In the two years he served as the Jewish state's consul in Los Angeles, Eitan Bentzur struck resident Israelis as sharp and low-keyed—the quintessential career diplomat. But they also discovered, quite painfully, that he was no fun at all at a party.
Early in his tenure, in 1987, Bentzur agreed to cosponsor an Israeli Independence Day bash with the Shalom Lodge of B'nai B'rith, comprising some 350 established Israeli families in Los Angeles. Together they booked the Scottish Rite Auditorium for a show by Israel's reigning pop group, Habibi. Tickets sold out in days, and L.A.'s Hebrew-speaking elite beamed.
Clearly these well-heeled Israelis were about to leave the ranks of the "scum of the earth," the term used repeatedly by Yitzhak Rabin, now Israel's Defense Minister, to describe his expatriate compatriots. The consulate, which had traditionally scorned them for wallowing in the fleshpots of the diaspora, had apparently adopted a more realistic, less judgmental line.
Before a capacity crowd of more than 1,700 Israelis—the women in Rodeo Drive finery, the men, uncharacteristically, in ties—Bentzur, stocky and bespectacled, mounted the podium, gazed out at his happy minions and bore down on them like a Merkava tank.
Why, he bellowed, had so few bothered to show up the previous day at an Israeli Remembrance Day ceremony honoring the country's fallen? How long would they insist on living as unwanted strangers in a land not their own? How could they continue to subject their children to lives bereft of a homeland, of roots?
The audience sat in stunned, sullen silence while the hapless Habibi trio—sort of an Israeli Manhattan Transfer—tried valiantly to salvage something of the evening.
A week later, at a fund-raising function for Tel Aviv's Diaspora Museum, someone finally called Bentzur out on what many regarded as his unwarranted attack. Barry Allon, a successful Granada Hills real estate developer and relentless self-promoter, was introduced to Bentzur. The consul, upon hearing Allon's fiscal accomplishments, said, "We can use people like you—in Israel."
Bad move. Embittered, Allon had left Israel during the mid-1970s after having been active in an unsuccessful attempt at political reform.
"I said, 'You've got to be kidding if you think you can tell us to pack it up,'" recalled Allon. " 'First, do something about helping our soldiers who finish their service and can't find work or housing. Do something about the new immigrants, who are leaving in droves. Get rid of the bureaucracy, the socialism and the corrupt party system. And when you're done, we can talk.'
"He called me a deserter. I said, 'If that's so, why are you chasing after these other deserters?' "
Bentzur had a different recollection of the encounter:
"Allon was baiting me. He said, 'How dare you criticize us when those of us who left are the true elite of Israel?' He slandered the country brutally."
Many local Israelis, equally riled by Bentzur's speech, protested in quieter ways. Yet they remain torn by his message. Nowhere has their ambivalence been more in evidence than at another Independence Day concert, at the University of California in Los Angeles. There, fans of Israeli balladeer Hava Alberstein—Hebrew-speaking Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky among them—had gathered for an evening of down-home folk music. Toward the end, after Alberstein delivered her latest hit, "America," a crowd of people who plainly were in Los Angeles out of choice rather than necessity—who had willfully left the Promised Land for the Land of Promise—rose and offered the singer a thunderous ovation.
Although gaining in confidence and stature, Israelis in southern California, as this behavior demonstrates, remain unable to grapple psychologically with the implications of their decision to leave the Jewish homeland. But however distressing their predicament, it has improved greatly over what it was.
Five years ago they would have been more inclined to accept Bentzur's admonitions quietly, much as the congregants at a Beverly Hills synagogue might suffer through their rabbi's sermon on the evils of driving to temple on the Sabbath. But this time their guilt at having left Israel was tempered by an awareness that their burgeoning numbers and obvious material success had put them on the southern California map.
Not everyone was a Menachem Golan or Yoram Globus; few had achieved the personal wealth of Meshulam Riklis or the real estate developer Jona Goldrich. But most were doing all right. And most were unwilling to take any more crap.
Five years ago, when Israelis were asked if they were here to stay, they equivocated. Pose the same question today, and Joe or Judy Sabra is at least ready to respond somewhat candidly.
"You can only sit on your suitcase for so long," said one longtime resident. "After a while, your tochis starts to hurt."
After 20 years of denigration by Israeli authorities, disdain or indifference from American Jewry, shame induced back in 1979 by the publicity surrounding the so-called Israeli Mafia (a small group of local Israeli thugs who, because of a drug murder they were allegedly involved in, generated a great many headlines) and a significant degree of self-loathing for having "betrayed" the Zionist ideal, L.A.'s Israeli community is in ferment, trying to shake off its mantle of guilt and to create a spot for itself under the California sun.
In part, these efforts are bolstered by gradual though partial recognition of their presence and potential from L.A.'s organized Jewish community, itself worried over the depletion of its ranks through assimilation and intermarriage. So far, however, the native Jewish community has been reluctant to act decisively, fearful that attempts to co-opt local Israelis will send a message to those still in Israel that, as one Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council fund-raiser bitingly put it, "If you don't feel like settling in the West Bank, why not try the West Coast?"
But even the federation's modest step of establishing a commission on Israelis—which issued a report in 1983 warning Jewish institutions that they could not afford to squander the resources represented by so outwardly Jewish a population—contributed to a sense that Israelis would ultimately have to be reckoned with.
More tangibly, the willingness of some Israelis to admit they may be here for the long run stems from a fundamental change in attitudes back home, where there is greater willingness to see emigration as an acceptable option for some people. "The Zionist dream of a homeland is a fact," explained Stanley Hirsh, who recently retired as president of the federation. "But that doesn't mean that Israel has necessarily grown to suit the purposes of all its citizens."
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's first visit to Los Angeles last year also contributed to the local Israeli community's growing sense of legitimacy. For the first time an Israeli head of state addressed an Israeli emigrant community in a less than hostile fashion.
Gerald Bubis, director of the School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, pointed out that Israeli politicians and emissaries are often unusually energetic in the hard line they adopt toward their wayward compatriots: "When the Queen of England comes to Los Angeles, she celebrates the presence of the British colony here, and it celebrates her presence. But when an Israeli Prime Minister comes to L.A., the only circumstances under which he or she would ordinarily meet with local Israelis would be to castigate them for their traitorous acts."
Zionist ideology, Bubis explained, holds that loyalty to Israel can only be expressed by one's physical presence in the Jewish state. "The myth suggests that the perfect Israeli would never think of leaving Israel. So these emigrants must by definition be imperfect Israelis."
This feeling began to change after Shamir's visit. Sensing the glimmer of a green light, L.A.'s Israelis began gearing themselves for action. While expatriate kibbutzniks continued quietly fashioning their good-old-boy network, established veterans with political ambitions in America turned to the Shalom Lodge as a power base in a bid for recognition in Sacramento and Washington. Businesspeople and professionals began networking furiously among themselves, seeking an edge into the city's tight, competitive markets. Even those on the margins have been able to find a brief measure of solace in the Church of Scientology, to the despair of some in the Jewish community.
Of course, none of these individuals typify L.A.'s Israelis. The fact that they operate as they do, however—especially in view of the burdensome psychological and ideological baggage Israeli emigrants carry when they depart from the Holy Land—would seem to indicate that both the Zionist and the American dreams remain alive.
Estimates of the number of Israelis living in Los Angeles vary, and often say more about the political agenda of those doing the guesswork than about how many Israelis actually live here.
Those who view Israeli emigration with alarm are inclined to inflate the figures, especially if their livelihoods and organizational funding depend on grappling with the issue of yerida, a pejorative term indicating "descent" from the Promised Land. A few years ago, Shmuel Lahis, a former director general of the Jewish Agency, spoke of at least half a million Israelis living in the United States. His figures sparked controversy.
Those who might wish to downplay the significance of the Israeli diaspora, perhaps because they might otherwise be required to deal with its presence, have been known to go with the low numbers. Pini Herman, a social worker who is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, insists there are no more than 130,000 Israeli expatriates in all of America, and that 10,000, perhaps 15,000, live permanently in Los Angeles. But his numbers strike many as unlikely. Hirsh calls them "a fiction." "Give me a phone book and I'll find you more than that," he said.
The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles estimates that between 100,000 and 150,000 Israelis live in L.A., while some guess the number might be closer to 200,000 or even higher. If accurate, this means that Israelis in Los Angeles comprise as much as one-third of the city's Jewish population.
Whatever the actual number, there is no denying a thriving Israeli presence in the city—and not just on Fairfax Avenue, with its mom-and-pop Middle Eastern grocery stores, falafel stands and even an Israeli record store. Israelis in great numbers have branched out into primarily Jewish areas of the San Fernando Valley. And according to Noam Niv, the 26-year-old former editor of the Los Angeles supplement of Israel Shelanu, a Hebrew-language weekly published in New York, Israeli professionals have also begun to move into Orange County, south of Los Angeles.
Boasting a twice weekly Israeli radio program and an appallingly produced half-hour Hebrew-language television show, southern California has become an attractive destination for those eager to leave behind the crushing taxes, burdensome military obligations, limited professional opportunities and stratospheric stress levels that characterize much of life in Israel.
Those who come, however, realize that they pay a heavy price to pursue the American dream. Many have left their families behind. Moreover, even the most secular Israeli, having grown up in a Jewish country, feels authentically Jewish in a sense that even ardent synagogue-goers here may be hard pressed to approximate. Yet here the synagogue is the main avenue for expressing one's Jewish commitment, and Israelis who cannot get over their discomfort with temples feel frozen out.
Also, most Israelis see themselves as Israeli-Americans, not Jewish-Americans. But maintaining that identity has proved problematic. What does it mean to be an Israeli-American? How can they impart their Israeli values to their children, who become jocks and Valley Girls?
Yet the city's balmy climate and its burgeoning and accommodating Israeli population have made it a New Jerusalem. And that is precisely what has the Israeli Government so alarmed—and puts the American Jewish community in a bind.
No one in Israel could seriously argue that emigration has become a major demographic crisis. But because the country was built on waves of immigrants—its very history is measured in terms of those waves-emigration remains a sore spot on the collective Israeli psyche. Last year, a furor arose in Israel over a report that several hundred senior army officers—colonels, brigadier generals and major generals—were residing in America. The figures were hotly contested. But some quipped that if this went on, no one would be left to turn off the lights at Ben-Gurion International Airport.
At 33, Shraga Agam is one of the grand old men of L.A.'s vibrant exkibbutznik community. Agam came to Los Angeles in 1977. Today he's married, has children and owns a big house in Sherman Oaks and a thriving home improvement company. Both his house and his business have gained renown among Far East-bound kibbutzniks as one of a number of hospitable way stations in southern California.
Agam has a Rolodex file with the names and numbers of several hundred ex-kibbutzniks who have sunk new roots in southern California. Fifteen of them are from Kibbutz Ha'ogen, his former home. "There are more than a thousand of them here by now, maybe as many as two or three thousand. I’ve lost count."
But though Agam has turned in his badge as a volunteer placement officer for incoming kibbutzniks, they still know where to find him. Danny Ziskind, a 30-year-old carpenter and youth worker from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, told me he had known he could count on Agam’s help, though they’d never met, even before he stepped out of the gates of his settlement.
“Any kibbutznik knows exactly where to go when he gets here,” Ziskind explained. “He can count on someone to pick him up at the airport, find him a place to stay, set him up with documents and a car, and within a couple of days, arrange a place of work.”
There are minikibbutzim all over the city, Agam said. One kibbutz, Beit Alpha, has a population of 29 members living in a number of adjoining apartments near Oxnard Avenue and Coldwater Canyon, in North Hollywood. Former members of Kibbutz Ma’abarot and Mishmar Hasharon are reportedly also organized in minicommunes in the Valley.
Ziskind said kibbutzniks remain much in demand because of their sterling work ethic. “They’re willing to work from 5 in the morning till 10 at night. There’s no such thing as dirty work. And we don’t have to worry about a fellow kibbutznik exploiting us.” Ziskind, who arrived with his wife, didn’t intend to stay. “For most kibbutzniks—though not a few decide to stay on—Los Angeles is like a gas station. We come here, en route to extended visits to the Far East, to fill up.”
Kibbutzniks comprise a mere 3 percent of the Jewish population of Israel. But they have always enjoyed close ties with each other. Traditionally fancying themselves an elite, a disproportionate number have volunteered for the Israeli Army’s top combat units. The friendships forged in the army and the shared experience of communal living run deep, Ziskind said. “By the time a kid finishes his army service at 21 or 22,” he explained, “he knows a lot of people. And even more people know him if only through a friend, a relative or a fellow kibbutznik. In Los Angeles, he can always find people who will be glad to see him.”
Shimon Erem is another Israeli with a list. It purportedly contains the names of 12,000 Israeli families in Los Angeles whose members not only have American voting rights but have also expressed a willingness to exercise those rights. Erem, a 65-year-old economic consultant who lives in Beverly Hills, said that these and another 12,000 such families not yet on his list comprise what he hopes will become “the long arm of L.A.’s Israeli community.”
“I think we have it in our means to become a significant factor in upcoming mayoral or Congressional elections,” he said. The burly, silver-haired former resident of Tel Aviv, who still comports himself in the authoritative manner of an Israeli Army colonel, which he was, has few doubts that his group, allied with Israelis on the East Coast, will eventually give the Jewish-American lobby a run for its money. Israelis are highly political, and those in America can be galvanized by the question of continued American support for their homeland. In America, Erem believes, one merely has to harness that tendency.
Some politically sophisticated Israelis have found an amenable place to realize their ambitions in B’nai B’rith. Shalom Lodge was founded 18 years ago to provide them with a social context at once part of the Jewish mainstream and yet comfortably Israeli. Lodge meetings were held in Hebrew, people met and partied, and members found a middle road between community activism and hard-sell fund-raising. Erem says that his fellow lodge members are particularly enamored by B’nai B’rith’s democratic nature. He says members enjoy considerable input into policy-making, at both the regional and the national levels.
Erem himself has risen through B’nai B’rith’s ranks. A former head of the national organization’s political division, he is now its West Coast district president. His political organization, as yet unnamed, will, he claims, be independent of B’nai B’rith. But Erem sees Shalom Lodge as a crucible for new community leadership. He also believes that as American Jews take notice of Israelis’ willingness to engage in local politics, they may find themselves less inclined to dismiss the Israelis in their midst as unwanted reminders that the Jewish state isn’t quite the utopia many American Jews envision.
Some Jewish leaders in Los Angeles, although they welcome Erem’s efforts, remain skeptical about his ability to deliver. “The Jewish community is terribly fragmented,” said one functionary. “I mean, can you imagine Stanley Hirsh telling people how to vote? My sense of the Israeli community is that they’re even more fragmented, more independent.”
This did not, however, deter Erem from admonishing the members of Shalom Lodge, in their monthly Hebrew-language newsletter, to vote Republican in the 1988 Presidential election. Whether his advice was heeded is anyone’s guess, but it is clear to him that Jews as a whole remained firmly in the Democratic camp. At a recent appearance before an Israeli audience in Los Angeles opposite Labor Knesset member Arie Lova Eliav, Erem told his compatriots that there is great bitterness within the Republican Party over this, and that the message he has been getting from party leaders is that Israel had better realize it’s a whole new ball game, in which “Republicans feel they owe us nothing.”
Not all members of the lodge, however, entertain notions of going political. Barry Allon had his fill of politics while in Israel. Today, at 53, he is more interested in the bottom line. Allon was born in Ramat Gan to a family of Polish-born entrepreneurs. After serving in the army in 1952, he distinguished himself as an athlete.
Allon left Israel in 1975. And although he has become involved in a number of philanthropic projects in Israel, and has assisted the Maccabee sports federation in Los Angeles (Maccabee, a large, vibrant organization in its own right, has organized the children of Israeli and American Jews into soccer and basketball leagues), Allon has never looked back. "Israel became too small for me. For a businessman, the economic climate can be stifling."
Allon attributes his success to positive thinking and long-range planning. Today he and a number of local and foreign investors are involved in building shopping centers and apartment buildings throughout the city. "I've given up trying to change the world," he said. "Today it's enough if I can lift up the people around me. And I've learned, unlike most Israelis, that it doesn't all have to happen in a day."
"Networking," said the Israeli insurance salesman as he poked at the nouvelle cuisine rubber squab on his plate. "It's such a strange word. In Israel, we used to call it 'paka-paka Knesset.' Shooting the breeze. Here it's a big deal."
On a Saturday night in mid-October last year, more than 300 Israeli businesspeople and professionals packed a hotel dining room on Sunset Boulevard. The occasion was the first gala dinner of the year-old Israeli Business Network. Rachel Chopin, the network's dynamic program director, took the microphone from the Israeli band's black guitarist. "This is a tough town," she said. "To compete, we're going to have to depend on ourselves and on each other. That's what this organization is about."
At 41, Chopin is one of the local Israeli community's movers. A leading member of the federation's commission on Israelis, she was head of the woman's division of Israel Bonds in L.A. before ultimately becoming a career head-hunter. Working for the bonds organization was an unusual job for an Israeli, which may account in part for the fact she didn't stay on. Many of her compatriots find the Jewish-American preoccupation with contributing money to Israel or communal projects difficult to fathom. Having served in the army for years, and having paid hefty taxes while in Israel, they aren't, as a rule, big givers.
Chopin didn't organize the dinner to put the touch to these skeptics. But her message was plain. The Israeli community would never get anywhere in Los Angeles unless it was willing to learn, adapt, organize and, ultimately, integrate. She didn't say so at the dinner, but for her, networking is only a start. If Israelis are to have a real impact, especially within the American Jewish community, they will have to demonstrate a willingness to work within the system. They can set their own agenda, but they will have to make the first move.
"This isn't Israel," Chopin said. "The Government isn't going to fund a community center or a secular Hebrew school for Israelis here, if they decide that's what they want. They have to realize that if they want services from the Jewish community, they have to go about it from the inside."
Many of those who attended the business network's dinner acknowledged that this will be no mean feat. "We have a bad name," said Shaul Sobol, a 34-year-old accountant living in the Fairfax area. "After the victory in 1967, American Jews saw us as heroes. But those days are over." And Rachal Harari, the network's vice president, said that she has regularly encountered hostility from American Jews in her business dealings. "Many have told us we should go back to defend the homeland."
Israelis in Los Angeles acknowledge that they have an image problem. The "Israeli Mafia" created fear within the local Jewish community of a possible anti-Semitic backlash. And the fledgling Israeli community, traumatized, grew wary of appearing conspicuous. A Jewish Federation Council fund-raiser, who asked not to be named, confirmed that Israelis have been stereotyped within the local Jewish-American community. "You hear a lot of people saying that they can't stand Israelis. It's based on some of the working-class types you see on Fairfax—these guys in the falafel stands. But is that how you judge a nation—by its hot-dog vendors?" Ethel Taft, assistant director of the federation's Jewish family service department, pointed out another factor contributing to unease among American Jews: "On the one hand, you talk about raising funds for Israel, encouraging aliyah and building up the country. So how do you feel about those with the opportunity to live the dream who rejected it instead? That's a tough one."
The tone of American Jewish disdain for Israelis, who are often dismissed as brash, arrogant and crude, is strikingly similar to that evinced by the German-American Jews in their relations with the Eastern European Jewish masses who fled to America at the turn of the century. "But there is one big difference," said Gerald Bubis. "The German-Jewish community viewed the Eastern European Jewish newcomers with great ambivalence. But they ended up serving their needs communally. The Israelis, though, are the first Jewish immigrant group in America not being served by the Jewish community."
This was confirmed last year by former federation president Hirsh, who told a group of Israeli Business Network members that the Israeli Consulate had tried to discourage the American Jewish community from helping Israeli immigrants. Bentzur neither confirmed nor denied Hirsh's contention. "This was before I took office here," he said.
Reluctance to grapple with the Israeli presence in Los Angeles has also been apparent in the pages of the federation's weekly newspaper, the Jewish Journal. According to critics, Israeli affairs and news of the local Israeli community were of marginal interest to the paper and received minimal coverage. This approach proved particularly burdensome for the Israeli Consulate here, which, until Stanley Hirsh bought the paper, awaited each new issue with dread.
Israelis early on accused the paper of a skewed presentation of Israeli news. Indeed, during the tense winter and spring of 1988, when the local Israeli and Jewish communities became incensed at the Los Angeles Times and its coverage of the Palestinian intifada, one Israeli I met at a consular function made a telling comment. "How can we rightfully complain about the Times," he asked, "when the most important Jewish newspaper in town is consistently down on Israel? All they had to do to decide what would go down with the Jewish community was to read the pages of its newspaper."
The attitude of local Israelis to the Jewish Journal was symptomatic of the regard with which they—and the Jewish Federation Council—held each other. Both sides found it more convenient to ignore rather than accommodate each other.
Ethel Taft said the federation never openly ordered her to ignore Israelis in her family service work. But she acknowledged that there was an unspoken understanding that Israelis would be denied the intensive resettlement services available to Soviet and Iranian-Jewish "refugees."
Accountant Shaul Sobol worked within the federation and personally witnessed efforts to exclude Israelis. "Two years ago two competing proposals were brought before the federation. One proposed funding assistance to Tzofim, the local Israeli scouting organization. The other advocated funding an outreach group for Jewish and minority children in Los Angeles. The money went to the latter."
Another Israeli, who asked not to be named, cited a recent development he found irksome: "I read in the paper that the federation gave money to uplift an Arab neighborhood in Israel. They'd never give us two cents!"
According to Gerald Bubis, however, this is a misreading of the case. The money in question was apportioned through Project Renewal as part of a general program to uplift poor neighborhoods in Israel. "That money could never be used locally," he said.
Hirsh denied that the federation has been out to exclude anyone. "Our responsibility," he said, "is to see to it that everyone has a good beginning. But our agencies provide assistance on a first-need basis. The Israeli Consulate's priority has been to encourage people to return to Israel. And it's an impediment to that position if the community makes it too easy for them here.
"But that does not mean that we have refused individual Israelis who have come to us for help. We just did not go out of our way to publicize the fact that help was available."
Hirsh said he had no problem personally with the sizable Israeli presence in Los Angeles. "God bless them, they are all Jewish. They are also a well-educated, ambitious group of people. I hope they get every opportunity for individual happiness and freedom."
He did, however, have a problem with the consul general, who steadfastly opposed the federation's efforts to co-opt the local Israeli community. Sources inside the consulate say that relations between Eitan Bentzur and Hirsh had, by the end of Bentzur's tenure, deteriorated markedly as a consequence of such efforts. The two had ceased to be at loggerheads over the editorial direction of the federation's newspaper, the Jewish Journal, once Hirsh had bought the paper for himself. The issue of how to relate to L.A.'s Israelis, unfortunately, proved far more difficult to resolve. Hirsh saw in the Israelis a much-needed shot-in-the-arm for the city's Jewishly anemic community. Bentzur could never bring himself to countenance such first aid at his country's expense.
Hirsh's successor as federation president, George T. Caplan, denied that the federation is presently at odds with the Israeli Consulate over this issue. Caplan, a successful attorney and at 46 certainly the youngest man ever to become federation president in Los Angeles, said he has noted a growing recognition within the Israeli Government that Israeli emigrants—and their children—will be lost to the Jewish people as a whole if they are not somehow dealt with.
Caplan said he has noted greater willingness on the part of Israeli residents here to send their children to Jewish schools, a tendency he welcomes: "I think they provide an opportunity, for the parents, to reinforce in their children their link to Hebrew, to Israel and to their religion." He said he would oppose, however, the establishment of secular Hebrew schools following an Israeli and American curriculum.
Still, Caplan said he is encouraged by the greater willingness he sees within the organized Jewish community to reach out to its Israelis. He noted, "I think it has begun to sink in, finally, that these people are here and will likely be here forever. We have to find a way to get to them."
Nira Ronen's husband died in a plane crash in 1970, when she was 30.
The night he died, Ronen suddenly saw him standing in her room. She didn't know what to think in the morning, she couldn't bring herself to tell anyone. Israelis, she told me, aren't big on the paranormal. Ronen began looking for answers. In 1974, her search brought her to Scientology, at the very moment it began making inroads into Israel. (First called Dianetics in 1952, Scientology was the brainchild of the late science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who initially conceived it as a unique form of psychotherapy incorporating some of the pseudoscientific overtones of 1950s pulp fantasy. Although widely dismissed as a crafty tax dodge, Scientology now appears to possess many of the qualities of a genuine religion, and inspires a certain amount of religious fervor among its many adherents worldwide, not least of all in the Jewish state.) Ronen spent the summer in London studying Scientology's teachings and in 1976, with her two daughters, she left for Los Angeles, where a small coterie of Israeli-born Scientologists was forming. By the start of the 1980s, she said, thousands of Israelis were flocking to lectures offered by the Israeli Center for Scientology in Los Angeles, known as SCILA.
In recent years, SCILA has lost much of its initial vigor. It has changed location a number of times, and several of its founders returned to Israel either for extended periods or permanently. Recently SCILA moved into a room adjoining the North Hollywood residence of its current leader, Zvika Shiponny.
Former members trace SCILA's decline since its heyday to "ego problems" within the group and to "politics." One dropout attributed the group's inability to retain members to an inherent Israeli resistance to intrusive ideologies. "It's hard to bullshit an Israeli. It's even harder telling him what to do, how to live and who to talk to."
But SCILA is still functioning, and Israelis continue to attend weekly lectures delivered by Shiponny. About a third who come, Shiponny said, eventually sign up for the courses. Perhaps 15 percent become more deeply involved in the church.
Shiponny, a mathematician at Rockwell International, said he doesn't know the exact number of Israelis now active in Scientology. One founding member estimated a core membership of 500 to 1,000. According to Chanon Bloch, coordinator of the cult clinic of the federation's Jewish family services department, "There is a preponderance of Israelis in Scientology, particularly in its upper levels." This contention is disputed by Shiponny and others formerly in SCILA.
Ronen, who claims to have been the most highly trained Israeli in Scientology here, left the church after she refused to sign a contract affording it access to her personal income tax files. Bloch believes that Israelis gravitate to Scientology because "cults target people in transition, those on the periphery."
A number of former SCILA members said they were attracted by an "accepting attitude" they found in the group. SCILA offered people stripped of their roots and adrift in a strange society a readily available social life, a support group.
"I went to a temple function once and was made to feel unwanted," exclaimed one former member. "Here I found hevrah." Shiponny said that SCILA may have indeed served as a social framework for newcomers. But this was incidental. At its crux was a commitment to the church's teachings.
"It wasn't just a question of being lonely," Ronen explained. "Israelis who had cut their ties to Israel were simply ready to try out new things."
Efrat Angel, a free-lance Hebrew-language journalist based in Los Angeles, attended one of Shiponny's lectures. She said that Scientology sells something else: a potent version of the American dream. "Scientology holds the promise of self-improvement. Join the church and learn how to harness your mind to succeed in America."
But Angel said that Shiponny offers a competing message, which is that material gain isn't everything. "It better not be, because Scientologists are going to pay for their courses through the nose."
Bea Chankin, early childhood director at Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Van Nuys, calls them "my Israelis." They comprise about a quarter of the families and half of the teachers in her preschool program, and they are there because she wants them there.
Valley Cities is one of the few places in Los Angeles where Israelis feel accepted, and where Jewish-American and Israeli parents associate extensively and comfortably. Chankin wants Israelis in her program because they lend an authenticity to her extensive Jewish curriculum. "Even secular Israelis are probably more knowledgeable about the very things they reject than American Jews, many of whom have a superficial knowledge of the thing they call religion."
"Israel is part of my core curriculum. It's the place where it all happened. And it helps to have children who talk about having a savta [grandmother] on a kibbutz, or who speak Hebrew naturally, and not in the artificial format learned in afternoon school. It makes it all real for the other children."
This is why Chankin insists that, whenever possible, at least one of the two teachers assigned to each preschool class be Israeli. "Whereas other Jewish schools may hire Israeli teachers because they can't find anyone else to teach Hebrew, for me it is a conscious choice. I want people for whom Hebrew and Israel and Judaism are a natural part of their lives."
Chankin's curriculum differs from those of other Jewish preschools-most of which are run out of temples—in that she needn't advocate one particular brand of Judaism. "My goal is not to develop a child who will be Reform, Conservative, Orthodox or secular. We have them all. This means than I can expose the children to everything because I never say one way is better than the next. And Israelis feel more comfortable with this than with having a particular brand of Judaism as the only one their child is exposed to."
Israeli parents, meanwhile, have made what Chankin considers a "tremendous contribution" to Valley Cities. For instance, a number of Israeli fathers have taken it upon themselves to celebrate Sukkoth in as big a way as they had in Israel.
Among non-Orthodox American Jews, the holiday has been nearly ignored. But for those who grew up in Israel, building a sukkah, or booth, in which to eat a holiday meal was de rigueur. Establishing that tradition at the center has enriched the quality of Jewish life there. Chankin has noted a growing readiness within Jewish institutions and agencies of late to deal with the Israeli presence in Los Angeles. But in the past, she said, the approach has been misguided.
"To say 'Oh, you poor people—let us help you,' that won't work. My approach has been, you have something to offer and I'd like to take advantage of it. They respond well to that."
About a year ago, Eitan Bentzur launched a program aimed at assisting Israelis in L.A. to return to Israel. Since then, Bentzur's Faces Homeward campaign has helped some 700 Israelis go home. Another thousand files—one per family or individual-are still being processed.
While still serving as consul, Bentzur acknowledged that these numbers may be a drop in the bucket. "But they do indicate the presence of a strong inclination out there to consider the option seriously."
Of course, not everyone who opens a file at the consulate follows through by going back. Moreover, many of those who have indicated their desire to return are older people hoping to retire in Israel.
Bentzur, unlike previous consuls, was willing to engage the Israeli community in Los Angeles in dialogue on a range of subjects—Jewish and Israeli education, investment opportunities, cultural programs.
When a number of other Israeli consuls in the United States recently sent a proposal to Jerusalem urging that secular Hebrew schools combining an Israeli and American curriculum be set up in major American cities for the children of Israeli emigrants, lest these children be lost both to the Jewish state and to the American Jewish community, Bentzur didn't cast his vote. "We're walking a thin line between acceptance and rejection on this one," he told me.
Of the Israelis in L.A., Bentzur said: "They are a miserable lot. They are lost here, and they know it.
"I'm glad if I took some of the wind out of their sails that night at the Scottish Rite. I didn't come here to give them legitimacy. I hope that yerida remains a mark of Cain stamped on the forehead of every emigrant."
Sheldon Teitelbaum wrote on Jewish reactions in Los Angeles to the Palestinian uprising in the November/December 1988 issue. This article is one in an occasional series examining the Israeli immigrant community in the United States.