'Do you have the Torahs?' Synagogue races LA wildfire to rescue its past and future

Cantor Ruth Berman Harris searched for her husband through the thick smoke that engulfed the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. Laurence Harris had been beside her just moments before, but now, as flames closed in and the air grew heavier, he was nowhere in sight.

“Do you have the Torahs?” she shouted, her voice slicing through the chaos, trying to find him amid the suffocating darkness.

And then, there he was. Emerging through the smoke, almost surreal in his calm, carrying one of the synagogue’s 13 Torahs — a Sephardic scroll, heavier than the rest, encased in silver etched with the patterns of a long-lost homeland. It had been donated by a congregant who fled Iran, a piece of history held in trembling hands.

Then the power went out. The fire, a beast consuming Los Angeles, roared closer. Joined by the synagogue president, Jack Singer, and custodian Robert Brown Jr., the couple dashed outside. “Ashes were falling in the parking lot,” she recalled Wednesday morning.

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