SAN FRANCISCO — When a Korean Methodist church here announced almost two years ago that it would close, many Korean-Americans responded as though a child were being kidnaped.
They deluged public officials with letters, announced plans to raise money to buy the church and launched a heated campaign to declare the whitewashed, tiled-roof building a historical landmark.
The battle, which has pitted the church against many prominent Korean-Americans, is similar to many that are taking place in cities across the country as religious leaders try to close churches that members have come to think of as their own: special places where they exchanged wedding vows, baptized their children and said final goodbys to loved ones who passed on.
The anguished fighting that has occurred in some Midwestern and Eastern urban centers is now shifting to California, where changing demographics are prompting several denominations to consider closing church doors, particularly in the Bay Area.
Faced with attempts to designate church buildings as landmarks to stave off demolition, attorneys for the denominations that own the property contend that constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state are at risk.
Earlier this year, Los Angeles' Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other religious leaders won legislative passage of a state-wide moratorium that prevents cities from imposing landmark status on any religious properties in California next year without the owner's permission.
"It's open-hunting season on churches for a year," said Los Angeles preservation attorney William Delvac, who helps church members try to save their cherished places of worship.
In Los Angeles, a historic Boyle Heights synagogue and a small Catholic mission near Downtown may face demolition, but Southern California has been spared wholesale closures of Catholic parishes because immigrants from Latin America and other Catholic regions are filling inner-city pews.
National experts on these church closure conflicts say they tend to involve Christian, mainline denominations, particularly Catholic churches. Because many Jews migrated from inner cities decades ago, older synagogues have already been demolished or sold to other religions.
But the moratorium on historic designations is disturbing to some. "It really could affect all groups," said Stephen Sass, president of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, which wants to prevent demolition of the imposing, brick Breed Street \o7 shul, \f7 the Boyle Heights synagogue where the Yom Kippur scene from the 1927 movie "The Jazz Singer" was filmed.
