A Look Back at PJTC’s History

By Michael Several

Chair, Eugene Fingerhut Memorial History Project

In 1949, Temple B’nai Israel, the original name of what has become the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, reorganized, renamed, and reincorporated itself with the State of California as the Pasadena Jewish Community. This restructuring was led by Rabbi Max Vorspan, who led our congregation as our first full-time rabbi between 1949 and 1952. Recently found in the collection of documents that Gene Fingerhut, of blessed memory, collected in connection with the history project was an article, undated and without a source, that appears to have published when Rabbi Vorspan was here in Pasadena. Though it fails to mention the influence Mordecai Kaplan’s concept of a Jewish civilization had on Max Vorspan’s vision in creating a Jewish Community, the article is being published because it offers a peek at what our congregation was attempting to become in the early 1950s and why it ceased having a Hebrew name.

PJC: An Experiment in Community Organization

To most people, Pasadena, California is a sun-splashed city on the Pacific coast where, once a year, a lavish spectacle known as the Tournament of Roses takes place. But to a growing number of Jewish leaders, who are concerned about the future of American Jewry, Pasadena is a laboratory in which an experiment is going on which may significantly alter the character of Jewish life in many communities. That experiment is the PJC — the Pasadena Jewish Community.

What is the experiment about? It is about a new concept in Jewish life, one that has long been dreamt and which has been talked half to death but which now at long last is being brought to life.

It is about a Jewish community, perhaps the only one in the United States that has found a way to combine its total religious educational, and welfare programs within the framework of a unified democratic organization by and for all the Jews in Pasadena who choose to identify themselves as Jews. It is about a community where Jews belong not merely to a congregation, a community center, a fraternal order, a social club — but to a community as a whole, to the entire body of Pasadena Jewry. It is about a daring program which is geared not to one or another of the 57 variety of Jews — but to all Jews in the community who wish to be considered Jews, and especially to the large number who in most communities form the great neglected army of the unaffiliated. That, in short, is what the experiment is all about.

It all began a little more than a year ago.

Rabbi Max Vorspan, former youth director of the United Synagogue, who had just assumed the pulpit of B’nai Israel in Pasadena, was talking to some of the leaders of the community about the unusual state of harmony that existed among the many Jewish organizations there. Will it last, they asked themselves, or will Pasadena, like many another community, suffer the inevitable breakup, differentiation, and duplication? Why not forestall such a possibility by creating one overall community organization to encompass all the activities and organizations? Thus an idea was born which, in the months following, was revised and refined and finally presented to the community for its consideration.

Not long thereafter the congregation officially approved the idea of a Pasadena Jewish Community and the Jewish Community Council agreed to become the Welfare Fund Council of the PJC and to consider itself the fundraising arm of the community. Things began to happen rapidly. Membership to the Pasadena Jewish Community swelled, each person paying according to his ability to pay. A campaign was launched to enlist every one of the 500 families in the community as registered members of the PJC. On February 28, the PJC elected its first slate of officers and set up business on a formal basis.

“The Pasadena Jewish Community,” said Rabbi Vorspan last week, “is conceived as a religious community in which all forms of Jewish self-expression will be democratically fostered. The rabbi and other employees will naturally be employees of the Jewish community. One of the healthy results of the PJC will be that the artificial differentiation between religious and secular will be eliminated.”

What do the members of the Pasadena Jewish Community think about the “experiment?” Rabbi Vorspan sums up their reaction in these words: “We feel it is up to us to find the human resources and the necessary devotion to convince the Jews of this country that it is not necessary for Jews to be constantly divided, that it is possible for a group of Jews to maintain their difference and yet organize as a body for their own welfare and for the welfare of the general community. Can we succeed? Just give us a chance!”