L.A. Emigres, Jews Debate Israeli Vote

By LARRY GORDON and DUKE HELFAND

May 31, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Transfixed by the closeness of the Israeli election results, Los Angeles’ Jewish and Israeli emigre communities pondered the voting results Thursday with a mixture of joy, fear, uncertainty--and above all passionate interest in how the complicated politics of the small democracy will affect its security and economy.

“A country that is so divided is going to require extraordinary leadership to bring it together,” John R. Fishel, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, said of Israel. Like many local Jewish leaders, Fishel monitored CNN reports through Wednesday night and Thursday morning as Likud candidate Benjamin Netanyahu gained a tiny lead over incumbent Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Those results were studied, celebrated and mourned in various ways around Southern California, home to an estimated 600,000 Jews. The federation’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters participated in a live and lively discussion linked to Jerusalem by satellite. The faculty of an Orthodox yeshiva on Pico Boulevard toasted Netanyahu with a belt of Scotch. And the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles was besieged Thursday with about 400 telephone calls seeking comment on the election’s effects.

Jews in Southern California reflected the split in Israeli society “with all the debates and some of the rancor,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. And on both sides of that divide, some Jewish Angelenos were following Knesset parliamentary seat tallies the way some neighbors track Dodger batting averages.

“The range was from severe depression to ecstasy. But most people were more moderate in their feelings,” Baruch S. Littman, executive director of the California Israel Chamber of Commerce, said of election reaction expressed at a trade-oriented breakfast held Thursday morning at a Westside hotel. He predicted that Israeli economic growth fueled by Mideast peace will continue no matter who heads a new Jerusalem government.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, director of the Jewish Studies Institute at Yeshiva of Los Angeles, brought a bottle of Scotch and cookies to the Orthodox school on Pico Boulevard to toast the apparent Netanyahu victory with other faculty members.

“It’s a triumph of common sense over blind optimism,” Adlerstein said. “I think finally the word will get out that the vast majority of Israelis are pro-peace but they want peace with a tad more security than Peres and Labor have been offering.”

In contrast, Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles chapter, which has backed Peres’ peace efforts, was worried. “At the very least, it sets the time frame back for peace with the Palestinians,” he said.

Many Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles relished gains made by the religious parties in the Israeli parliament. But that development alarmed Rabbi Harvey J. Fields of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, a Reform leader who is chairman of the Community Relations Committee of the area Jewish Federation. Israeli ultra-Orthodox, he said, may push challenges to rituals of Reform and Conservative Judaism and revive painful debates over the definition of Jewishness.

It could bring “very vociferous critique from American Jews,” Fields said.

After visiting Israel several times in the last six months, Fields said, he was not surprised by the tightness of the election. He awoke at 4 a.m. Thursday to discuss the election by telephone with friends and relatives in Israel. And he remains convinced that most Israelis want peace with the Palestinians even if half want the process “slowed slightly.”

The terrorist bombings of Israeli buses in February and March continue to echo in the election results, Fields said. “I think the blood is still splattered on the consciences and the sensibilities of Israelis,” he said.

Those bombings’ psychological effects were also mentioned by Rabbi Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center. But Cooper said the real winners in Israeli politics will be the moderates and that Netanyahu will put together a Cabinet “reflecting more to the center, rather than the extreme right.”

At the Israeli Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard, the phones were ringing with election-related questions from the large emigre community. “It was hectic here,” said Ravit Lichtenberg, director of media relations. “We even had people who called and asked if they could vote after the elections were closed.”

The Jewish community in the Los Angeles area also includes sizable numbers of people born in the former Soviet Union. Russian Jews here took notice of how their former countrymen who emigrated instead to Israel managed to form their own party and apparently win seven Knesset seats.

Such activism, whatever its outcome, pleases the American Jews who financially aided the Soviet emigration to Israel, said Fishel of the Jewish Federation. “To be indirectly able to help empower them to be a fully participating member of Israeli society is tremendously gratifying,” he said.

Marlene Adler Marks, managing editor of the Jewish Journal, a weekly publication for the Los Angeles area, noted that the election showed “the difficulty that Israel is having stepping into the new era of peace, but peace is inevitable.”

Likud will not sacrifice the economic gains achieved since the agreements with Palestinians, she said. And even if a slim majority of Israelis turned against Peres, all owe him gratitude for helping to forge the peace.

“It’s sad but probably true that you can’t move people too fast into the next era,” she said.