LA fires won’t stop bar mitzvahs this Shabbat, as joy and pain meet
Sinai Temple will host Kehillat Israel b’nai mitzvahs while Temple Judea hosts Or Ami’s
Flames from the Palisades Fire burn in front of the Jewish Temple Chabah of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images
By Louis Keene January 10, 2025
Louis Keene is covering the fires in Los Angeles, where he is based. Follow him on X for live updates.
Rabbi Paul Kipnes swept the placemats and coffee mugs off his kitchen table, and laid a cloth on it. There he gently placed the Torah scroll that had been rescued from Congregation Or Ami two days earlier. Tracy Frank and her 13-year-old-son, Liam, peered inside.
It was a makeshift dress rehearsal for what will be a makeshift bar mitzvah: Or Ami, a Reform synagogue in Calabasas, lost power this week as fires swept across Los Angeles. The Kenneth Fire forced many of Kipnes’ congregants — the Franks included — to evacuate their homes. It stopped short of Or Ami, but with uncertainty around the synagogue’s condition, Kipnes accepted an offer from nearby Temple Judea to host Shabbat services — and Liam’s bar mitzvah — in their sanctuary.
The bar or bat mitzvah, marking a Jewish child’s entry into adulthood, is a culmination of months of advance planning and study, and because the most common rite of passage — reading from the Torah — is fixed to the weekly portion, it can’t simply be put off a couple weeks.
For the Franks, the location was the least important feature of the bar mitzvah. “We were like, ‘We’ll do it in the backyard,” Tracy Frank said. “We don’t care, as long as we have the Torah, the rabbi, our friends, our family.”
All over the city, as thousands of Jewish Angelenos have been displaced by the wildfires and hundreds of Jewish families have lost their homes, Jewish community institutions have rallied to support them. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles listed 16 synagogues and Jewish schools that have opened up as shelters for people looking to pray, work or just think. And as displaced communities grieve their losses and contemplate the future, at least two synagogues will also host the displaced celebrations.
“This is what it means to be in a Jewish community,” said Temple Judea’s Rabbi Josh Aaronson. “It was as close to a no-brainer as you could possibly get.”
Two families had planned bar mitzvahs this Shabbat at Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist synagogue whose surrounding area was ravaged in the Palisades Fire. One of those families lost their home and postponed the bar mitzvah; the other, whose home survived, will have theirs at Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Westwood that is hosting KI this Shabbat.
It was admittedly dissonant to be planning a joyous occasion in the wake of a tragedy. Tracy Frank said part of her felt almost selfish for proceeding with Liam’s bar mitzvah. But there is a corpus of Jewish tradition about navigating the inevitable conflict of joy and grief. Kehillat Israel’s cantor, Chayim Frenkel, related a piece of Talmud: When a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at a crossroads, the mourners stop for the newlyweds to pass.
“This boy is actually allowing us to gather together to celebrate,” Frenkel said.
Sinai Temple’s Rabbi Nicole Guzik and Rabbi Erez Sherman already had a bat mitzvah planned at the synagogue this Shabbat — their daughter Annie’s. That will go forward in the main sanctuary as the KI bar mitzvah happens in the chapel.
Guzik said they offered the space without hesitation, and indefinitely. Sinai is also yielding its main sanctuary to KI on Friday night, and organized a toy drive so that kids whose homes burned down could leave with new toys.
“As rabbis, this is what we do,” Guzik said. “We hold community and the pain that community feels at the same time as experiencing our own joy. We’ve committed ourselves to staring at our beautiful daughter as she reads from the Torah, and experiencing the beauty and delight that comes from witnessing your own child really come forward as an adult member of the Jewish community. We are making room for both.”
While the b’nai mitzvah would feel different, some of the features would remain constant. As Liam Frank chanted his Torah reading in Rabbi Kipnes’ kitchen, he sounded nervous, and raced through the first aliyah.
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it again, and now slow it down,’” Kipnes recalled. “And he did it. And as he got to his second, third aliyah, a smile crossed his face. He realized, ‘I got this.’”
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