Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5, Chapter 17, Exit 12 (Division Street): Paradise Village
Exit Division Street, follow to right turn at Euclid Avenue, to left turn at E. 4th Street. Paradise Village at 2700 E. 4th Street is just beyond Paradise Valley Hospital.
Relatively few of the more than 500 residents at Paradise Village are Jewish, although Sandy Scheller remembers that after her late mother, Ruth Sax, moved into the modern facility several years ago, she wore a pendant with a Jewish star to dinner one evening. A woman seated at the same table commented, “Are you Jewish? So am I.” Gradually, other Jews at the senior facility in National City also self-identified, forming the nucleus of a small congregation that meets the third Friday of every month for a Kabbalat Shabbat service.
Until then, Mrs. Sax, a Holocaust survivor, never had a chance to become a bat mitzvah, so her daughter asked Morris Lazard, a lay cantorial soloist, if he would help prepare her for the ceremony. He taught her the prayers before and after the reading of the Torah, as well as some other parts of the Shabbat service including the recitation of the Shema. Just three months before she died at age 89, Ruth Sax officially became a daughter of the commandments.
For Lazard, who chanted the Haftorah blessings with Mrs. Sax and then read the Haftorah in her stead, that moment in 2018 was laden with significance. Ruth Goldshmiedova Sax, known as “Ruthie” to her friends; had lectured to numerous school children about the Holocaust, and now she was able to participate in a rite that the children knew well but which had been denied to her.
Lazard, a social worker employed by the County of San Diego to determine financial and residential eligibility for cradle-to-21-year-old residents with major disabilities, says he is happiest when he gets to sing, particularly Jewish prayer songs. Through his tutoring of Ruth Sax, he got to know other Jewish residents of Paradise Village, and before long he was asked to officiate at the monthly Shabbat service. He met with Paradise Village’s Chaplain, Harry Bennett, before accepting the volunteer gig. Services are held in the non-denominational chapel, which has a stained-glass window bearing a picture of a dove.
Along with his longtime companion, Elizabeth Green, Lazard brings a suitcase full of siddurim from Ohr Shalom [Light of Peace] Synagogue as well as a challah from the D.Z. Akin’s Delicatessen in San Diego to Paradise Village for the oneg Shabbat that follows the hour-long service. Sometimes, members of the sparse congregation—which frequently fails to muster a minyan – also bring baked goods, making the occasion “perfectly delightful.”
Green describes Lazard as an “eternal optimist,” noting that every month he shleps a suitcase containing between 30 and 40 prayer books to the service, perhaps on the expectation that if there are more books, perhaps more will come.
The service conducted by Lazard, who turned 64 in November 2021, is more a solo performance than an interactive experience. Lazard explained in an interview that he doesn’t want to tax his congregants, whose average age is “somewhere in the 80s.” Similarly, at parts of the service when congregants normally would stand up, Lazard invites “those who are able” to rise, to avoid anyone having to struggle from their seats or wheelchairs.
Green said that a small congregation with mostly octogenarians presents its special set of challenges, which she and Lazard try to resolve. For example, she said, she roves through the chapel, helping anyone having trouble finding a page in the prayer book. And when there are many pages to turn between prayers, Lazard will give an English reading, thereby providing the elderly congregants more time to find the page.
They hadn’t done so yet at the time of our interview, but Lazard and Green were toying with the idea of magnifying and photocopying the relevant sections of the prayer book and putting those pages into a binder to make it even easier for the congregants to follow along.
“I get pleasure out of doing things for other people, singing, and doing Jewish things,” Lazard, who sings alto, told me. “It feels good. If I am tired at the end of the day, once I do that, I’m not tired. It energizes me.”
Among his regular congregants is a woman whose daughter is a rabbi. Just knowing that keeps him on track, Lazard laughs self-deprecatingly.
He said he once thought about becoming a rabbi himself. At the time he had an Associate of Arts degree, but not a Bachelor’s degree so he went to San Diego State University and obtained a B.A. in Religious Studies, getting “all A’s except one B+,” he said. Then he inquired about studying at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University but decided against it after he realized that to do so would mean moving his family to Los Angeles. His then-mother-in law had just moved to San Diego to be closer to the family, and moving her, his then-wife, and two children would have been a great disruption. So, he put the rabbinical dream aside.
Born in San Diego, Lazard had grown up Orthodox at the Beth Jacob [House of Jacob] Congregation, but as an adult he gravitated toward Conservative Judaism, joining Congregation Beth Tefilah [House of Prayer]. He eventually became president of that congregation, at a painful time when the congregation was too small in numbers to be financially secure. A merger with Congregation Adat Ami [Gathering of My People] was arranged, which resulted in a new congregation called Ohr Shalom and the sale of Beth Tefilah’s synagogue building to a Christian congregation.
Feeling out of place following the merger of the two Jewish congregations, Lazard experimented with attendance at other congregations, including the Conservative congregation, Tifereth Israel [Glory of Israel] Synagogue and the Reform Congregation Beth Israel [House of Israel]. But after an absence of “a year or two,” he found his way back to Ohr Shalom, where he leads the davening whenever he is needed. He also is a member of Ohr Shalom’s choir.
After he was divorced, he observed his father’s yahrzeit one evening and met Green, who also was observing a yahrzeit. He arranged an introduction from a mutual acquaintance, and he and Green, an Information Technology executive, have been together since the early 2000s. Like Lazard, she is a native of San Diego. Her grandfather, Ernest Green, moved to San Diego in 1929 and became the proprietor of Green Furniture on El Cajon Boulevard.
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Next Sunday, May 1, 2022: Exit 13B (National Avenue/ 28th Street): General Dynamics/ NASSCO
This story is copyrighted (c) 2022 by Donald H. Harrison, editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. It is a serialization of his book Schlepping and Schmoozing Along Interstate 5, Volume 1, available on Amazon. Harrison may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com