My family's periodic excursions into Los Angeles's Fairfax neighborhood, 30 miles away, to stock up on Bamba, Bisli and other Israeli treats have long been a valued indulgence, even given that the cost of a tank of gas in California is now gaining parity with that exacted from Israeli motorists. Never mind that out here in the wilds of Agoura Hills, we now have an Israeli-style supermarket, a felafel and shwarma joint, a glatt kosher pizzeria, a perfectly adequate Jewish-style deli and a Steimatzky book store just over the ridge buffering us from the western San Fernando Valley. "Have you seen what they charge for pitah here," my wife thunders. "Ganavim!"
The "ganavim" may be winning though. Simon Rutberg, the owner of Hatikvah Records, a Fairfax Avenue landmark since 1989, called me the other day to inform me that he and several other shops that embody the area's Jewish character are being forced out of their storefronts by new owners who "want to turn Fairfax into another Melrose Avenue," exchanging heritage for hip.
Adding insult to injury, says Rutberg, is that the man believed to be spearheading the recent buying spree of storefront properties along the avenue is Uri P. Harkham, a prominent, Beverly Hills-based, Iraqi-Israeli clothier, developer and film producer ("Gorky Park") known for his financial support for Jewish education in Los Angeles and in Israel. Acting through various holding and management companies, Harkham, they say, has invalidated long-held leases, doubling some rents and fees. Among the businesses expected to join Hatikvah in bailing by year's end: Solomon's Bookstore, Arnold Herr Bookseller, Picanty Kosher Market and the National Council of Jewish Women Thrift Shop.
Fairfax Avenue extends from Santa Monica Boulevard, in the south, to 6th Street, north of Wilshire Boulevard, bisecting the city from the downtown core to the ocean 15 miles west. The area attracted its first Jewish residents in 1928. Most of them hailed from areas now firmly ensconced in L.A.'s sprawling and impoverished eastern reaches, largely populated by Latinos and African Americans.
After World War II, the area attracted observant American Jews, Holocaust survivors; more recently, there's been an influx of Russian-Jewish, Iranian and Israeli immigrants. During the 1950s, the neighborhood became a hub for Jewish organizations, serving a largely middle-class population with Eastern European roots. In ensuing decades, however, younger Jewish denizens of the area migrated to the city's upper-crusty Westside neighborhoods, and into the San Fernando Valley, leaving behind an increasingly aging and economically limited population.
Fairfax has since been eclipsed by a burgeoning, largely Orthodox Jewish presence in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, some three miles to the southwest. Still, the street retained, if only thanks to nostalgia, pride of place as a focal point for local Jewish life.
Now, it seems, the Jewish mom and pop shops and flavor of Fairfax are about to be subsumed by the boutique culture of nearby streets. That may be fodder for another TV nighttime soap opera, but a small slice of history - not to mention a trustworthy source of cheap pitah - will have been lost.
Sheli Teitelbaum