Pico Union Project is more than a women's mosque

The oldest Jewish synagogue building in Los Angeles has been getting some news media attention lately as the home of what may be the only women's mosque in America. But that's not really the whole story. The building, located at 1153 Valencia Street, is actually the home to a Korean church, an African-American church, a new branch of another church and a Catholic ministry. There also are Jewish services at times.

It's called the Pico Union Project, founded in 2013 after Craig Taubman bought the building, which housed a Welsh Presbyterian Church for 88 years. He was put up to it by Stephen Sass, the HBO executive who is president of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California and deeply involved in bringing back the historic Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights. Taubman had made the old synagogue a place for prayer in many faiths, though it turns out it has been hardest to get Jews to take active part in the Pico-Union district. "The Pico Union Project is dedicated to the Jewish principle to 'love your neighbor as yourself,'" the project's website says. "We elevate this teaching into practice in our historic building by bringing diverse cultures together through song, story, art, food and prayer."

The project and its founder are profiled in a story in the Jewish Journal:

Uniting the world’s oft-quarreling religions under one roof is only one part of Taubman’s vision for the Pico Union Project, which is housed in a building erected in 1909 by Sinai Temple, the first Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. Taubman also wants the space to function as a performance venue, a community space and an advocate for the surrounding Pico Union neighborhood, a largely poor and Hispanic area on the edge of downtown that teeters on the brink of gentrification.

Taubman’s grand sense of possibility fits with the rest of his personality, which tends toward the unrestrained. Topped by a shock of white hair, Taubman, 56, is an outgoing, irrepressible fount of ideas, words and wisecracks.

A former composer of commercial jingles, and songwriter and performer for Disney, Taubman is known in the Jewish world for helping to launch the wildly successful Friday Night Live prayer service at Sinai Temple, which is now a pillar of L.A.’s wealthy west side Jewish community. The service regularly drew hundreds of young Jews every month for more than a decade.

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The Pico Union Project is among a number of historic American synagogue buildings that have been repurposed by Jewish institutions. Some, such as the Vilna Shul in Boston and the 6th and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, include regular Jewish prayer services. Others, like the Eldridge Street Museum in New York City and the Lloyd Street Synagogue in Baltimore, function primarily as museums of Jewish and neighborhood history.
But none share the Pico Union Project’s emphasis on multiculturalism.

The project's website has some nice vintage photos of the building through the years.

Photo: Anthony Weiss