By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — The Summer 2013 issue of The Journal of San Diego History has an interesting cover article about one of San Diego’s most under-appreciated landmarks, the 125-year-old Queen Anne-style Villa Montezuma in the Sherman Heights neighborhood.
The article co-authored by Charles Spratley and Louise Torio , noted that at Villa Montezuma many neighborhood children were introduced to music, art and history, all of which were passions of the villa’s somewhat eccentric original owner, Jesse Shepard.
The authors went on to note that “in 1986, Larry Malone, the live-in Community Projects Coordinator, was recognized by the County of San Diego with the Bechefsky Award for outstanding contribution to the prevention of juvenile delinquency for his work on these programs that kept kids out of gangs.”
Bechefsky. The name sounded familiar. “Googling” helped my recall. Howard J. Bechefsky, while a defense attorney, served in 1977 as president of the San Diego County Bar Association. In 1979, he was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to the municipal bench in El Cajon. He had a promising career as a jurist, but he drowned in a 1980 Riverside County swimming accident “in the vicinity of Grieg’s Grotto where Strawberry Creek flows down narrow, cliffy, steep terrain,” according to Jim Fairchild of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit.
Fairchild said an eye witness was watching as Judge Bechefsky “approached the stream, placed a leg in it, was pivoted off the rock and into the torrent. He tried to stop himself by hooking a rock with his foot, but just as the eye-witness came along to help, he was swept down and over a waterfall, striking head first, then he went over a second falls and out of sight. We found him down a third long cascading falls, around a bend and in the pool.”
Twenty-eight years after his death at age 39, Bechefsky was well enough remembered by his colleagues of the bar and the bench to be inducted by the San Diego County Bar Foundation to its Distinguished Lawyers Memorial.
A citation said: “After a notable career as a criminal defense attorney with the firm Sheela, Lightner, Hughes, Hillman & Castro, Judge Bechefsky was appointed to the bench by then Governor Brown in 1977. He was a pioneer in California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, where he served as editor of the FORUM…”
Bechefsky’s name was just mentioned in passing in the Villa Montezuma article. But it is clear that he was a man who in a short lifetime left his mark. As a journalist and historian who loves to find Jewish stories “everywhere,” I am always delighted when the name of a member of our community turns up on an award, a scholarship, a building (or room within a building), a street, or sometimes, even, as the name of a town.
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As I delight in finding Jewish references in articles about San Diego history, so too do I enjoy finding San Diego references in articles about Jewish history. In the Summer 2013 issue of Western States Jewish History, there is a reprint of a 1958 article about the farming operations that the Jewish Agricultural Society attempted to create in California after World War II, with the help of the Baron de Hirsch Fund.
Jacob M. Maze authored the update on the progress of the Western States Office of the Jewish Agricultural Society, in which he reported that “our early efforts were concentrated in Baldwin Park, 18 miles east of Los Angeles; Fontana, 50 miles east of Los Angeles; and Vista, San Diego County, 100 miles south of Los Angeles. The selection of Vista, however, was premature as the new settlers refused to go so far from Los Angeles at that time.”
By 1958, some settlers were “compelled to move from the congested residential areas in San Fernando Valley and other crowded areas near Los Angeles. A center of Jewish poultry farming, citrus and avocado culture is developing there (in Vista),” the article went on to say.
I hadn’t been aware that Jewish farmers had been encouraged to settle in Vista, but I was aware that Vista was the site of the North County Jewish Community Center, which had been modeled after the Centro Social Israelita in Tijuana.
Today, the Centro Social Israelita continues to serve Tijuana’s Jewish Community, both as a social gathering place for the Jewish community and as the home of a synagogue led by Chabad Rabbi Mendel Polichenco.
Interestingly, the North County Jewish Community Center had evolved into Temple Judea, serving a Conservative congregation. Later it was sold to a church organization, and more recently it has been purchased by Chabad for use as a combination social center and synagogue under the leadership of Rabbi Baruch Greenberg.
So, the sister congregations of Tijuana and Vista, after a period of estrangement, are again a family!
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The other day, along with my great niece Jessica, I visited San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, an institution for which I have the utmost respect. Among the current exhibits are photographs that made the news in 2012, and I was disappointed to see that a number of them glorified Palestinian stone-throwers, while others showed the agonized faces of mourners at a funeral for children who reportedly were killed in an Israeli air attack on Gaza.
The images are strong ones, and indeed were in the news, so I can’t fault the Museum of Photographic Arts for including them in its exhibit. But what I can–and do–fault MOPA for is failing to provide any context for the images. When Israel bombs Gaza, it is not an unprovoked act of aggression. It is in retaliation for continued rocket attacks which terrorize the school children of Sderot and such surrounding communities as the Sha’ar Hanegev municipality, which has a long and enduring relationship with the Jewish Federation of San Diego County.
If one wants to depict photographically the tragedies of warfare in the Middle East, there are equally disturbing photos to be had of the children in numerous southern Israeli communities running as fast as their little legs will carry them to bomb shelters. They have only 15 seconds from the moment the “Red Alert” sirens sound to get into the shelters. If they can’t get there in time, they have to throw themselves onto the ground and hope that a bomb doesn’t land upon them. This is a totally intolerable situation, but often the media — and now MOPA — dismisses this aspect of the Middle East conflict and focuses only on the hardships of the Palestinian side.
Come on, MOPA, I know that you can–and should–do better than that.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com