Among the many horrible fires affecting Southern California, the Witch Creek fire engulfing much of "north county inland" San Diego County began in a small area, called Witch Creek, east of the town Ramona, home of the tiny, but engaging Congregation Etz Chaim (a URJ affiliate). As of late Monday evening nearly everyone in the congregation had been accounted for including our 94 year-old retired cantor and his wife who would not evacuate the area, and some members who remained in the high valley to do volunteer work for those who could not evacuate.
Those unfamiliar with the topography and the weather conditions that enable these fires to burn the way they do can check this photo (thank you Google Maps) that shows the location of Witch Creek (the green arrow) in relation to Ramona (click the photos for larger views),
and this zoomed out version that shows the mountains to the east of San Diego County. (Route 79 runs along the ridge.)
Damp winds usually blow in from the ocean making San Diego a delightful place to be. Periodically, different winds (called Santa Ana, similar to a hamsin) "swoop" down and blow westward toward the ocean. Most of the area consists of shrub-covered rolling hills (called chaparral) and mesas ("tables" plateaus) which offer perfect fuel for fires. The area is not terribly unlike the Land of Israel where the seacoast has marshes and beaches. The land rises up to soft hills (Poway, then a bit higher Ramona). The hills become steeper as they climb further to the mountains (Julian).
Also in the area is Temple Adat Shalom of Poway. As of Tuesday (October 23), we do not have detailed information as to the situation there.
Though we are in New York City for the time being, our home is in Poway.
We are beginning to get reports on the situation in the area. This is the best information I've found. Getting news from the area is difficult because everyone's been evacuated.
Fire in sight of Pomerado Hospital
11:26 a.m. [Monday, October 22] POWAY –Fire and smoke crested the hills immediately east of Villa Pomerado here at 11 a.m. today, and mechanic and service workers for the hospital complex were manning hoses to defend the facility.
All workers were being told at 11:15 to evacuate Pomerado Hospital and Villa Pomerado at 15600 block of Pomerado Road. Fire appeared to be coming over the hills from the east. Mechanics had gone to fire extinguisher boxes on the roof of the parking structure to pull hoses and fighting equipment. Smoke was thick.
No fire trucks could be seen in the area of the hospital complex.
Meanwhile, a long line of Villa Pomerado patients in wheelchairs were quickly being moved onto school buses lined up to evacuate patients from the nursing facility. More than 120 patients from Pomerado Hospital were evacuated earlier this morning and 75 patients from the adjoining Villa Pomerado were now being taken to other sites.
Each Villa Pomerado patient was holding a large ziplock bag carrying confidential patient information and transfer documents as they were being loaded onto the buses.
The hospital is about 200 meters from Temple Adat Shalom and 100 meters from the local Jewish independent living center Seacrest Village. The Seacrest residents were evacuated to the coastal facility in Encinitas, but were then evacuated from there later in the day. The good news about the Pomerado Hospital story is that when it was reported on CNN on Tuesday morning, the hospital spokesman spoke about trying to find out when they can go back… which implies that there's something to go back to (as contrasted with "assessing the damage" or discussing when they can "rebuild".)
We know that our neighboring colleagues and their young family evacuated Sunday night. Our immediate neighbors evacuated to be with a daughter in Claremont Mesa early Monday morning. We don't have any information about our house.
On Monday afternoon I saw a report of houses burning by the green arrow at the upper left on this map. Monday night as we went to bed we heard and read reports about homes burnt in the Maderas Golf Club area (where we have friends who have lived in the canyon long before it became a resort, as well as along the north-east side of St. Andrews Drive. This morning (Tuesday) I read on a San Diego area fire blog about a house that was reported to have burnt where (by chance) the hand is on this map.
Our house is on the bottom of the map just above the double "l" of Valle in "Valle Verde Park".
We know of some congregants whose homes have been destroyed. We also know of some others who, when they called home this morning, the answer machine picked up. The local and other offices of the URJ have been attentive to our plight.
My current favorite source for information on the fire.
selected items of interest:
Debbie now has a “Domain of her own…”:
Jews On The Chocolate Trail™
Where in the World are Rabbis Hurvitz and Prinz?
Personal Web pages represent a new phenomenon (for a favorite example (recently experienced an entire transformation) and a wonderful analysis ... you know what to do). Corporate (commercial Web sites) exist to advertise and sell the goods produced by the company. Educational and governmental sites fulfill a similar function. These add a venue for like-minded people to share ideas, a concept growing in a number of corporate sites that serve as the gathering ground for a "community of users." There seems no reason why an individual cannot participate in this process as well. In a sense, my personal Web site fulfills a variety of functions. On the one hand, it is a "vanity" press. On the other hand, it serves as a public repository of materials I make available to various audiences. It is as though I have taken my collected efforts and spread them on a table in the public square. I expect that, in time, some of these pages will require a password (distributed only to family and close friends), but that requires more scripting knowledge than I currently possess.
A special note: This site should not be confused with the commercial site (i.e. ".com") with a similar name.
Nor, should this site be confused with the site called Dafka which (according to it's developer) was rated the number one pro Israel site by Bambili.com (in Israel). I appreciate their efforts, but, I'm not certain I agree with all their positions.
I come by the name Davka.org honestly having been on the editorial board and then the editor of a small journal with that name published by Jewish students in Los Angeles during the 1970s (more on that another time [oops, sorry, link rot, I hope I can track down the article]). I used the English translation of Davka: "Despite Everything" as the title for my editor's column there and then as the title of my column in a variety of synagogue bulletins over the years.
Thank you, Jay, for reminding me.
Some references here to "my" Davka:
- The Davka Portfolio Thirty Years After the World Vanished
- Greetings "from the 'youth'" offered at the annual "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" commemoration event sponsored by the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles, April 18, 1971, at Temple Israel of Hollywood. (First published in Davka Volume 1, Number 4; Summer 1971.)
And there are (or - in some cases - have been (sorry about "link rot" here, let's try this one and see how long it remains live), indeed, other "Davkas" (here's another) represented on the WWW. (Wow, the word seems to be growing in popularity.)
All of life is an art form. A Web site (sorry again, linkrot) is one particular expression of a life. Some portions of this site (the Haggadah in particular) are designed with their artistic (visual, as well as textual) aspect in mind. Others exist as a weaving of ideas. Among the visual metaphors that come to mind when working on the Web are (of course) the spider's web, and a fisherman's net. Each of these suggest both an interconnectedness of the whole and an ability to capture.
Yet another is the rich tapestry of a weaving (I have searched the Web for a decent site maintained by someone "in honor" of The Weavers [Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Pete Seeger] and to date [July 14, 1999 - the birthday of Woodie Guthrie] not found one. (The best I can do is a link to a location where you can buy some of The Weavers' recordings.)I do believe that information "wants to be free." (But what about "images"?) I regularly make information available here. (I do produce a paper copy of the Haggadah that families can use at their Sedarim. This costs money. I've noticed that, over the past few years, as more people visit the Haggadah online, fewer people buy it.) I also link to other sites where you can find more. I find it odd that often I'll offer reciprocal links and not have the "favor" returned. While I do indicate that this material is © "copyright" by me (in most instances), I simply request that, if you use what you find here, you let me and others know its source. One of many famous ancient rabbinic statements: "One who quotes an idea in the name of its originator speeds the coming of the messianic age."
Efforts of Earlier College Students
Very little has appeared online that deals with the activities of the Jewish left during the 1960s. I try to make up for that lack here by reporting on what I did with my peers in the Los Angeles area. All of this material, and more, will be available at appropriate archives after I scan and post the material here.
- The Hurvitz Family's Yom Kippur Leaflet calling for an end to the war in Vietnam (1966).
The leaflet (printed on white paper (the color of the scan is not true)) was distributed outside of a number of synagogues in Los Angeles following Yom Kippur services 5727 (1966). the text; a scan of the front of the leaflet; a scan of the back of the leaflet.
"Mom" Faye Hurvitz has been distributing the leaflet once again due to the current (Autumn 2004) political situation in the U. S. in relation to the war in Iraq. It has received nods of recognition for its prescience.- The Conference on Jewish Action held May 9-11, 1969 which served as the organizing meeting of the Jewish Radical Community of Los Angeles.
- Thoughts about the commonality of the struggles of Blacks (African Americans) and Jews during the period. A couple of leaflets of the Jewish Radical Community on the subject:
- American Oppression Divides Black and Jew; the first leaflet of the Jewish Radical Community of Los Angeles (January 5, 1970).
- A comparison of the struggles of Soviet Jewish Prisoner of Conscience Boris Kochubiyevsky and Black Panther Bobby Seale Free Boris Free Bobby; the eighth leaflet of the Jewish Radical Community of Los Angeles (August 7, 1970).
- The text of the People's Peace Treaty distributed by the Jewish Radical Community of Los Angeles. And scans of the pamphlet that accompanied it: The front; the back; supporting materials inside poetry; the a Torah-based case against the war by Rabbi Moshe Adler; continued; and The Vietnam War and the Needs of the Jewish Community.
Resources for Jewish College Students (and others)
I had mentioned a while back the dearth of leaflets for distribution by college students. I've put the together a number of PDF files you can download, duplicate and distribute. (Or, feel free to send the PDF files to others, or link to this page.) For those who want to modify the text, I've added raw text files you can use. This material is "anti-copyright". Please use and distribute.
There are as of this date (Sunday, May 5, 2002) 19 leaflets.
(June 19, 2003):
Thank goodness this has not needed updating in some time. I have ideas for more leaflets, however, the urgency to produce them is not there. One leaflet deals with the "Right of Return" another with the "Palestinians' 'Altalena'" (one approach, another).
I began creating a Web site in my head as early as August 1995 when I drafted the following:
For a project I'm pursuing regarding Jewish involvement on the internet and the World Wide Web in particular, I'm interested in learning about any sites about which you may know. For example, do any rabbis have Home pages? Which synagogues or synagogue organizations have Web sites? Does Marge Piercy have a site at which you can read portions of "He She and It"? Does Howard Rheingold have a site where you can learn more about creating a Virtual [Jewish] Community? Is there a Web Camera at the Kotel? In the Wilderness of Zin?
At the time there existed very little. Since then, All the synagogue movements have developed significant sites as have other Jewish umbrella organizations. The number of synagogues themselves that have sites increases weekly if not daily. At the time, Marge Piercy did not have a site (which surprised me because of her novel), but that has changed. I'm certain that Howard Rheingold did have a site, but I don't remember visiting it (his current site). You can read all of Virtual Community Online, but I don't think Howard is involved in much Jewish thought. (As with me, he does have a Haggadah Online.) There was none then, but now at least one Web camera is aimed at the Kotel. [Their listing here is by no means intended as an endorsement!] One is owned by Aish haTorah and the other is at a commercial site for Virtual Jerusalem at which you need to register before you can visit! Still, no one has set up a camera at Ben Gurion's grave to watch the Wilderness of Zin.
For simple organizational purposes of my own (it is easier for me to store the materials this way) I've divided the area in to the usual six sections. I could have done "Air, Fire, Earth, Water" or some other convention ("scissors, paper, rock"?), but this works for me.
In June of 1999 this Site moved from its home of three or four years at "Computergeeks.com" where it was generously hosted by Joe Kissell and his partner David F. McKee. These gentlemen were made an offer for the name "computergeeks" that they could not refuse and this caused me to establish my own "domain" and find a new server.
[Note: This site is now hosted on Macintosh servers at DigitalStore.]
Now that it is professionally hosted, much of the work I'd done to simplify URLs and clean up the code here, should become easier. If you find them, please let me know so that I can correct them. I have done some work on correcting "linkrot" I know that I have more to do and am concerned about those who have linked to my old site. I am now working on notifying them. As I prepared this site I became aware of portions of it that refer to information that is now outdated. I wonder how to handle this:
- I save the old pages off-line. Periodically I save the entire site archived on disk.
- Should pages have the date of posting as well as the date they were last modified?
I have a graphic that I use on all the printed materials that I produce. I have wanted to use it here as well - for its visually unifying effect. However, I am concerned that others not take it for themselves (and abuse it). "We'll see...."
In early May 2007 I put the graphic at the top of this (and a couple of other) page.Thank you for your patience and support.
This week’s Torah reading (parashah) is: . (Get a PDF....)
My thanks to Joel Hoffman of Lashon.net
© Mark Hurvitz
Last modified October 23, 2007
