Building Lives - The Campaign for Wilshire Boulevard Temple

When I was President of the Sisterhood in 1976, Rabbi Magnin was the Chief. One Sunday, I went with him to the Hillcrest Country Club. In the car, in conversation he related that he was from the Bay Area and asked where I was from. I told him I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and he remarked without any hesitation: "Oh, you are really Jewish." I still remember that and it puts a smile on my face.

Inside a four-inch-by-three-inch notebook, fitting cozily into the palm of a hand, is the story of our congregation and how our predecessors built our sanctuary. The notebook belonged to Dr. David Edelman whose name is discernible in fading gold leaf on its cover. As is still the case today, the notebook was a promotional gift from a pharmaceutical company and its front pages contain advertising for medications long ago superseded by newer formulations.

Apparently doctors in the 1920s had far better penmanship than conventional wisdom now suggests. In meticulous script, penciled in over the course of many long months and years, Dr. Edelman carefully recorded the names of all the members of Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the amounts they gave to the community-wide effort to build our historic Sanctuary.

Dr. David Edelman served as the president of Congregation B'Nai Brith from 1910 to 1933 and was the son of Rabbi Abraham Wolf Edelman, the first rabbi in Los Angeles and at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. He was also the brother of A.M. Edelman, the Sanctuary's architect. While his brother's fame has endured, Dr. Edelman's years-long effort to raise the $1.5 million necessary to build the Sanctuary has mostly been forgotten.

According to Rabbi Magnin, who paid tribute to Edelman's herculean efforts when the Temple was dedicated in the summer of 1929: "Dr. D.W. Edelman has labored day and night with indefatigable energy and courage. Private interests, personal comforts and health became subsidiary and unimportant in his eyes, in the face of this colossal enterprise."

Even then, the Temple membership was fairly large, numbering approximately 2,000 families. Despite his busy medical practice, Dr. Edelman reached out to the vast majority of Temple members and it appears that most responded as generously as they could. From the Warner Brothers who gave $40,000 to scores of families who gave $5, all helped to build a new home for the congregation on Wilshire Boulevard.

The Warner Brothers' gift for the murals may have been 8,000 times as much as the smallest donation, but everyone helped and their gifts were all personally recorded by Dr. Edelman in his little notebook and then printed in the dedication program.

Today, as we move forward with the Building Lives Project, our intention is to reach every family in the same way they did in 1929. While our goal today is 100 times greater, we have strength in numbers and every dollar counts as much now as it did then.

Dan Wolf is the son of Rabbi Alfred Wolf (ז״ל ), who served the Temple for 36 years, from 1949 1985.

From my youngest age, the Temple sanctuary was something of a babysitter for me. This is because on many Friday nights, rather than arrange a flesh-and-blood babysitter, my parents would take me with them to services, which back then were always held in the main sanctuary (except during the summer, when they were conducted in the patio).

I provide this detail to establish my credentials as someone who has attended literally hundreds of services in that remarkable room. But here's the really extraordinary thing: During every one of those hundreds of services, I have looked up and been surprised. There is something about that dome that makes it more magisterial than one remembers, no matter how many times one has gazed into its heights. Like the Grand Canyon, it is a curious mixture of the real and the surreal.

Each time I look up, a part of me responds that it can't be real while at the same time I know it is. In a space so singular, it is that much easier to appreciate the words written above ... the lord our God the lord is one.

Since my first babysitting experience at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, I have gotten to know many other domes--from the Capitol to the Pantheon--and each has its awe-inspiring virtues. But only one dome can I call home. May it continue to surprise for countless generations to come. --Dan Wolf

Steve Breuer worked at Wilshire Bouelvard Temple for almost 50 years, serving as director of the Religious School, director of the camps and executive director.

In most of my lifetime, our Sanctuary has been a very special place for me. On that pulpit I was bar mitzvah, confirmed, and married. As a congregant, I heard sermons from Rabbis Magnin, Wolf, Fields, and Leder from which I can still quote. As Executive Director, I worried about filling those seats with happy congregants.

Three distinct memories speak to the unusual role of the Temple whose sanctuary it is.

When Saint Basil's church, across Harvard Boulevard from the Temple, burned down, the years of good relations between Rabbi Magnin and the local Cardinal resulted in a unique solution. Mass was held in our Sanctuary every Sunday for the years during which the new church was built.

In 1963, upon the assassination of President Kennedy, I joined almost two thousand congregants at a Friday evening service, the crowd all the more remarkable for there being no announcement of a special memorial. We were just people seeking and finding solace in our spiritual home. And I cherish, with pride as the director, the memory of the memorial service, one year later. Our youth group presented to a large congregation, reading the entire service, which featured Charlton Heston reading Robert Frost.

I recall interfaith services organized by Rabbi Wolf, including the call to worship by a muezzin whose minaret was our choir loft. But the most dramatic interfaith event came under the auspices of Rabbi Fields, who invited the Dalai Lama to speak in the Sanctuary. Hundreds of saffron-robed Buddhist monks filled the first rows of the Sanctuary overflowing with many of the Dalai's followers and many congregants. The pulpit was removed and the Dalai sat on a tall chair right in front of the arc, entertained first by a gospel choir and then by Native Americans dancing before him in full regalia on our pulpit.

These are but a few echoes within that majestic space and in my own memory.

--Steve Breuer