Jews Los Angeles

Trying to repair the damage caused by memos that forced him to divorce himself from the two men who had been guiding his political career, Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky Wednesday moved to keep alive his quest for the mayor's office by hiring a full-time campaign adviser. Yaroslavsky also sought to appease an angry Mayor Tom Bradley, whose IQ was derided in the memo, telephoning the mayor in Hawaii.

Fifty years ago, the neighborhood east of La Brea Avenue and Adams Boulevard was awash in the sound of Yiddish and Big-Band swing, and Les Leibson loved it. * As a boy of 10, Leibson would dash through throngs of shoppers along Adams to pick up pastrami cold cuts at his aunt's delicatessen or Russian rye bread at nearby Weitz Bakery.

Fifty years ago, the neighborhood east of La Brea Avenue and Adams Boulevard was awash in the sound of Yiddish and Big Band swing, and Les Leibson loved it. As a boy of 10, Leibson would dash through throngs of shoppers along Adams to pick up pastrami at his aunt's delicatessen or Russian rye bread at nearby Weitz Bakery.

Meat cases in New York, Chicago, Detroit had been picked clean as bone. And with a sympathetic shrug, Rabbi Eliezer Eidlitz explained that he had cornered the market on kosher ribs. One thousand pounds of the ribs--about the total amount available domestically on any given day--along with equal amounts of kosher chicken and kosher hot dogs went up in smoke Sunday at what was billed as the world's largest kosher barbecue.

Students who run cross-country for Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles are hoping that after a hearing today, they can have the same opportunity as any other team with their winning record: a chance to compete in the November championships. The problem is that the California Interscholastic Federation has held the preliminary and final meets on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

Six years ago the University of Judaism opened a new undergraduate college, based on the concept that a Great Books approach to Western culture could mesh so well with Jewish studies that young people would flock to the campus perched high above Bel-Air. The idea was to produce students familiar with the Aeneid and the Book of Exodus alike, who could blend the lessons of Greek philosophers with the teachings of Talmudic rabbis.

At a Westside synagogue last week, scholars and Sephardic Jews remembered the other landmark event of 1492. As everyone knows, Columbus reached the New World in 1492. But that same year, Spain's monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, also ordered the nation's Jews either to convert to Christianity or to leave the country under pain of death. At least 50,000 Jews--some believe as many as 300,000--were banished from Spain.

They were ordinary women--mother and daughter--whose devotion to tolerance and abhorrence of fascism launched them on an extraordinary adventure: the infiltration of prewar Los Angeles' Nazi movement. Before America's involvement in World War II, Navy widow Grace Comfort and her daughter, Sylvia, a single secretary--both Gentiles--joined a group of Jewish private citizens in Los Angeles to investigate the activities of Nazi-inspired groups in the area.

A 165,000-square-foot domed granite-and-glass structure has risen on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Less than three miles away, workers soon will be installing exhibits in a converted bank office alongside the Jewish Federation Council headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. And just 1.

For 42 years, Paula Lebovics carried the memory of the Soviet soldier who fed her a crust of black bread the day that the Russians liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. On Sunday, she thought she had found him again. Lebovics was one of dozens of Auschwitz survivors who flocked to a Holocaust Day memorial service at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles to reunite with retired Soviet Lt. Gen.