Sinai Temple Celebrates its Centennial

Last Sunday, Sinai Temple in Los Angeles celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary, with a dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by over a thousand people. 

In 1906, according to this chronology of Los Angeles Jewish history, the city’s population was around 100,000, including about 2,500 Jewish residents (up from 500 in 1890).  Amy Klein’s recent article in The Jewish Journal on Sinai’s centennial notes that the “young adult immigrants who established Sinai in 1906 [as the city’s first conservative congregation] . . . just wanted a synagogue that wasn’t exactly Orthodox, but was definitely not Reform.”

One hundred years later, Sinai Temple has nearly 2,000 families as members, provides a shul with a remarkable clergy headed by Rabbi David Wolpe, attracts nearly 1,000 people for services each Shabbat and another 1,000 at its monthly Friday Night Live service for twenty and thirty-ish year-olds, runs a religious school, a major day school (the Sinai-Akiba Academy) and the Douglas Early Childhood Center for pre-schoolers, maintains the Blumenthal Library with more than 30,000 items, operates Mount Sinai Memorial & Mortuaries in service to the entire Jewish community, and mixes Ashkenazi, Persian and Sephardic Jews into a single congregation that (perhaps because of that mixture) has an extraordinary vitality.  The many events in the year-long centennial celebration that culminated in Sunday’s dinner are described in this issue of Sinai Speaks. 

A hundred years is a very long time in Los Angeles history, but it is only a blink in Jewish history.  As Milo Mandel, one of Sinai’s former presidents, said in his dinner ad — “100 years . . . it’s a nice start.”

(The dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, with a 15-person band, beautiful decorations, and kosher biblical food prepared by an assortment of chefs from Israel and the United States.  The Jewish Current Wife is at the lower left).

(More than 10 former Sinai presidents attended the dinner, including (front row) Milt Hyman, Malcolm Cosgrove, Milo Mandel and (back row) Jimmy Delshad, Ed Kaminer).

(Pictured, left to right:  Rabbi Schuldenfrei (L) and Rabbi Schuldenfrei (R).  They’re married.  The small group of Jews who formed Sinai Temple in 1906 would have been proud.)