The Shul on the Beach
Venice Beach: the second most popular tourist attraction in California, second only to Disneyland.
Miriam and I spent a few days in sunny California this week, to enjoy some father and daughter bonding time. We rented an AirBnB apartment near Venice Beach, and we decided to rent electric scooters to tour the promenade.
With an average of 30,000 visitors each day, Venice Beach is a truly fascinating place to people-watch and see the cultural clash of wealthy visitors and homeless beachcombers, aggressive vendors and naive tourists.
Some of the hardest working vendors are the Egyptians who are the proprietors and staff that work at the “Egyptian Museum Gift Shop.” It also just happens to be next door to the Pacific Jewish Center, “The Shul on the Beach.”
A display case full of exotic rings outside the Egyptian gift shop caught Miriam’s attention, so we went in to look around. Within seconds, Ahmed, an Egyptian man, came over, looked us up and down and said in a heavy Arabic accent, “You are our neighbors from the Middle East, no?”
I was wearing a baseball cap, and neither Miriam nor I had any external Jewish giveaway signs, so we were shocked by his reverse J-dar abilities. “How did you know?” I asked. “I could tell,” he replied.
He said that we are “welad ammi,” paternal cousins through Abraham. He must have sensed some discomfort on my part, so he pointed to the synagogue next door to prove his point, smiling and commenting that “here too we are neighbors,” and asked if I would go there to pray. I replied that they only had services on weekends.
He said, “Yes, but someone is always there. You can just knock and they will let you in.” I smiled politely and thanked him for his unsolicited advice. We did some classic Middle East price-haggling, bought a ring and moved on.
Miriam and I spent the next hour strolling and people-watching on the boardwalk. I realized that it was getting close to sunset and I had to pray the afternoon mincha service. Figuring I’d need to walk back to our AirBnB to pray in privacy, we started heading back. Then we passed by the Pacific Jewish Center and I remembered what Ahmed had told me, that someone was always there, so we knocked and, lo and behold, a young man named Eli opened the door for us.
He gave us a tour of the synagogue and Miriam and I both prayed the mincha afternoon prayer service there. It was a small historic synagogue, truly a spiritual oasis in an unspiritual environment, and provided an uplifting experience for both of us.
I told him that I was so glad that he always hangs out at the synagogue, so that he was available to let us in when we knocked. He said that it was actually a fluke. Typically no one was ever in the synagogue during the week. (Ahmed must have gotten confused with the Kotel.) He said that he actually works for an art gallery down the road, but he “just happened to be there when we knocked” because he wanted to meet a contractor there who was hired to do some renovations.
Well, it was truly meant to be. We instantly hit it off with Eli. He’s a real “salt-of-the-earth” kind of guy, swims 3 miles in the ocean every night after work, and spends his spare time volunteering at the synagogue. Oh, and he and Miriam share political views. That was the clincher.
So, we invited him to join us for dinner. We all had a great time together. Afterwards he invited us for drinks, and we hope to stay in touch with him.
There you have it, folks. Yet another episode of a Rabbi and his minyan. You can’t make this stuff up!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Koval
Miriam, Eli and me outside the synagogue. Notice the Egyptian shop right near the synagogue.
