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Pigeon carcasses lie where worshipers once stood. A tangle of tattered prayer shawls fills the Holy Ark, normally reserved for the sacred Torah scrolls.
Graffiti obscure a mural of the Ten Commandments, gang monikers mar Stars of David. Books that Jewish law say must be buried in the earth rather than tossed in the trash are splayed on the synagogue floor--bindings torn, pages soiled by urine and bird droppings.
Once the religious center of the largest Jewish community west of the Mississippi, the Breed Street shul--a Los Angeles cultural-historic monument that was memorialized on film in both the original and remake versions of "The Jazz Singer"--now teeters on the brink of collapse.
Preservationists, Jewish community leaders and local politicians want to restore the shul as a testament to Boyle Heights before World War II, when barrels of pickled herring lined Brooklyn Avenue--now named for Cesar Chavez and filled with the smell of freshly baked churros.
"If we tear down the past, then yesterday has no meaning--we're all just living for today and uncertain about tomorrow," said 85-year-old Bel Air resident Morton Silverman, a synagogue member from the 1930s until its last worship services in 1993.
But an Orthodox rabbi who claims title to the building wants it razed and the land sold, insisting that using the structure as a museum or community center would desecrate its origins.
One week after the Los Angeles City Council voted to delete St. Vibiana's Cathedral from its list of historic monuments to help clear the path for its destruction by the Roman Catholic archdiocese, the same lawmakers plan to use the shul's landmark status in a last-ditch effort to save it.
The council today is expected to pass an emergency motion to erect new barricades around the old synagogue, known in its heyday as "the queen of shuls." Councilman Hal Bernson, who became a bar mitzvah at the shul, and Councilman Richard Alatorre, who represents the now-Latino neighborhood, plan to use the city's power of nuisance abatement to clean it up. And the Jewish Historical Society is pondering legal action to buy or otherwise take control of the building, then launch a fund-raising campaign to restore it.
"We need to save it," said Bernson, who at age 10...