LOS ANGELES — A new mural depicting a woman lighting candles for Shabbat earlier was unveiled in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles earlier this month. From the folds of her scarf emerge symbols of LA’s various Jewish communities and the city’s recognizable emblems – a pomegranate and saffron, Russian and Persian textile motifs, a desert scene from the Biblical Exodus resembling the beaches of Malibu – alongside intergenerational female silhouettes. Standing out against the blue background, the red flames of the candle are composed of Hebrew letters forming the words l’dor v’dormeaning “from generation to generation”.
Painted by Iranian-American Jewish artist Cloe Hakakian, “The Common Thread” at 9320 West Pico Boulevard is the first of five planned anti-hate murals organized by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations (CHR) in the frame of his LA against hate summer initiative. (Hakakian also created a fresco last year in support of women’s rights protests in Iran.) The Pico-Robertson neighborhood, known as a center of Jewish culture in Los Angeles, was the site of the shooting of two Jews as they left the synagogue earlier this year, an incident that was investigated as a hate crime. (The shootings took place a block away, about a mile southwest of the new mural.)
Each mural is located in one of LA County’s five districts and will honor a different group, including the Black community in District 2 in South LA, the Indigenous community in District 5 in the North, and the Latinx community in the Valley from San Gabriel to the east. The next mural will focus on Long Beach’s LGBTQ+ population and will be unveiled on August 5. The themes were chosen based on the findings of 2021 LA County Hate Crimes Report.
Although hate crimes have increased nationally in recent years, unfortunately they are not a new phenomenon. The CHR was founded almost 80 years ago in the wake of the crisis of June 1943 Zoot costume riotsin which mobs of American servicemen attacked Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits in the streets of Los Angeles.
The murals are the anchor of the Summer of Solidarity campaign, through which the CHR partners with community organizations such as Brotherhood Crusade, LA Commons and the LGBTQ Long Beach Center. Partners for the first mural are the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and the Anti-Defamation League. The CHR called on TaskForce, an organization that works on public campaigns, to organize the mural initiative.
This community involvement also extends to the creation of each mural, which involves a series of focus groups with local residents. During the first session, they are invited to answer questions about their identity on cards, which the artists use to clarify their approach. Once they’ve created an initial design, it’s shared back to the focus group again for another round of feedback.
“It reinforced the feeling of belonging to this community. There’s a special bond, whether you know everyone or not…I felt like we did it together,” Hakakian said. Hyperallergiccomparing herself to the “paintbrush on the wall”, animated by the collective responses she receives.
Hakakian considers her mural to offer something different depending on who looks at it and how familiar they are with the images it depicts. “It will educate people who don’t know and bring comfort to those who do,” she said.
