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Friday October 26, 2007

SoCal Jewish community battles fallout from fires

by jacob berkman
jta

“I worked all my life for this house,” Daniel Okonsky said in a call from his cell phone Tuesday, Oct. 23. “I was able to build it, to maintain it — and now there is nothing.”

Okonsky was speaking from the Downtown Sheraton in San Diego, where he has been staying with his family since they evacuated their home Sunday, Oct. 21 at 3:30 a.m. in the face of wildfires that have ravaged Southern California.

All told, as of Wednesday morning, Oct. 24, the disaster had turned some 410,000 acres from San Diego to northern Los Angeles into a rumbling inferno, forcing at least 500,000 to evacuate, causing at least $1 billion in damage and destroying at least 1,400 homes, including Okonsky’s.

As the region deals with the fires, the Jewish community of nearly 750,000 in San Diego and Los Angeles counties is struggling to assess the damage in its own ranks.

San Diego County, with about 100,000 Jews, has been hardest hit, with 14 separate fires raging. About 300,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. It is unknown how many of the evacuees are Jewish.

The Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla has been evacuated and has incurred some smoke damage, according to Michael Sonduck, chief operating officer of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County.

The residents of the Jewish Sea Crest retirement villages in Rancho Bernardo and Encinitas were voluntarily evacuated.

Two of the area’s 40 synagogues were evacuated, and a number remain in fire zones, but it is still not known whether any of them have been damaged, according to Sonduck.

The federation, the Jewish Community Foundation and the Jewish Family Service of San Diego have set up a disaster fund to help assist with relief.

“San Diego is our big concern,” Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, said. The fund collected $35,000 in its first day.

Much of Diamond’s job right now is reaching the 290 rabbis from San Diego to San Luis Obispo who make up his board and trying to figure out how their synagogues can help each other. If congregants require housing or need to replenish Jewish supplies such as prayer books, the board of rabbis will step in, he said.

Even as they worry about their own synagogues, some Jews have reached out to the broader community.

When the Malibu Presbyterian Church burned down Monday, Oct. 22, the Reconstructionist Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue offered to house the church’s preschool for several months, Diamond said.

And in San Diego, Chabad-Lubavitch has been delivering blankets and food to the 10,000 evacuees staying at Qualcomm Stadium, home of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers. Chabad is delivering kosher food to Jews and nonkosher food donated from local restaurants to non-Jews, said the rabbi of Chabad of Poway, Yisroel Goldstein.

“The wildfires know no bounds of geography or religious faith,” Diamond said.

The area’s largest Jewish community, in and around Los Angeles, where some 550,000 Jews live, seems relatively unscathed so far, according to officials at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

The S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children Services

has set up a fund for emergency donations: the Southern California Fire Response 2007 fund.

To make a donation, please mail it to 2150 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94115; call (415) 449-1256;

or go to www.jfcs.org. To donate on the Web site, click on the “donate now”

button and then type “fire fund” in the online form.

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