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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