For decades, one of the most splendid Christmas celebrations in San Francisco took place at a grand Queen Anne Victorian on Franklin Street.

Preparations for the holiday extravaganza started months before Dec. 25. Every year, the mansion’s basement would be transformed into a magical wonderland, evoking an exotic theme. As family and friends sipped cocktails upstairs, a Santa descended the stairs, ho-ho-ho’ing as he greeted and handed out favors to dozens of children.

Under a huge, glittering Christmas tree was a mountain of beautifully wrapped presents, not to be touched until the last plate of caviar, oysters and the piece de resistance, a gleaming roast suckling pig, was devoured. It was the great event of the year in the house, eagerly anticipated by young and old alike.

There was one noteworthy thing about this Christmas celebration. It was held by one of the most prominent Jewish families in San Francisco at their home, one of the city’s grand Victorians, the Haas-Lilienthal house.

Today, it may seem odd that a pillar of the Jewish community would stage an over-the-top celebration of Christmas (not to mention Easter, another big do at the mansion). But from the city’s birth until recently, such cultural crossovers were the norm, not the exception.

As Irena Narell wrote in her 1981 book, “Our City: The Jews of San Francisco,” “Christmas and New Year celebrations have remained a strong family tradition among descendants of San Francisco’s pioneer Jewry. To them, Christmas and membership in the major temples did not seem mutually exclusive.”

Previous trivia question: What San Franciscan was the first Asian American woman to win a diving medal at the Olympics?

Answer: Victoria Manolo Draves, a Filipina who grew up South of Market.

This week’s trivia question: Where was the first steam bath, in San Francisco and when was it built?

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.

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As noted in an earlier Portals, the city’s pioneer Jews were well-educated Germans. They were largely nonobservant to begin with, and San Francisco’s welcoming climate, as well as the tremendous business success they enjoyed, encouraged their secularism and their social assimilation. They were part of the San Francisco monied elite, and their standing in the establishment was much more important than any allegiance to Jewish religion or customs.

“For the majority of socially prominent San Francisco Jews, religious affiliation was primarily a matter of form,” Narell writes, quoting a descendant of one of those elite families, the Slosses, who said her father never set foot in a temple.

In “The Haas Sisters of Franklin Street: A Look Back With Love,” Frances Bransten Rothmann, granddaughter of Haas family patriarch William Haas, writes that her mother, Florine Haas Bransten, and her aunt, Alice Haas Lilienthal, “celebrated Christmas and Easter rather than Channukah and Pesach because these were the holidays of the culture they lived in.”

She adds, “The sisters knew little about Jewish rites. The menorahs, the beautiful lights adorning their Franklin Street homes, were merely artifacts ornamenting their dining and living rooms. We might dine on gorgeously glazed hams, but only fish was served on Fridays. As bacon sizzled in the kitchen, Mother worried endlessly about our Catholic nurse’s Lenten diet. These were not intentional or prejudicial defiances; they were merely a part of the world the sisters knew and lived in.”

Alice Haas Lilienthal, who was born in 1885, was in charge of the Christmas gala. A bighearted woman who thought the best of everyone and “lived her whole life as though it were still 1880,” according to a relative, she began preparing for the party months before, enlisting her daughters to help.

“Aunt Alice seemed to be Mrs. Santa Claus personified; her daughters, elfin helpers,” Rothmann writes.

Aunt Alice’s centerpiece was a glorious, ceiling-high Christmas tree. It rotated on a music stand and always featured remarkably symmetrical branches, heavily laden with heirloom ornaments, ropes of tinsel and hundreds of lights.

“The secret of those symmetrical branches became known to me in time,” Rothmann writes. “Aunt Alice had extra boughs cemented to the tree’s trunk, whenever it was not perfectly proportioned.”

The party was initially held upstairs in the parlors and dining room, but as the family grew to include 50 to 60 cousins, sisters, aunts and uncles, it was moved to the basement ballroom.

“These chilly, subterranean depths were transformed into other worlds. Each year there was a new stage setting, a new burst of imagination, and infinite attention to detail,” Rothmann writes.

One year, the basement ballroom was transformed onto a Mexican wonderland, complete with Santa Claus piñatas, sombreros, Indian baskets, paper poppies and papier-mache chickens and horses adorning the dining tables. Another time, the ballroom was decorated in opulent Oriental style, with chiming Siamese silver and gold wind-bells and brightly colored Japanese paper fans and butterflies. The tables were lit by lanterns from Hong Kong in the shape of odd animals, and several of the ladies wore kimonos that Lilienthal had brought back from Japan.

But Rothmann’s favorite Christmas decor was when her beloved aunt turned the old house into a winter wonderland. One year, Lilienthal made trees out of pine cones she had gathered the previous summer at Lake Tahoe, painted silver and covered with popcorn and ornaments threaded together.

The highlight was an alpine scene on the buffet table, featuring a gingerbread chateau built by the cook, surrounded by a miniature forest. An ice-skating pond was cleverly designed on a mirror, with tiny toboggans, paper snowballs, sleds and a Santa on the chateau chimney reflected in it.

This grand, cross-cultural Christmas tradition went on for more than 60 years. Lilienthal died in 1972 at age 87. The magnificent Haas-Lilienthal house at 2007 Franklin St. is now the home of San Francisco Heritage, an organization dedicated to preserving the city’s architectural legacy.

It recently received a $4.3 million restoration and is open to the public for tours.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

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The Northern California Board of Rabbis (NorCal BOR) on Tuesday announced a new program called the “Jewish Chaplaincy Program,” designed to fill a notable gap in San Francisco’s unaffiliated Jewish community.

According to NorCal BOR, the program will provide acute bedside care to unaffiliated Jewish patients in San Francisco hospitals. It is also expected that a system for contacting chaplaincy leaders and hospitals will be developed to provide information and support to unaffiliated Jewish patients facing illness or at the end of their lives.

The board is currently looking for a part-time rabbi-chaplain to lead the initiative.

California’s Golden Gate Bridge, near San Francisco (Credit: RICH NIEWIROSKI JR./WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

According to a 2013 Pew poll, one in five American Jews say they don’t belong to any religious community — or have “no religion.”

Jewish Life in San Francisco

The San Francisco Bay Area has the fourth largest Jewish population in the United States after the New York area, southeast Florida and metropolitan Los Angeles.

According to a 2018 report, the Jewish population in the San Francisco Bay Area has a higher proportion of young adults, at 37%, than any other recent major American Jewish community study. Not only young people are drawn to the region (around 70% of the Jewish population come from other countries); Once they get here, they move around. The Jewish population is growing in the East Bay while it is shrinking in San Francisco.

Reflecting the entire Bay Area, the Jewish population is more diverse than any other community in the country. There is one LGBTQ+ person in every fifth Jewish household in San Francisco. Across the Bay Area, there is one Hispanic, Asian American, African American, or person of mixed or other ethnic or racial background (other than white) in one in four Jewish households, The 2018 Portrait of Bay Area Jewish Life and Communities, the first comprehensive Study of the Bay Area’s Jewish population, said.

Danny Grossman contributed to this report.

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When I was growing up in San Francisco, every Passover my very secular mother would try, with mixed results, to ensure my brother and I had something of a normal Seder. At those Seders, one of which was written about in the pages of this newspaper in 1980, there were sometimes more Catholics than Jews around the table and nothing could start until I got home from baseball practice and asked the four questions — CYO athletics did not cancel practice for Jewish holidays back then. We never quite knew what we were doing and the Jews seemed much less stressed out about it than the Catholics, but the food was always excellent. Those long ago seders reminded me of why Jewish San Francisco has always been both fascinating and puzzling for me.

It has long struck me that back in New York the question “Are you Jewish?” was usually met by a one word answer, yes or no. In San Francisco, it has always been more of an essay question.

Those essay responses I have heard over the years include things like, “Well, we’re not religious, but my family is Jewish and we sometimes…” Or “My father is Jewish and my mother converted, but I haven’t set foot in a synagogue (very rarely shul) for years and I never had a bat mitzvah…” Or “Culturally I am, but I don’t believe and I don’t speak any Hebrew…”

It is always nice to learn more about people, but the unwillingness or inability of many Jewish San Franciscans to answer that simple question has always mystified and bothered me. I am also aware that my own personal story of being a Jew who spent 10 years attending a San Francisco Catholic School is a source of frequent comfort, and humor, to my Jewish friends and family in New York.

A few years ago, I found myself reconnecting with an old friend with a Jewish sounding last name and asking her, “To what extent are you Jewish?” I used the odd syntax because, anticipating an essay in response, I asked an essay question. She explained that she was in fact Jewish, with a family history not unlike mine and then indicated that she had long thought there was a lot of anti-Semitism at our old high school, but had never really discussed it. I assured her she was right about that.

For many generations, Jewish San Francisco had a very different feel than other urban Jewish communities in the US To use the language of another group, Jews in San Francisco were not always quite out, never fully comfortable or public about who we were. It is also true that San Francisco’s Jewish community has long played an important role in the political, civic, cultural and financial life of San Francisco. These two points are probably related.

The long history of Jewish San Francisco includes numerous civic and business leaders going back to Levi Strauss in the days of the Gold Rush and including people like Herbert Fleishhacker and Benjamin Swig in the last century. The City also was one of the first in the country to have a Jewish mayor, actually two — Washington Bartlett and Adolph Sutro, almost 80 years before New York.

But for much of that time, the unspoken social contract for Jewish San Francisco was discretion in exchange for tolerance. That arrangement seemed to work in some respects, as San Francisco has always been a city where Jews can succeed in pretty much any professional field they want — including managing the local baseball team to the best record in the Major Leagues, as Gabe Kapler did last year — but also where speaking Yiddish loudly, flaunting our religious observance and reveling in Jewish American culture was never quite accepted.

In other words, San Francisco was for many years an easy place to Jewish, but less so to be a New York Jew. Or less charitably, a fine place to be Jewish, but not to make such a fuss about it.

Many Jewish San Franciscans with deeper roots in The City than me — my family arrived from New York in 1971 — understand this dynamic instinctively, but it took us a long time to figure it out. During the 1970s and 1980s, when we heard the phrase “pushy New Yorker” out of the mouths of too many San Franciscans, my mother, brother and I understood it to be code not simply for “Jew” but for “New York Jew. ” However, New York has been the capital of world Jewry for well over a century, so if you have a problem with Jews from New York, there may be uglier sentiments lurking there as well.

As any San Franciscan with a sense of history knows, The City’s most famous proud New York Jew was Harvey Milk. Milk was brash, had a quick and sarcastic sense of humor, spoke with an unmistakable and charming (at least to some of us) Outer Borough accent and brought a Jewish perspective to his advocacy for LGBTQ rights, not least through his frequent mention of how the Holocaust informed his views as a gay Jewish man.

The story of Milk’s assassination is well known, and it is primarily part of LGBTQ history, but the Jewish angle has also struck me as oddly overlooked. In many other American cities, if a right-wing politician who had campaigned on a pledge to “eradicate malignancies that plague our city” had killed the highest profile Jewish politician in town, who had arrived recently from New York, it would have been understood as also a Jewish story. But that perspective has usually been overlooked in San Francisco.

Things have changed since the 1970s, as Jewish San Francisco has been altered by more Jews from the East and the Midwest moving in, making the Jewish experience in San Francisco a bit more like that of other major cities. San Francisco’s Jewish community has not been entirely transformed, but those essay answers may be getting shorter. So, as we used to say in Catholic School, Chag Sameach!

Lincoln Mitchell has written numerous books and articles on The City and the Giants. Visit lincolnmitchell.com or follow him on Twitter @LincolnMitchell

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Craftsman with Jewish family services does odd jobs for seniors

Updated: 10:17 p.m. CDT May 21, 2021

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THESE UNUSUAL JOBS. WE HAVE THE BIG OAKS OUTSIDE. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT AND GODTSER GOT YOURSELF TODAY. IT’S A BIG DEAL FOR US. JEFF TALKS ABOUT THE HOME HELP HANDYMAN SERVICE OF THE JEWISH FAMILY SERVICE PROVIDER TO HELP EVERYONE WHO HAVE TO DO WITH THE PANDEMIC ESPECIALLY IN THE LAST YEAR, THE LIST IS GROWING AND IT IS PROBABLY NOT TO TRY FOR YOUR BEST. SO WE GET IN AND CHANGE TAPS. WE MOVE FURNIRETU FOR THE ELDERLY. WE WILL CHANGE THE LIGHT BULBS THIS DAY. IT’S GOOD WK FOR ME TO STAND UP ON THE ROOF IMMEDIATELY TO CLEAN THE GUTTERS. IT’S REALLY DANGEROUS IF THE PROGRAM HAS BEEN LAUNCHED TO HELP SENIORS AND OTHERS WITH HARD CHALLENGES TO HAVE A CRAFTSMAN TO DO THOSE WEIRD jobs that do things they are unable to do. IT IS A SERVICE. JEFF SAYS IT HAS BEEN USED SEVERAL TIMES. HOW TO FIX A TOILET OR DISPOSE OF A RUBBISH. IT’S SOMETHING HE TELL HIS FAMILY COUNCIL. THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOME AND BEING IN AN FACILITY. MANY OF THEM. HAVE NEVER BEEN A LONG TIME BUT IT’S GOOD TO ONLY HAVE CONVERSA

Craftsman with Jewish family services does odd jobs for seniors

Updated: 10:17 p.m. CDT May 21, 2021

Jewish Family Service said its handyman utility was launched to help seniors and others with difficult challenges do odd jobs around the house.

PRAIRIE VILLAGE, Kan. –

Jewish Family Service said its handyman utility was launched to help seniors and others with difficult challenges do odd jobs around the house.

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Three residents of the San Francisco Jewish Life Campus have died from complications related to Covid, according to an update on its website.

The SFCJL is now the second Jewish senior citizen facility in the Bay Area to have coronavirus deaths. Eight deaths were reported in October as part of the memory care program at Rhoda Goldman Plaza in San Francisco.

“While residents were near the end of their lives near the end of COVID,” said a letter signed by SFCJL CEO Daniel Ruth, “the board, staff and other members of our community are deeply saddened to hear their deaths.” These residents have been members of our community for an extended period of time and as [a] The result is that our employees have developed deep and meaningful relationships with them, and we are all feeling this tremendous loss. “

Ruth described this time as “the most difficult time in our 150-year history”.

The SFCJL, one of the largest long-term senior facilities in the Bay Area of ​​325 residents and 700 employees, announced a “significant outbreak” of the virus last week. Thirty-nine residents in a single quarantine unit have tested positive since December 7th. A total of 33 employees have tested positive since March.

The last facility update did not specify the number of direct caregivers in the affected unit. SFCJL was said to be working to contain the outbreak with help from local and state health officials and the facility’s infectious disease doctor.

Since the pandemic started in March, the SFCJL had largely avoided a surge in the coronavirus. Before December 7th, only two long-term residents and 22 employees had tested positive.

The current outbreak was discovered after a caregiver tested positive in the week of November 30th and a decision was made to quarantine the unit.

The news of the coronavirus deaths comes just before the SFCJL will receive a shipment of the Covid-19 vaccine sometime between December 21 and 28. In an email to J. Dec. 17, SFCJL spokesman Marcus Young said they will receive these 195 doses.

At Rhoda Goldman Plaza, 15 employees and 25 residents have tested positive for coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to the state Department of Social Services. In the Reutlingen community in Danville, seven employees and five residents had tested positive by December 8, according to Todd Murch, who currently runs the facility.

Coronavirus cases explode in city and state. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco reported an average of 280 cases per day this week and a record 335 cases on December 16. On December 17, the Department of Health ordered a mandatory 10-day quarantine for anyone traveling to the city from outside the Bay Area. The order came into effect on December 18th and will last at least until January 4th.

California is also seeing an increase. In early November, the state saw a seven-day average of 4,138 cases. According to CNN, that average rose to 38,774 on December 17th.

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