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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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Clavicular cuts a path across Tel Aviv, dividing pro-Israel influencers over his record of antisemitism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — When Israeli influencer Aaron Morali realized that the celebrity drawing a crowd at the Loullie beach club on Saturday night was Braden Peters — better known as Clavicular — he alerted staff.
He knew that in addition to being a prominent “looksmaxxing” influencer, Peters had appeared alongside the white supremacist Nick Fuentes singing Ye’s “Heil Hitler” and otherwise consorted with antisemites.
“We thought maybe he was a big influencer supporting Israel,” Morali told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But we very quickly understood that he wasn’t.”
Peters was soon asked to leave the club. But elsewhere along the beach in Tel Aviv, Clavicular has gotten a warm reception. Even though he is closely associated with an online ecosystem steeped in antisemitism, a number of pro-Israel and Jewish influencers have enthusiastically filmed content with him in Israel, and crowds of young Israelis have gathered around him as he livestreams from beaches and nightclubs.
The welcome has bewildered many of Peters’ own followers. His livestreams from Israel have been filled with comments accusing him of selling out, urging him to “kiss the wall” — a reference to the Western Wall that has become a taunt in some far-right online circles — and mocking him for embracing Israel.
In addition to becoming well known for his efforts to optimize his physical appearance, Peters drew attention in January when he was part of a group at Miami’s Vendôme nightclub — including Fuentes and the manosphere influencers Sneako and Andrew Tate — singing along to ‘Heil Hitler,’ the Ye song that samples a speech by Adolf Hitler.
Amid a backlash, Peters doubled down. “I am not sorry. I don’t apologize for what I did,” he said at the time. “I would do it again today.”
Now, Clavicular’s visit to Tel Aviv has raised questions about why he was admitted to Israel given the country’s recent record of denying entry to right- and left-wing figures with records of antisemitic and anti-Israel activity. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism declined to comment about Clavicular’s entry into Israel.
It has also exposed a divide in the pro-Israel influencer community. Some influencers have sought to partner with Clavicular to film content, attempting to springboard into his vast audience and taking pride in presence at a time when Israel is widely seen as a pariah. Others have decried his presence, his content objectifying Israeli women and the readiness of fellow Jews to overlook his antisemitic activity.
Orthodox Jewish influencer Golda Daphna posted a series of Instagram videos criticizing Peters during his visit. In one video, she played a recording in which Peters, after being shown a photo of an Israeli woman, says, “Does she want to have sex? Just tell the girls I’m looking to have sex in a bathroom.” In another post, Daphna criticized fellow pro-Israel influencers who collaborated with him, writing, “Whoever gives this behavior a platform, in my opinion, has ended their career.”
Eden Sisson, another influencer involved in hasbara, or public diplomacy on Israel’s behalf, similarly urged Israeli women not to appear in Peters’ videos. “Don’t give him the attention he’s looking for. If he approaches you with a camera, think twice before participating,” she wrote. Referring to his past use of Nazi slogans and symbols, she added, “Someone who has chosen to use Nazi slogans and symbols in the past does not deserve your trust.”
The influencer Hallel Abramowitz-Silverman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, denounced what she said was “a growing culture within parts of Israel’s advocacy and creator community that mistakes influence for integrity.” She added, “Somewhere along the way, we started believing that if someone has enough followers, we should be grateful they’re willing to talk to us at all — even if they have spent years platforming hatred, extremism, or misogyny.”
Peters could not be reached for comment via multiple channels and multiple attempts by JTA. He told The Free Press that he had come to Israel because it was “unexplored territory” for major influencers, few of whom have broadcast from the country, which he said was “viral.”
Among those willing to engage with Peters was Rabbi Yossi Farro, who has built a large social media following by wrapping tefillin on celebrities and what he calls “powerful Jews.”
Farro met Peters for lunch at the Royal Beach Hotel in Tel Aviv and later posted a video presenting him with a necklace combining the OpenAI logo and a Star of David, joking that it amounted to “ChatGPT mogging David,” using internet slang meaning to outshine or dominate someone. Farro later wrote that Peters was “loving Israel and Israel is loving him.”
Farro did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Meanwhile Shira Braun, an influencer whose bio says she is “representing Jewish & Israeli women,” appeared in videos with Clavicular in which she was presented as his girlfriend. She said she had received death threats as a result.
Their collaborations with Peters drew swift criticism from other pro-Israel creators, who argued that collaborating with someone associated with antisemitism risked legitimizing him while exposing Israelis to manipulation.
“If he approaches you with a camera, think twice before participating,” Channel 12 personality Hagar Amgar warned on Instagram. “A few seconds of footage can be edited, taken out of context, and shared with millions of people.”
Some prominent advocates went further. Yoseph Haddad, the Arab Israeli activist and influencer, called for Peters to be deported.
Peters also briefly crossed paths with Topaz Luk, a longtime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Tel Aviv nightclub Shlavata. Peters has said he hopes to film a “collab” with Netanyahu himself, whom he calls “The Big Yahu.”
Luk described the encounter as coincidental in an interview with the Israeli outlet Walla. He said Peters “asked to express regret over his antisemitic statement,” and said the influencer told him he was in Israel to show the truth about the country and planned to meet Holocaust survivors and issue a public apology. Luk was skeptical: “We’ll wait and see,” he told the outlet.
Peters’ connection to online antisemites continued during his Israel visit. He shared a post by Fuentes during his trip. And his stream chat has been filled with antisemitic and anti-Israel comments, with viewers deriding him as a sellout, hurling slurs and mocking the trip; his former friend, the streamer Sneako, who has espoused Islamist views, publicly lamented the visit, while an AI-generated image of Peters kissing the Western Wall circulated on X.
Peters has also commented repeatedly on stream about Israeli women, calling them “Stacys,” looksmaxxing slang for attractive women.
In response to backlash from his fans over the visit to Israel, Peters told The Free Press that he is “not a political guy” and that the trip was not about wading into the Israeli-Palestinian debate.
Peters’ presence in Israel has puzzled many of his critics.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism has recently urged the Population and Immigration Authority, which has the power to permit or deny entry to Israel, to bar prominent figures on both the right and left who have drawn allegations antisemitism and anti-Israel activity.
In May, Israel denied entry to the streamer Tyler Oliveira, who had made the Hasidic community in Kiryas Joel, New York, and the Orthodox community of Lakewood, New Jersey, the targets of his content. He was deported back to the United States after landing at Ben Gurion Airport, and Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli confirmed the decision on X, resurfacing a month-old post in which Oliveira had asked whether Israel would let him into the country and replying with one word: ‘No.’”
Peters has a lengthy record of run-ins with the law in the United States, one standard by which those who seek to visit Israel are sometimes denied. He was charged with unlawfully discharging a firearm in Florida after appearing to shoot a dead alligator in the Everglades on a livestream, resolving the case in May through a plea deal that carried six months of probation and 20 hours of community service.
He was arrested earlier this year in Arizona on suspicion of drug possession and using a fake ID. Maricopa County prosecutors subsequently dropped the charges, citing no reasonable likelihood of conviction. He is also being sued in civil court by an influencer who alleges he sexually assaulted her when she was 16. His lawyer has denied the claims, calling them unproven.
Morali, who rose to fame as a cast member on “Love Island Israel,” has joined the growing chorus asking why Peters was allowed to enter Israel in the first place. “Obviously we welcome everybody to Israel, but whoever is posting content against us or doing something controversial, that’s a bit more tricky,” he told JTA.
Morali said he was at the club for a night out with friends when he spotted Peters standing outside. The video he filmed of Peters standing outside the nightclub, which he captioned, “We don’t need any antisemites here. Am Israel Chai,” quickly went viral.
According to Morali, after Peters entered the beach club with his security detail and began approaching patrons and trying to film content, security began to take notice. Loullie did not respond to a JTA request for comment but confirmed the account to Israeli media.
“We decided to tell the right people about it so something could be done, because we didn’t feel comfortable having someone with his camera in everyone’s face, filming something that could potentially harm our country,” Morali said. “They removed him right away. And I must say, I’m proud of them for doing that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How Shabbat bound Lindsey Graham to Joe Lieberman
Lindsey Graham did not always know what time Shabbat started, but he always knew when it ended. That was the joke the South Carolina Republican made while remembering his close friend, the late Sen. Joe Lieberman, at a memorial service in Washington in 2024.
In his remarks, Graham said that while traveling around the world with his Senate colleague, Lieberman, an observant Jew and author of a book about Shabbat, always knew exactly when sundown arrived on Friday, no matter where they were. After years of traveling together, Graham joked, he learned to recognize when Shabbat ended on Saturday “so we didn’t have to do this anymore.”
This past Saturday evening, almost exactly as Shabbat came to a close, Graham died after suffering an apparent heart attack at his Capitol Hill townhouse. Emergency dispatch audio indicates first responders were called to his home at around 8:30 p.m. after a report of chest pains.
The two politicians from different sides of the aisle first became close when Graham joined the Senate in 2003, joining an already close friendship between Lieberman and Sen. John McCain, who died in 2018. Despite disagreeing on many domestic issues, Graham and Lieberman bonded over shared views about American leadership abroad, traveling together to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The three senators, who became known as the “Three Amigos,” also made repeated trips to Israel.
At Lieberman’s memorial, Graham recalled one of their more memorable trips together, accompanying McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Graham said he was pinned against the ancient stones by photographers scrambling for the perfect shot and injured his knee. “They crushed me against the wall, and I began to wail,” Graham joked, referencing the site’s English name, the Wailing Wall. Lieberman, he recalled, helped pull him back to his feet.
Months later, during a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Colorado, Lieberman brought the Tibetan spiritual leader over to Graham and asked if he could heal his injured knee. The Dalai Lama placed a hand on it and asked if it felt any better. “No,” Graham replied.
“I didn’t think so,” the Dalai Lama quipped.
A strong ally of Israel
Israel occupied a central place in Graham’s political career. He was one of Congress’ strongest supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance, pushed for a tough approach toward Iran and backed efforts to expand peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Axios reported Sunday that Graham spent his final weeks working on a renewed push aimed at normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that he and Graham disagreed over Israel’s recent proposal to phase out U.S. military assistance in the coming years, amid growing criticism of aid to Israel from both parties. Graham “went ballistic,” Netanyahu said. “He said, ‘No way. You can’t do that.’ He was so concerned with our security, which he believed was your security, that he actually fought the prime minister of Israel on keeping America’s aid – or actually increasing it.”
As news of Graham’s death spread Saturday night, Jewish organizations and leaders mourned his passing and reflected on the legacy he leaves as one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for Israel and Jewish causes.
In his farewell to Lieberman two years ago, Graham concluded: “One of the best things that ever happened to Lindsey Graham was to meet Joe Lieberman. So until we meet again, my amigo, God bless.”
For those who watched their friendship over the years, it is hard not to imagine that somewhere beyond this world, McCain, Lieberman and Graham have found each other once again.
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I was there when the lights went out and New York was plunged into darkness
I’m the lifelong resident of a vast and complicated metropolis that smugly prides itself on never stopping. Subways, buses and cabs running day and night, bodegas and diners open 24/7, hundreds of thousands of people at work or out partying somewhere, bike couriers and truck drivers making deliveries — all in a town with a million moving parts, where the show always goes on — until, suddenly, it doesn’t.
I was reminded of that one evening not long ago in a drab Chinese restaurant uptown on Broadway, clutching a pair of wooden chopsticks poised to shovel another mound of chicken and walnuts into my mouth.
Music was playing softly over the house PA system. The melody suddenly sounded strangely familiar, but oddly out of place in those surroundings. I froze mid-bite, trying to place what I was hearing. Then it hit me. I glanced at my dinner companion Ann Aptaker, author of the Cantor Gold noir crime novels.
“Wow,” I said. “Do you hear that?”
She paused, tilted her head slightly, then raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s Threepenny Opera!”
Sure enough, the song drifting through the room was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s wickedly jaunty tango, “Ballad of Immoral Earnings.” Even stranger, it was a track from my favorite production of the show: the Lincoln Center revival from decades ago, starring the late, great Raul Julia as Mack the Knife and Ellen Greene as his favorite prostitute, Jenny Diver.
“Of all things! What a weird song to play while people are eating,” I mused.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in a restaurant before,” she agreed. “And certainly not a Chinese place.”
“They must have good taste in musicals.”
Shrugging, we resumed picking away at our dinner. A minute later another song from the same show began to play. We gaped at each other.
“They’re playing the whole album!” I sputtered. “What are the odds?”
Ann frowned and paused. then suddenly whirled to reach into the pocket of her denim jacket hanging behind her chair. She pulled out her phone, and the music instantly grew louder. We both laughed. She must have leaned back against her jacket and set off her music app. Whew — mystery solved!
But hearing those distinctive strains of Weill’s score transported me back to one of the hottest summers New York City had ever endured.
It was 1977, the year I attended an outdoor performance of Threepenny Opera at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. My mother and a roommate from Pratt had joined me that night.
The Delacorte sits beneath the stone towers of Belvedere Castle, lit by floodlamps like a fairytale illustration, open to the sky and the sounds of the city beyond the trees. On a good night it can feel magical. On this particularly sweltering night, the air hung over us in the audience like a damp blanket as Philip Bosco, who had replaced Raul Julia for this summer staging, swaggered across the stage as Mack the Knife, and Ellen Greene reprised her role as Jenny.
And then — just as she was belting out her furious solo number, Pirate Jenny — all the lights shut off. Greene’s mic abruptly went dead, and the band lurched sourly out of tune before grinding to a halt.
We were plunged into pitch darkness. For a moment, there was silence.
Then the crowd began to buzz nervously. Was this part of the show? I’d seen the play several times before, and knew that it most definitely was not.
A few awkward minutes later, some of the cast reappeared wielding flashlights. While the tech crew worked on the electricity, the band filled the darkness with some lively jazz. Rubber-limbed dancer Tony Azito pranced around jovially in the flickering beams, easing the mood for a spell. But that age-old theater adage, the show must go on, was about to bite the dust.
The house manager finally stepped up on stage to make an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we just learned that there’s been a massive power failure at Con Edison. It’s not just us; the whole city is dark!”
We didn’t know it yet, but this was the Big Blackout of July 13, 1977, and there we were, thousands of us stranded smack in the middle of Central Park. There wasn’t even much of a moon out that night, so it was really, really dark.
“Well, this is some pickle,” Mom said.
We wondered how the hell we were going to get out of there.
I vividly recalled the last big blackout in New York City, the one in 1965. I was just a young kid back then and safely at home, so it had actually been fun. While my mother lit a few Sabbath candles, my little sister and I roamed from room to room pretending we were in a haunted house. Meanwhile, our poor Dad had to trudge back to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan — a five-hour hike in hot leather shoes.
But this time felt very different. I was far from the safety of home, trapped in the middle of what might as well have been a forest at night. Central Park is beautiful when you can see it. In pitch darkness it’s downright hazardous.
“Guess we’ll all just have to sleep in the park tonight,” I cracked. Neither Mom nor my Pratt roomie were laughing.
Thankfully, a phalanx of city cops eventually arrived to help guide us out. Audience members, cast and crew all joined hands as we carefully made our way along the park’s winding paths, stepping over roots and curbs, catching one another when someone stumbled. Our only illumination came from a few scattered police car headlights.
A walk that normally takes ten minutes took forever, but eventually we emerged onto Central Park West.
The scene was eerie. Streetlamps were dark. Traffic lights were out. Cars sat frozen in the intersections. Not a single apartment window was lit. For a city that never sleeps, it felt as if someone had suddenly flipped off the master switch.
Then I spotted something: “Look, the buses are still running!”
A city bus was rumbling slowly toward us, brightly lit inside. With the subways dead, getting back to my dorm in Brooklyn would have been impossible, so Mom’s place on the Upper East Side looked like the safest destination. She had temporarily split with my Dad and was living there with a roommate at the time.
The three of us squeezed aboard along with what felt like half the audience, and somehow made it across town to First Avenue. As we approached my mother’s high-rise, a dreadful thought suddenly hit me.
“Mom, what floor are you on again?”
“Twenty-five,” she replied grimly.
Of course both elevators were dead. We trudged up 25 flights of stairs in complete darkness, arriving exhausted and panting. My mother fumbled with her key, finally opening the door to reveal Sylvia, her gravel-voiced, seen-it-all Long Island roommate, standing there with her ever-present cigarette tip glowing in the dark.
“Come on in, darlings,” she rasped dryly. “Join the party.”
Sylvia had lit a few candles around the apartment, the only light we’d see that night.
Outside, the city was far from peaceful. While we tried to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, one of the worst nights of unrest in New York history was unfolding in the streets below. Store windows were smashed. Shops were looted. Garbage cans were set on fire.
Lying there in the dim glow of flickering candlelight, hearing distant sirens punctuated by the sudden crash of breaking glass somewhere in the darkness below, I felt a growing sense of dread. An evening that had begun with music and theater had improbably ended with Manhattan plunged into darkness, its fragile machinery suddenly exposed.
By morning the city looked as though it had survived a world war.
This resilient burg has been battered and bruised over the years, enduring terrorist attacks, blackouts, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, garbage strikes, transit strikes, and the occasional collapse of its aging infrastructure. Yet somehow it manages to reset and lurch forward each time, improvising solutions the way Tony Azito danced in the dark that night at the Delacorte.
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