Orange County Jew: a Memoir

By Martin Aaron Brower

When Martin Brower moved his family from heavily Jewish Los Angeles to barely Jewish Orange County, California, in 1974, his Los Angeles friends were amazed at his bravery and his foolishness. Orange County was considered anti-Semitic and lacking in culture.

However, during the years following World War II, Orange County was transformed from a small rural community with citrus groves, row crops and cattle -- first into a bedroom community for neighboring Los Angeles County and then into a dynamic urban empire.

As the Countys population and employment base exploded, Orange Countys Jewish population grew from a small enclave of Jewish shopkeepers into a vibrant Jewish community in excess of 100,000. To the surprise of many, Orange County now boasts one of the leading centers of Jewish life in the nation, complete with 30 synagogues, a grand new Jewish Community Center, one of the nations largest Jewish day schools and one of its finest homes for the aging.

In his book Orange County Jew: A Memoir, Brower superimposes the growth of the Jewish community over the amazing development of Orange County itself, and uses as a framework the personal story of his own 36 years as a resident of Orange County and as a player among its major real estate development companies and its entrepreneurial leaders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449073503

Martin Aaron Brower

Martin A. Brower was born and raised in LosAngelesand was educated at the University of California at Los Angeles where he was editor-in-chief of theUCLA Daily Bruin. A journalist and a public relations professional, he wasinvolved in public relations with the County of Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District, witha high-tech public relations firm, and with Los Angeles' then-largest architectural firm, Welton Becket and Associates. He was also managing editor of a national business publication. With the Becket firm, he was intimately involved withthe planning and development of such projects as the Los Angeles Music Center and Century City. During all of this time, he was an active member of the Los Angeles Jewish community,closely observing its growth and development. Currently, Brower lives with his wife, Tamar, inCorona del Mar,California. There, he continues his writing as a magazine columnist.The Browers have four grown children and three grandchildren.

Book preview

ORANGE COUNTY JEW:

A Memoir

SKU-000366148_Text.pdf

Martin Aaron Brower

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2010 Martin Aaron Brower. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/15/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4490-7350-3 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-7349-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-7348-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-7350-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010900448

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE BEGINNING: AN OPPORTUNITY IN ORANGE COUNTY

CHAPTER TWO

I JOIN THE IRVINE COMPANY

CHAPTER THREE

THE IRVINE RANCH: A PUBLIC RELATIONS CHALLENGE

CHAPTER FOUR

ORANGE COUNTY JEWS SETTLE INTO CITIES,

BEGIN BUILDING SYNAGOGUES

CHAPTER FIVE

WE FIND OUR CONGREGATION – OR OUR CONGREGATION FINDS US

CHAPTER SIX

ORANGE COUNTY BUILDS A JEWISH FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER SEVEN

I CAN’T SAY NO – BECOMING INVOLVED IN THE GENERAL COMMUNITY

CHAPTER EIGHT

NOW JEWISH CORPORATE PROFESSIONALS RELOCATE TO ORANGE COUNTY

CHAPTER NINE

NEW COMMUNITIES ATTRACT NEW JEWISH RESIDENTS

CHAPTER TEN

THE IRVINE COMPANY TURNS JEWISH

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE LEASED RESIDENTIAL LAND ISSUE EXPLODES

CHAPTER TWELVE

I BEGIN TO PUBLISH ORANGE COUNTY REPORT

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NOW COMES MARTIN BROWER AND ASSOCIATES AND THE KOLL COMPANY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ORANGE COUNTY’S JEWISH COMMUNITY CAPTURES ME

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I FLUNK RETIREMENT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE SECOND MASSIVE JEWISH INSTITUTION: THE SAMUELI CAMPUS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE CITY OF IRVINE – ORANGE COUNTY’S MOST JEWISH CITY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

JEWS CONTINUE TO MOVE TO ORANGE COUNTY

Dedication

To Stephanie, who came to Orange County as a toddler,

and to Jason and Mason, who are Orange County natives

PROLOGUE

Martin, what in the heck is an Orange County?

The caller was an editor friend from the New York Times and I was director of public relations for The Irvine Company, the largest landowner and real estate developer in Orange County, California.

I wasn’t surprised by his call. It was the mid-1970s and I had received similar inquiries from other New York-headquartered news media ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Business Week to Time magazine and Fortune. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, what a Boston, a Chicago or even a San Jose was — but an Orange County?

The reason for the curiosity was that Orange County, a relatively small California county in land mass located directly south of Los Angeles County, was the first urban area in the United States not centered on a major city. For purposes of the Federal government’s listing of metropolitan areas, Orange County’s metropolitan area was labeled by a combination of its two largest cities, Anaheim and Santa Ana — hardly metropolises in themselves.

Thus, in the early 1970s, reporting from New York City, Time magazine wrote Anaheim/Santa Ana is the fastest growing residential area in the United States (we don’t understand this, we have been to Anaheim and there doesn’t seem to be that much open space).

News media, and much of the rest of the nation, were caught unaware of Orange County because its emergence as a metropolitan area came about so rapidly. A basically rural county with bean fields, citrus orchards and grazing cattle until 1950 had been suddenly transformed into an urban dynamo.

I was standing in front of the Irvine Marriott Hotel in the early 1980s waiting for the valet to bring my car when I noticed a young lady, briefcase at her side, waiting for her rental car while studying a map. I asked if I could help her, and pointed out on the map where she wanted to go.

Thanking me, she inquired as to whether she could ask me a question. I flew in from New York last night, she said. What are all of these tall hotels and office towers doing in the middle of nowhere?

* * * *

With Orange County’s transformation from an agricultural to an urban county came its transformation from what many considered an anti-Semitic region, typical of rural areas, into one of the nation’s fastest growing, most diverse and most vibrant Jewish centers.

In 1973, my Jewish friends in Los Angeles County were stunned when I told them that I, a native of Los Angeles and active in the Jewish community, was moving to Orange County. Although the City of Newport Beach in Orange County, to which I relocated, is only 60 miles south of West Los Angeles where I then resided, the difference was considered to be the proverbial night and day.

Los Angeles, after all, was the world’s third largest Jewish population center with liberal political leanings, and Orange County had long been known as bereft of Jews and a politically conservative, anti-Semitic area — the county in which the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan had once been active. My explanation — that the now heavily-Jewish San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles was considered anti-Semitic before World War II when the Valley was rural — did little to assuage their fears.

Over the past more than 35 years since I moved with my family to Orange County, I have frequently been called upon to speak on the subject of what I call Orange County and the Jewish Question. The title typically gets a knowing laugh, because until recent years the term Jewish Orange County was considered to be an oxymoron. No more.

Today, Orange County, California, has a Jewish population probably well in excess of 100,000 – although no accurate demographic study has been taken for many years. A Jewish population of that size makes Orange County’s Jewish community larger than that of Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis or Cleveland — each a long-time, highly Jewish city. The World Almanac and the American Jewish Yearbook each list Orange County, California, as having one of the largest Jewish populations in the nation.

Institution-wise, Orange County has nearly 30 synagogues – Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox and Chabad; two Jewish day schools; one of the nation’s finest Jewish homes for the aging; and a magnificent Jewish Community Center which includes offices occupied by a myriad of Jewish agencies.

In 2009, I published a personal memoir titled Los Angeles Jew: A Memoir, depicting the growth of Jewish Los Angeles from my birth in that city in 1928 to the present day.

Now that I have lived in Orange County for the past 35-plus years, I felt that the best way I could communicate the dynamic story of Jewish Orange County – in which I have been deeply involved – is through this second memoir.

Enjoy!

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE BEGINNING: AN OPPORTUNITY IN ORANGE COUNTY

THERE IS A LONG-TIME JEWISH PRESENCE

Similar to the majority of Jews who live in Orange County, California, I was lured to Orange County by a job. Dissatisfied with my income as vice president of public relations for the Los Angeles-headquartered national architectural firm of Welton Becket and Associates, I began looking at other opportunities in early 1973 at the age of 44.

I knew that a decision to leave Welton Becket and Associates would be difficult to make. The firm had been extremely good to me over a period of 12 years, and I was a close confident of the firm’s president, frequently traveling with him to our offices in San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and New York City.

Moreover, our spectacular Los Angeles headquarters in Century City was exceedingly comfortable and close to my home, and best of all I had a ridiculously extravagant expense account which I constantly exceeded. But my basic salary was not keeping up with the times.

When Tom Wilck, a professional public relations acquaintance I had known some years earlier in Los Angeles, called me from Orange County about an opening at a firm he had recently joined called The Irvine Company, I told him that I would come to see him. But I told him I was coming there only because our architectural firm was doing a project I wanted to see in the Orange County city of Newport Beach, and because I had not seen Tom for a number of years.

In truth, I had heard that Tom — who had a public relations agency in Los Angeles before taking a position with the government in Washington, D.C. — had joined The Irvine Company. And I wondered why in the world a sophisticated person such as Tom would take a job in a backwoods area like Orange County, of all places.

I had visited The Irvine Company in 1966 to plan the opening of a regional retail center called Fashion Island in Newport Beach, which our architectural firm had designed for the Company. At that time, The Irvine Company — known for owning an agricultural empire called the Irvine Ranch which occupied a full one-fifth of Orange County — was headquartered in an old farmhouse in the central part of the Ranch, and was just beginning development of portions of its vast property.

On that previous trip, I had arrived early and therefore took time to visit the brand new campus of the University of California, Irvine, opened in 1962. The William Pereira-designed buildings, arranged in a ring in the center of a 1,000-acre parcel of land donated by The Irvine Company, presented a bold architectural statement.

And coming from cosmopolitan Los Angeles, I was astounded by the students I saw walking the campus — male and female, all were blond and beautiful. I should not have been surprised, because Orange County was known as a white bread county, populated by politically conservative Christian Caucasians.

* * * *

In fact, what was to become Orange County actually had a small Jewish presence since 1857, when a group of about 50 Germans, including German Jews, formed the Los Angeles Vineyard Society in a southern part of Los Angeles County they called Anaheim.

The following year, in 1858, Benjamin Dreyfus opened a retail store in Anaheim and became the first Jewish citizen to actually settle in the area. In 1864 Dreyfus produced the first California wine to be certified Kosher for Passover, and by 1876 B. Dreyfus & Company had become the largest winery in California. Thus, Dreyfus, his wife Leah, and their sons Emile and Walter laid the foundation for the Orange County Jewish community.

What is believed to be the first High Holiday services occurred in 1874 when Morris Mendelson, a tailor, conducted services in the home of a Mr. B. Cohen who operated a meat market in Anaheim. And Jews took their place in Anaheim’s leadership when in 1877 Louis Wartenberg became the first Jewish marshal – an officer of the court – and in1881 Benjamin Dreyfus became the city’s first Jewish mayor.

Typical of other small towns throughout the United States where there was a gathering of people, there was a need for supplies – and that attracted Jewish shopkeepers. As early as 1880, an Anaheim newspaper wrote "On Wednesday, owing to the closing of many stores on account

of it being a Jewish holiday, the town was abnormally quiet and dull."

At that time, what eventually became Orange County was the southern tip of giant Los Angeles County. Orange County’s 786 square miles were snipped off as a county of its own in 1889.

By the early 1900s, Jewish shops in Anaheim included Levi Gildmacher Groceries, Reinhaus Bros. Department Store and Sam Hurwitz Haberdashery. And one of the largest and most successful businesses in Anaheim was the modern Asher & Falkenstein Department Store.

As Anaheim expanded, Philip and Gustave Davis established a private bank in their general store, and shops along Center Street included the Jewish-owned Style Shop and the Gloria Shop.

Some indication of the lack of anti-Semitism during those early years was the fact that in 1909 Gertrude Asher was crowned as Queen of the May Festival. However, just as in Los Angeles County, an undercurrent of anti-Semitism evolved in the first half of the 1900s with the infusion of basically rural Midwestern Americans who had inbred negative concepts of Jews without ever having met any.

When the nearby city of Santa Ana — incorporated in 1886 three years before the new county was born — became the County seat, Santa Ana’s population began to expand and that city’s center evolved as the major downtown of Orange County. The growing city began to attract Jewish merchants from Anaheim and from elsewhere in the nation. By the late 1920s, downtown Santa Ana had a sizeable number of Jewish families.

The colorful Jewish history of Orange County before World War II is well documented by the Orange County Historical Society, which has news clippings, family histories, recorded narratives and photographs of the early Jewish families, their homes and their shops.

Included among the Historical Society’s collection is the story of shoemaker Nathan Fainbarg and his wife Rose, who came all the way from Michigan in 1919 to purchase the Eureka Shoe Store in downtown Santa Ana.

My good friend Allan Fainbarg, son of Nathan and Rose and brought to Orange County at the age of one, recalls that on Saturday nights Santa Ana was like a Western town in the movies. Cowboys from the surrounding Irvine, Mission Viejo, Moulton and other cattle