The Brief

Editor's note: We enjoyed the story so much last year we've updated it for this year. Enjoy!

For me, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which starts this year at sundown on Wed October 2, is all about traditions — creating them and recalling them. And for my family, 85% of our traditions happen around the dinner table.

So yes, of course you’ve got to listen to someone blow the Shofar 100 times. AND, yes, you’ve got to throw bread, or nowadays pebbles or seaweed, into a flowing body of water to symbolize the things you wish you hadn’t done this year (a ceremony known as tashlich). But mostly, you spend a lot of time eating, especially sweet things like dipping apples in honey, because the major underlying theme for this celebration is to ensure that you enter the new year with sweetness and hope.

(Eat your apples and honey now as things only get sweeter as we head into fall, eating dozens of 100 Grand bars as I’m passing out candy to trick-or-treaters or overdoing it with Thanksgiving yams that have been sufficiently marshmallowed).

Here are some of my family’s traditions — and some new ones that are evolving in L.A. as modern chefs take on ancient customs.

Mom’s traditions

My mom was born in Newark, but raised in Pico-Robertson. Her parents, Selma and Vic, moved to the neighborhood less for the synagogues and more for the delis — and the ritzy proximity to Beverly Hills.

Josh's Grandpa Vic with his sister Sylvia and Grandma Selma

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The Heller Family

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My mom’s fondest memories of Rosh Hashanah were at the kid’s table in the early 70s, over the hill in Canoga Park at her Nana and Auntie Jan’s house.

She remembers walking into the smell of Nana’s homemade potato knishes — “like the ones you’d get at Label’s Table — but Nana’s were better.” Once seated, there’d always be mixed nuts on the table — so you could nibble your day's worth of calories before the meal even appeared.

They’d always have sliced apples dipped into a ramekin of honey, tzimmis (carrots, sweet potatoes, and prunes), noodle kugel and brisket, and my mom remembers her older family members vying for the pupik, the gizzards in the chicken fricassee.

Chopped liver pineapple sculpture from the 1953 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook

Grandma Selma was “world famous” for making sculptures out of chopped liver. In those days, most Ashkenazi liver dishes came from chicken, but Selma’s recipe called for calves liver, and “everyone would go crazy for it,” according to my mom.

Selma molded her chopped liver into the shape of a pineapple, adding cross hatches and a crown of real fruit fronds, adding pimento green olives to make it look like a real pineapple.

Meanwhile, my mom’s Aunt Jackie was the Queen of the Jello Mold — she’d put fruit cocktails inside of wiggly Jello. My mom remembers telling her sister, “Jello is the only food you can’t spit out if you don’t like.”

Interweaving traditions

Chef Rebecca King is a private chef who owns and operates a culinary concierge business and is the purveyor of a "a very unkosher deli" known as The Bad Jew.

King trained in the kitchen at deli-inspired fine-dining establishment Birdie Gs and learned to use the smoker at Texas-style Flatpoint Barbecue. Over the past seven years at pop-ups around LA, The Bad Jew has developed her treyf take on pastrami with her signature Porkstrami.

Chef Rebecca King

Her family told her, “Rebecca, you’re gonna get us in trouble” with the branding for The Bad Jew, but she says it really resonates with people.

As a private chef, King has cooked High Holiday meals for a wide range of family traditions.

“I have clients who keep kosher, who are secular. Some want a traditional Ashkenazi meal, others want more adventure, maybe a Mediterranean or Asian twist,” she said.

Her own family background is Ashkenazi — she grew up in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood — and her most potent Rosh Hashanah memories are of her grandma’s matzo ball soup and all of the kids wildly running around her grandparent’s penthouse.

But she says she also enjoys cooking in the Sephardic tradition — “I like flavor, really spicy foods, the herbaceousness — just intense flavors that I love.”

“I’ve done it all... 15 million Rosh Hashanah classics,” she smiles, quoting from Aleeza Ben Shalom in the Netflix series Jewish Matchmaking: "There's 15 million Jews in the world, and there's about 15 million ways to be Jewish."

“There’s no way to do it wrong.”

Roasted lamb with pomegranate seeds

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Chef Rebecca King

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Rosh Hashanah meals have ranged from roasted chicken and carrots tzimmis to her signature oak-smoked lamb peppered with baharat seasoning topped with coriander leaves, with pomegranate molasses and arils, those juicy pomegranate seeds.

King uses pomegranates because they’re another symbolic fruit for Rosh Hashanah, representing fertility and abundance. (I remember learning that there are supposed to be 613 arils in each fruit, and that’s how many commandments there are in the Torah. Though it’s not an exact science.)

Growing a plant-based tradition

Megan Tucker is the Culinary Institute of America-trained chef behind pop-up Mort & Bettys, a Philly-style plant-based Jewish deli. “Everything is made from scratch — and there’s no fake meat here, it’s all seasonal produce," Tucker said.

The deli is named after Tucker’s grandparents, Mort and Betty. They were both born to New York City Lithuanian-Jewish families in 1912 — and met at a Borscht Belt summer resort, “like Dirty Dancing but without all the drama,” Tucker said as she laughed.

Mort was an engineer and owned a piano factory that was converted to a wartime airplane factory during the war. Betty had a degree in accounting and worked for the city — and even ran for local city council.

Matzo ball soup from Mort and Betty's

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Mort and Betty's

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Tucker has infused that old-school Jewish tradition into a modern, vegan approach to Rosh Hashanah dishes.

This year's menu includes matzo ball soup, a symbolically round challah (representing the continuity of the seasons) and matzo ball soup. "The standout," she says, "is probably the harvest vegetable kugel or the apple honey cake (with house made vegan honey)." The cake is inspired partly by Amish farm stands in central Pennsylvania.

You can do pre-order pickups from their location at Crafted Kitchen in the DTLA Arts District, and their weekly pop-up still happens every Sunday at the Atwater Village Farmer's market.

More retail locations are also selling Mort & Betty's products, like Maciel's Plant Butcher in Highland Park, Maury's Bagel in Silverlake, and Love.Life.Cafe in El Segundo.

Traditions for the cooking-avoidant, time-pressed wage slave

I know some of us don’t have family in town — which might make it difficult to access traditional holiday feasts. But it is possible to assemble a quick and easy Rosh Hashanah meal.

(Shoutout to my editor, Gab Chabrán, who knows I’m the King Of The Family Meal Deal.)

Listen, I regularly serve dinner to 4-12 at my dining room table, and I’m always on the lookout for great value take-out offers. So, if you just wanted me to drop an instant Traditional Ashkenazi Rosh Hashanah dinner, I suggest you order a Gelson’s High Holiday Meal package. There are many other places you can order this kind of meal, like smaller delis, but what’s convenient (if you live near a Gelson’s) is that since they are doing supermarket-sized volumes, your food will be ready when you need it.

The Heller Family: Josh, bottom left, his father Kenn, upper left. Sister Ally, upper right and his mother Babette, lower right

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Nothing beats home-cooked — but sometimes you may have a cadre of tiny cousins running around your home demanding food, and you just need something to give them.

The reason you’re feeding people is to facilitate them to go on with their evenings without thinking about hunger. Well-fed people can laugh and be silly with their families, like bootleg retellings of The Wise Men of Chelm (a Yiddish folk tale) or impromptu vaudeville performances from the kids’ table or dishing out gossip from someone your grandma knew in the old country — all of these happy activities require that we not be starving.

So, for me, my point is: WHAT YOU EAT AT THE ROSH HASHANAH MEAL DOESN’T REALLY MATTER — as long as you can keep your guests happy and well-fed so they can postulate on a sweet new year.

Mix and matching old and new traditions

When I asked my mom what to expect on our 2024 menu she texted that she was still "workin' on it."

Then a minute later she wrote "first course" and sent a picture of gefilte fish, two jars of Bubbie's brand horseradish, one red, one white, frozen potato bourekas, vegetarian kibbeh, and a vegan "parve kishke."

Since last year my dad has enthusiastically adopted a plant-based diet (in part from reading my trio of Vegan In The Valley Stories) so my mom's menu has more vegetarian/vegan options than usual.

Josh's son Hank enjoying his couscous

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But we can also expect: "Matzo ball soup with chicken ; tzimmes ; noodle kugel ; brisket and of course apples and honey and honey cake ... am i forgetting anything ?" Oh yeah, she forgot the salads "carrot , beet, and shreeded cabbage."

Have a sweet New Year!

In the wake of the Eaton Fire, Altadena and Pasadena’s music community have really shown up to support fire survivors, especially fellow musicians who lost instruments and record collections.

That effort continues this weekend with a special donation concert at a Pasadena record store, with the aim of getting vinyl records back in the hands of survivors who lost their collections.

“You know, our name is Healing Force of the Universe, and I think that gives me a pretty clear direction… especially after the fires,” said Austin Manuel, founder of Pasadena record store, where Sunday’s show will be held.

The record donation effort is the brainchild of musician Brandon Jay, who founded the nonprofit Altadena Musicians after losing his home and almost all of his family’s instruments in the Eaton Fire. Through Altadena Musicians’s donation and registry platform, Jay said he and his partners have helped some 1,200 fire survivors get their music instruments back.

Brandon Jay.

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Now, that effort has fanned out to restoring vinyl record collections.

“All of that stuff evaporated for thousands of people,” Jay said. “Look at your own record collection and be like, ‘Wow, what if that whole thing disappeared?’”

You might know Jay from several bands over the years, including Lutefisk, a 1990s alt-rock band based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Gwendolyn Sanford, composed music for TV shows, including Orange is the New Black and Weeds.

Jay plans to play some holiday tunes at Sunday's record donation show (which LAist is the media sponsor), along with fellow musician Daniel Brummel of Sanglorians. Brummel, who was also a founding member of Pasadena’s indie-rock sensation Ozma, said he was grateful to Jay for his fire recovery work and to Manuel for making Healing Force available for shows like this.

Brummel, who came close to losing his own home in the Eaton Fire, recalled a show he played at Healing Force back in March.

Ryen Slegr (left) and Daniel Brummel perform with their band, Ozma, on the 2014 Weezer Cruise.

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“The trauma of the fires was still really fresh,” Brummel said. After playing a cover of Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town,” that night — which includes the lyrics “I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down” — Brummel said his neighbors in the audience told him the rendition hit them hard. “It felt really powerful. And without that space, it just wouldn’t have occurred.”

Details

Healing Force of the Universe Record Donation Show
Featuring: Quasar (aka Brandon Jay), Sanglorians (Daniel Brummel) and The Acrylic.
Sunday, Dec. 14; 2 to 5 p.m.
1200 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
Tickets are $15 or you can donate 5 or more records at the door. More info here.

Topline:

The case: In September, the city settled a lawsuit brought forward by two brothers in their 70s who said they suffered serious injuries after an LAPD officer crashed into their car. Days before the $18 million settlement was reached, lawyers for the brothers said Feldstein Soto called an expert witness testifying for the plaintiffs and “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

The response: Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request. Her spokesperson said the settlement “had nothing to do” with the expert witness. Her campaign manager told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call and did not know the person had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

What Jurado says: In a statement to LAist, Jurado said she wants to “make sure that the city’s legal leadership is guided by integrity and accountability, especially when their choices affect public trust, civic rights and the city’s limited resources."

What’s next: The motion needs to go through a few committees before reaching the full City Council. If it passes, the motion calls for the city attorney to “report to council in closed session within 45 days regarding the ethics breach violation and give updates to the City Council."

Every year in Santa Ana, Luis Cantabrana turns the front of his home into an elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe that draws hundreds of visitors.

Along the front of the house, the multi-colored altar is filled with lights, flowers and a stained-glass tapestry behind a sculpture of the Lady of Guadalupe. Cantabrana’s roof also is lit up with the green, white and red lights that spell out “Virgen de Guadalupe” and a cross.

Visitors are welcomed with music and the smell of roses as they celebrate the saint, but this year’s gathering comes after a dark year for immigrant communities.

Luis Cantabrana stands in front of the stunning altar he built in front of his home in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Every year, his display draws hundreds of visitors.

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Why do they celebrate? 

In 1513, the Virgin Mary appeared before St. Juan Diego between Dec. 9 and Dec. 12, asking him to build a church in her honor. Her image — a brown-skinned woman wearing a green veil with her hands together in prayer and an angel at her feet — miraculously appeared on his cloak.

To celebrate in Santa Ana, worshippers gathered late-night Wednesday and in the very early hours Dec. 12 to pray the rosary, sing hymns and celebrate the saint.

Cantabrana has hosted worshippers at his home for 27 years — 17 in Santa Ana.

The altar started out small, he said, and over the years, he added a fabric background, more lights and flowers (lots and lots of flowers).

“It started with me making a promise to la Virgen de Guadalupe that while I had life and a home to build an altar, that I would do it,” Cantabrana said. “Everything you see in photos and videos is pretty, but when you come and see it live, it's more than pretty. It's beautiful.”

The Santa Ana home's elaborate altar in honor of La Virgen de Guadalupe draws hundreds of visitors each year.

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LAist

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Gathering in a time of turmoil 

Many also look to the Lady of Guadalupe for protection, especially at a time when federal enforcement has rattled immigrant communities.

“People don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to take their kids to school, but the love we have for our Virgen de Guadalupe,” Cantabrana said. “We see that la Virgen de Guadalupe has a lot of power, and so we know immigration [enforcement] won’t come here.”

Margarita Lopez of Garden Grove has been visiting the altar for three years with her husband. She’s been celebrating the Virgencita since she was a young girl. Honoring the saint is as important now as ever, she said.

“We ask, and she performs miracles,” Lopez said.

Claudia Tapia, a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said the Virgin Mary represents strength.

“Right now, with everything going on, a lot of our families [have] turned and prayed to the Virgen for strength during these times,” Tapia said. “She's a very strong symbol of Mexican culture, of unity, of faith and of resilience.”

See it for yourself

The shrine will stay up into the new year on the corner of Broadway and Camile Street.