party should stand.
“The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches — and not only in Texas,” Rove wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in explaining his decision to back Rosenthal.
Rove singled out growing antisemitism in the party: “There are ‘just asking questions’ Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots.”
Rove isn’t the only GOP stalwart to turn on French.
“Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized,” outgoing Texas Sen. John Cornyn wrote in condemning French’s social media musings. “This is how great political parties self-destruct.”
Cornyn has stopped short of backing Rosenthal, instead saying he might leave the ballot blank.
Texas Rep. Jon E. Rosenthal inside the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin on Aug. 18, 2025. (Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
Rosenthal and French have agreed to a debate on Oct. 22. French leads the race in polling released last week from Texas Southern University, but by a much slimmer margin than GOP candidates are accustomed to in Texas. Rosenthal’s campaign could also see a boost from fellow statewide Democratic candidate James Talarico, who is polling neck-and-neck with his opponent in the U.S. Senate race.
On social media, Rosenthal celebrated Rove’s endorsement, writing, “When GOP architect Karl Rove breaks a 30-year voting streak to endorse our campaign, it proves this race isn’t about party lines, it’s about competence vs. chaos.”
A former county Republican Party chair who defeated the incumbent GOP state railroad commissioner in a runoff primary, French spurred widespread backlash earlier this month after posting a photo of students of color at the University of Texas celebrating a football win to the social network X.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” French had captioned the photo on Sept. 13. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He has since doubled down on the sentiment, replying, “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans,” and using the backlash to solicit donations.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state House Speaker Dustin Burrows were among the other Republicans who criticized French for the post, though neither formally rescinded their support, and French continues to list Abbott’s endorsement on his site.
It was not French’s first brush with bigotry. In 2025, during his stint as Tarrant County GOP Chair, French posted an online “poll” asking his followers whether “Jews” or “Muslims” pose “a bigger threat to America.” In a follow-up post, he argued, “You may not like Jews, but to suggest they are a bigger threat to Americans is Jew Derangement Syndrome.”
French later deleted both posts, and has few visible tweets about Jews today. In later posts, he claimed, of himself, “There has never been any evidence of antisemitism. It would certainly be surprising to my Jewish partners.”
Jewish Republicans in the state and beyond are largely keeping their distance from French, with one exception. His campaign site currently touts an endorsement from American Jewish Conservatives, whose only listed chapter is in Dallas.
Neither French nor the group, formerly Dallas Jewish Conservatives, responded to JTA requests for comment on the endorsement. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition also did not return a request for comment on French.
Last month French cited a desire to combat antisemitism when arguing that Texas should not use mosques as polling places. In other posts, he accused a university in the state of “harboring radical left/antisemitic professors,” identified himself as both pro-Israel and pro-Tucker Carlson, the talk show host who has platformed antisemites and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and told one follower, “I have never served Israel. Don’t be a retard.”
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was among the GOP officials who condemned French’s tweet about Jews last year, calling on him to resign as county chair. “Antisemitism and religious bigotry have no place in Texas,” Patrick said then. French ultimately resigned months later in order to run for railroad commissioner.
Today, French lists Patrick as one of his endorsements. A spokesperson for Patrick, who recently told JTA he supported Texas schools assigning books on the Holocaust after public remarks apparently to the contrary, did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
French’s other listed endorsements include Texas congressional candidate Brandon Herrera, who has made jokes about Hitler and the Holocaust in YouTube videos.
Rove’s essay led to President Donald Trump wading into the controversy, calling Rove “so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” in a post on his social network Truth Social. Trump’s post did not mention French, nor address his past post about Jews.
The Texas railroad commission, composed of three members, oversees the state’s large and powerful oil and gas industry. It has no oversight into immigration or religion. Even so, French’s campaign has drifted far afield from energy issues: One of his pledges is “Stop the Islamic Invasion of Texas.”
French’s controversies have elevated the profile of Rosenthal, who was raised a Reform Jew in an interfaith household and whose Houston-area district is home to large Muslim communities. This year Rosenthal marked Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by sharing links to Chabad-Lubavitch webpages about the holidays.
Rosenthal’s campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment, but he told the Forward last year that he identifies as agnostic and “multireligious,” and attends synagogues as well as mosques and churches.
Rosenthal is also a trained mechanical engineer, a background he has drawn on in his bid for railroad commissioner: one campaign ad, quoting a conservative radio host, approvingly calls him “a ‘drill, baby, drill’ Democrat.” He has accused French of “overt racism,” while French has dubbed his opponent “Radical Rosenthal” and posted images, generated using artificial intelligence, of cross-shaped Texas oil wells to promote his blending of energy policy with Christian iconography.
Last year, Rosenthal cited his Judaism in response to legislation that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. Rosenthal introduced an amendment that would have required a “Jewish” version of the commandments to be displayed alongside the “Protestant” one. The amendment failed, and the bill passed.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill to create safe spaces around synagogues
(JTA) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has signed a law that will create protective spaces around religious institutions, after a pro-Palestinian protest at a Los Angeles synagogue last year turned violent.
The legislation, AB 2664, establishes 100-foot zones around the entrances to houses of worship. Within the zones, no one will be allowed to come within eight feet of a congregant without consent to distribute leaflets, hold a sign or engage in oral protests that aim “to harass, obstruct, threaten or intimidate the person.”
Failure to comply could result in fines of up to $1,000 and/or imprisonment of no more than six months, with second violations raising those bars to $5,000 and one year, per the law.
“Every Californian should be able to walk into a synagogue, church, mosque, or other house of worship without fear,” Newsom said in a statement.
“California is continuing to protect these organizations and the people they serve, and we’re strengthening that work from the front door to expanding security resources to community events statewide.”
Newsom’s status as a leading Democrat – and one considering a 2028 presidential run – makes his enthusiastic endorsement notable. Progressives in other locales, including New York City, have pushed back against similar laws, saying they endanger speech protections.
The bill’s signing came less than a year after a violent protest rattled the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. At the December event, pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked people from entering the synagogue and cut off parental access to the religious school. Protesters destroyed property and assaulted a security guard; one person was arrested for battery and another for vandalism.
At the time, Mayor Karen Bass denounced the incident, which took place at one of the largest synagogues in the city, as both “abhorrent” and antisemitic.
The following spring, California Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democrat, introduced the legislation, drafted by Jewish California, a lobby representing a number of the state’s Jewish groups.Newsom signed the bill on Friday inside Wilshire Boulevard Temple, joined by Jewish California leaders, synagogue clergy and members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and the broader community.
The legislation advanced despite vocal opposition. The Council on American-Islamic Relations slammed the bill for infringing upon free speech by creating “new criminal penalties that would put peaceful protesters and community advocates at risk.”
In a statement following Newsom’s signing ceremony, the council’s California CEO, Hussam Ayloush, argued that some sales of “illegally occupied land” are occurring “exclusively to Jewish Americans at events hosted by American synagogues.”
“If a house of worship in America chooses to serve as a platform for illegal land sales meant to normalize Palestinian displacement, Americans should be able to peacefully demonstrate against that immoral activity,” Ayloush said. The protest at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple did not target land sales, but a public safety and technology event organized by the Consulate General of Israel.
Jewish California stressed that the legislation not only gained support from dozens of Jewish groups but also from Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Hindu organizations. Ultimately, the bill passed with 34 out of 40 State Senate votes and 61 of 80 State Assembly votes.
“With the Governor’s signature, California is sending a clear message: everyone has the right to practice their faith safely and freely,” Bauer-Kahan said in a statement.
“Antisemitism is rising, and so is hostility towards other religious communities,” she added. “This law protects all worshippers of all faiths, and it ensures that faith can be practiced without fear.”
AB 2664 was one of six bills relevant to the Jewish community that passed in California’s state legislature last month. Newsom signed one of the other bills, AB 1853, on Monday afternoon — enacting a ban on including misleading or threatening information, like hate speech, in California voter guides.
The governor has until Sept. 30 to either sign or veto the other four pieces of legislation. Among the most contentious is SB 1387, a bill that would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” on state agency data collection forms.
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