Friday, September 11, 2026

Second New Year Without a Building: Pasadena’s Two Congregations Prepare for a Rosh Hashanah With No Opening-Day Shofar

By THERESE EDU

Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins at sundown Friday, Sept. 11, and for the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center it will be the second Jewish New Year the congregation observes without a building.

It will also be a quieter one than usual: the first day of the holiday falls on Shabbat this year, and the shofar is not sounded on Shabbat, so the ram’s horn will not be heard until Sunday, Sept. 13.

Two congregations anchor Jewish observance in Pasadena, and they arrive at 5787 from opposite ends of the same difficult year. Chabad of Pasadena, at 1090 E. Walnut St., publishes its holiday programming openly and takes anyone who walks in. PJTC, whose two-acre campus on North Altadena Drive burned in the Eaton Fire on Jan. 7, 2025, has asked that its High Holy Day schedule and locations not be published, citing security concerns.

The silence on the opening day is a matter of Jewish law, not local circumstance. “Well, in terms of how we lead the holiday, it’s led the same way with the exception of not blowing the shofar on Shabbat itself,” said Rabbi Chaim Hanoka, executive director of Chabad of Pasadena. “But short of that, the services and the foods and the like are pretty much all the same.”

Rabbi Joshua Ratner, PJTC’s senior rabbi, said the absence changes what is asked of worshippers. The shofar, he said, is “primal and deep and soulful,” and “its purpose in many ways is to be our spiritual alarm clock.” Without it on Saturday, “it means we have some extra work to do. Extra work, I don’t mean menial work, I mean spiritual work to do,” he said. “It means the onus is on us a little bit to fill that absence with our own intentionality.” He added that the second day carries the obligation instead: “The good thing is we have two days of Rosh Hashanah, so we get to hear it on Sunday on the second day.”

Ratner arrived at PJTC in August 2025, months after the fire, to lead a congregation that had no building to offer him. He has described the displaced congregation as “a mishkan,” a traveling tabernacle. Asked what has changed between last year’s High Holy Days and this one, he said the difference is evidence. “Last year we were in much more of an aspirational space. We thought we could do it, we hoped we could do it. But now we’ve actually lived it and succeeded in doing most of what we were able to do before,” he said. “We don’t have to put things on hold until the building is rebuilt.”

What a synagogue is, he said, has been the year’s lesson: “a synagogue or really any house of worship is defined principally by the people who make up the community. It’s not defined by the walls, it’s not defined by the architecture, it’s defined by the people.”

By that measure the congregation has grown. Membership rose to more than 430 families after the fire, even as 70 member families were displaced from their own homes, and First United Methodist Church of Pasadena has hosted PJTC’s Shabbat services since the fire. For the High Holy Days the congregation has not used Christian or Catholic space; its director of education, Rabbi Jill Gold Wright, has said the congregation has “purposely not used a Christian or Catholic space for the High Holidays.”

The security caution has a documented history. Antisemitic graffiti appeared on a surviving wall at the former site in January 2026. A mural was painted over it in spring 2026 by scenic painter Miriam Hellmann with the group Art Over Hate, religious school students, youth members and volunteers, featuring a large orange California fire poppy, a peacock, a butterfly and Stars of David in the corners. That mural was found defaced on July 24, 2026 with multiple swastikas and a misspelled anti-Zionist phrase. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating both incidents as hate crimes, and county Supervisor Kathryn Barger introduced a motion for a $20,000 reward for information. At a gathering at the site afterward, Ratner said the congregation “will not be intimidated by this or any other deplorable act of vandalism.”

Readers who want to attend PJTC services can do so. The congregation’s High Holy Day programming includes options for members and non-members, registration is requested of everyone, virtual attendance is offered, and information is available at www.pjtc.net. PJTC observes the full arc of the season: Rosh Hashanah Sept. 11-13, Yom Kippur Sept. 20-21, Sukkot Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, and Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah Oct. 2-4, closing with a community-wide Simchat Torah celebration with dancing, music and food.

Chabad of Pasadena, by contrast, publishes everything and charges nothing. “As mentioned, we don’t charge for tickets, which is different than many other temples,” Hanoka said. “So somebody wants to come in to pray, basically you don’t have to pay to pray, make it simple.” The programming, he said, draws a wide congregation, including people who do not attend synagogue the rest of the year. “It’s people from all walks of life, literally A to Z.”

The one moment the shofar will sound outdoors and in public in Pasadena is at the Caltech Turtle Pond. Chabad of Pasadena’s “A Moment by the Water” is set for Sunday, Sept. 13, at 5:45 p.m. at the Caltech Turtle Pond, a short shofar sounding followed by a brief Tashlich service, with Rosh Hashanah treats and prizes for children; information is at www.ChabadPasadena.com/highholidays2026 and by phone at (626) 564-8820. Tashlich, the symbolic casting of sins into flowing water, normally falls on the afternoon of the first day and moves to the second day when the first is Shabbat. Hanoka said students and faculty from Caltech have traditionally joined the walk. “We often will blow the shofar for people who want to hear the shofar,” he said.

Chabad also runs children’s programs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sept. 12, Sept. 13 and Sept. 21, with honey tasting on the first day, a caramel apple bar and a noon shofar blowing on the second, and a kosher snack and lunch each day. Asked why so much of the effort goes to the youngest attendees on the most serious days of the year, Hanoka was brief. “Because ultimately our future are today’s youth,” he said. “You don’t invest in the youth, then there’s no one to invest in at some point.”

On what a year of fire, litigation and rebuilding asks of a congregation at the New Year, the two rabbis answered differently. Hanoka placed it in the hands of God. “Why God does what he does, I don’t know the answer to. Only God knows,” he said. “How one sees that through the ashes and through the smoke is part of a person’s introspection and part of their faith and belief in God.” “When a person has God, a deep belief in God, that acts as an anchor to the person, no matter what happens their way throughout life.” Ratner framed the accounting as a response to circumstance. The reckoning, he said, “asks us to take stock of the reality of our lives and how we responded to that reality.” “Hope doesn’t have to mean glossing over the loss,” he said. He added that “hope doesn’t require us to cancel out the loss or skip over the loss and the emotional toil of that, but it gives us a way to find some resoluteness as we grapple with that loss in thinking of what comes next.”

Jews have lived in the Pasadena area since 1874, with organizing efforts in 1907 and 1912, and Temple B’nai Israel of Pasadena was incorporated in 1921. Albert Einstein visited the congregation in the 1930s during his periods at Caltech. The congregation bought the North Altadena Drive property in 1941 and completed the building in 1945, was renamed the Pasadena Jewish Community in 1949 and became the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center in 1956. Its archives, 47 linear feet spanning 1932 to 2019, were donated to the UCLA Library in 2019, before the fire, and are now publicly accessible. The campus was among more than 30 historic sites destroyed in the fire.

PJTC has committed to rebuilding on the original site, and its Rebuilding Committee includes president Clark Linstone, former Pasadena mayor Terry Tornek, Todd Levine, architect Jonathan Brier, general contractor Jonah Dicker, Michael Silver and Ratner. Pasadena’s City Council has approved fee exemptions for qualifying Eaton Fire rebuilds. Yom Kippur follows on Sept. 20 and 21.