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50 Years after his visit, a multicultural homage to MLK

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a Shabbat evening service at Temple Israel of Hollywood (TIOH) in 1965, security was tight and sharpshooters manned the nearby rooftops.
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January 14, 2015

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a Shabbat evening service at Temple Israel of Hollywood (TIOH) in 1965, security was tight and sharpshooters manned the nearby rooftops. Less than a week before, Malcolm X had been assassinated, and law enforcement wasn’t taking any chances with the man who a year before had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fifty years later, as the temple readies itself for a “multicultural, multifaith musical extravaganza” on Jan. 18 to commemorate King’s sermon, the passage of time, if not the evening’s festivities, has moved the celebration onto a more King-like plane of “justice, peace and brotherhood,” rather than security.

The event, which will feature PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley — whose new book is about the last year of King’s life — will showcase what the organizers believe is the lasting impact of King’s visit.

Following up the next day, Big Sunday’s Third annual MLK Clothing Drive & Community Breakfast will take place at the organization’s 6111 Melrose Ave. storefront.

Big Sunday, originally called Mitzvah Day, has its origins as a program at TIOH.

Arranging the evening’s program is temple member Michael Skloff, a composer and musician who has an ear for modern Jewish synagogue music and is a “lover of African-American music,” he said.

Interspersed between the performances of a combined choir of singers from the temple and the Leimert Park Choir from the Harmony Project, will be excerpts from King’s speech, Skloff said.

Exhibiting the evening’s spirit of multiculturalism, a Korean dance group will perform, a video of an imam will be screened, and TIOH chazzan Danny Maseng — along with African-American singer Bridgette Bentley — will perform Maseng’s arrangment of “Amar Hashem” (Said the Lord Unto Jacob).

“We have this pristine recording of that sermon he gave that evening, because, back in the day, Temple Israel of Hollywood was full of movie studio technical people and movie studio executives,” Skloff said.

Temple member Ruth Rose, 81, was among those in attendance that Friday night in 1965. She said King “was brilliant, he spoke fluently. … Yes, he was an orator, and he knew how to work his audience.” 

And work the audience he did.

The recording of the speech, which was made available to the public in 2007 and is posted on the Jewish Journal’s website, is filled with classic King rising oratory and biblical allusions, but it also reveals King tucking in an appeal for financial support from the 1,500 people the L.A. Times reported were in attendance.

“I want to thank you in advance for your prayers, for your concern, for your moral support, and also for your financial support. I can assure you that this financial support will go a long, long way in helping us to continue in our humble efforts to make the American dream a reality,” King said in the opening paragraphs of his sermon.

At TIOH, which in its earliest days referred to itself as “Filmland’s House of Worship” and today takes pride in its social justice roots, King’s legacy extends beyond that one speech. “Martin Luther King’s legacy is very much a part of our day-school curriculum,” said Rabbi John Rosove, senior rabbi at TIOH since 1988.

In the early 1990s, Rosove was also part of a partnership developed between the congregation and Messiah Baptist Church, in Southwest Los Angeles. “I would preach there on Sunday morning,” said Rosove, and the Rev. Kenneth Flowers, who was a protégé of King, “would preach here, usually on Martin Luther King weekend,” Rosove said. “When the riots took place, we were the first people down there, helping as a congregation to give out clothes,” he said.

The relationship was such that after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which, according to the L.A. Times, left the church with “lightning-shaped cracks in its bell tower and inner support columns,” Messiah parishioners were welcomed to hold their services at Temple Israel. “A 16-member gospel choir belted out a rollicking version of ‘Oh Happy Day’ in front of the Holy Ark,” the Times reported.

During the coming musical celebration, that African-American spiritual is not on the program, but Skloff, who is known for having composed “I’ll Be There for You,” the theme song from “Friends,” noted that the combined choirs singing from the bimah will be performing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

And change apparently is coming.

Skloff, who will be conducting the combined choirs, has noticed during rehearsals a difference in learning approaches between the two musical groups. “Our choir is used to holding music, and their choir is used to learning by ear, and I’m trying to get our choir to learn by ear, but it’s challenging,” he said. “I keep promising them, you’ll feel so free once you do it,” added Skloff, who — though it will not be performed that night — has composed a kedushah with a “gospel spirit,” he said.

Among the choir members on Sunday night, adding her own voice to the spirit of the evening, will be Rose, a soprano, who remembers that, on the night King spoke, “I got here early; I wanted to be able to park,” a perennial problem even today. At the time, she worked as a supervisor for the temple’s religious school. Remembering the security that evening, she recalled, “They looked in my purse, like [in] Israel.”

“It was well-publicized within the congregation,” she said, and an ad in the temple newsletter, The Observer, announcing King as “Nobel Prize winner and the most outstanding Civil Rights leader in U.S. History,” bears this out.

As Rose recalled, the men in attendance wore coats and ties, and the women were dressed up for temple. “We had at least half of the service,” before Rabbi Max Nussbaum introduced King.

Nussbaum, who had invited King, was a refugee from Nazi Germany; in 1940, he was one of the last rabbis to leave Berlin. That Shabbat evening, he introduced King as “the man who has given the history [of] our generation a forward thrust, a sense of direction, an encounter with destiny,” Nussbaum said, according to a transcript.

Two years earlier, as indicated by an announcement in The Observer, King had been scheduled to speak on Nov. 23, 1963, at the synagogue, about the “Negro Revolution,” but John Kennedy’s assassination the day before ended that plan.

“Tonight, I would like to suggest some of the symbolic mountains that we have occupied long enough and that we must leave if we are to move on to the promised land of justice, peace and brotherhood,” King said.

“This was the first time I had heard him,” Rose said. “I don’t remember there being applause,” she said, as Nussbaum did not usually permit it during the service. “People talked afterward, but I had a babysitter to get home to,” she said. She also had religious school to get to the next morning, Rose added.

King’s sermon has meant more to Rose since she saw the film “Selma,” she said of the recent release, which dramatically portrays the three marches leading up to the passage of the Voting Rights Act signed into law in August 1965. The historic first march took place on March 7, little more than a week after King spoke at TIOH.   

“It didn’t matter whether you belonged to his church or not,” Rose said. “He was willing to give. On the other hand, he wanted something back; he wanted support for his campaigns. He wasn’t obnoxious about it, but you knew why he was here — to drum up interest in his cause.

“This man, in his nonviolent way of lobbying for things, accomplished more than the protesters who are more modern and who are more violent,” Rose said. “They just wanted their rights; they wanted equal education, and, of course, they wanted voting rights.”


For tickets, which cost $5, and more information, visit tioh.org.

To volunteer for Big Sunday’s Third annual MLK Day Clothes Drive & Community Breakfast, Jan. 19, 9 a.m.-noon, email rob@bigsunday.org.

To hear the recording of King’s 1965 TIOH speech, visit: http://www.jewishjournal.com/jj_audio/article/martin_luther_kings_hollywood_dream_20070105

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Special Martin Luther King Jr. Shabbat celebrations will  also be held Jan. 16 and 17 at Sinai Temple; for information, visit sinaitemple.org.

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