SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER : NEW ATTITUDE FOR JEWS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

By dawn's first light, its pink stone facade shimmers like the walls of Old Jerusalem. Around its secluded 15-acre campus, hills spiked with thorny desert plants recall the arid terrain where Moses once walked.

With its quasi-biblical appearance, the Skirball Cultural Center could be taken for one of King Solomon's lost temples.

But the drone of freeway traffic confirms that this $65 million temple of Jewish-American culture belongs more to the future than the past.

``America needs to be more than a veneer that lasts for a decade, so we have built something that I hope will last maybe for 1,000 years,'' says Dr. Uri Herscher, the Skirball's genial and driven CEO.

A thousand years? That's a long time in a place where most people already have forgotten last month's Oscar winners. But the Skirball has a good shot at reversing L.A.'s chronic cultural amnesia.

When it opened to the public one year ago, the hilltop complex became the nation's largest museum dedicated to exploring the breadth of the Jewish-American experience.

Tucked inside the Sepulveda Pass, above the San Diego Freeway (405), the Skirball sits strategically between L.A.'s two principal Jewish enclaves, the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. Two miles north of the new $733 million J. Paul Getty Center, it lends multiethnic texture to an auto-linked acropolis that some are calling the new Museum Row.

Generously endowed by the late Jack Skirball, a former rabbi turned millionaire Hollywood producer (``Shadow of a Doubt''), the Skirball houses more than 25,000 artworks and ceremonial objects, mostly one of a kind.

But it's more than a warehouse for antiquities. Like the Getty, the Skirball aims to be an oasis, a place where weary commuters can revive their spirits with art, music, family get-togethers and lively discussion. It also means to supply a ``neutral ground,'' where L.A.'s Babel-like factions can meet and search for a common tongue.

Not all this has happened, at least not yet. But the Skirball has met or surpassed two important goals. After projecting 60,000 visitors in its inaugural year, the center got 250,000. An estimated 30 percent were non-Jews, possibly attracted by the center's decision to depict the Jewish experience simply as an offshoot of the U.S. immigrant experience.

``What we've tried to make clear is the symbiosis of these two cultures, Jewish and American,'' says board chairman Howard Friedman.

Among the Skirball's non-Jewish visitors were 46 sixth-graders from Valley Presbyterian School in North Hills who went last fall. Teacher Shirley Deedon says her students were enthralled with the Skirball's hands-on computer displays and a simulated archeological dig. And she thinks the building, an amalgam of quiet courtyards and scenic vistas, greatly improves on the museum's former site at Hebrew Union College near the USC campus.

``The old museum was dull and dismal. You didn't get excited to walk in there. The new museum is, I think, a gorgeous piece of architecture.''

Blessed with room to stretch, physically and philosophically, the Skirball is busily testing boundaries. Already it has offered such diverse activities as a reading by African-American author John Edgar Wideman, an exhibition of biblical-themed works by sculptor George Segal, a klezmer music festival and a ``Reggae Passover'' musical tribute to the Jewish and African diasporas.

The klezmer festival is especially notable, as it heaps legitmacy on a genre that Jews themselves often have dismissed as embarrassingly provincial, i.e. ``too Jewish.'' While itinerant folk musicians were playing klezmer in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, assimilated middle-class Jews were inside concert halls in Berlin and Vienna listening to assimilated composers such as Mendelssohn. The Skirball apparently doesn't buy that there's such a thing as ``too Jewish.''

Identity, perhaps, is what the Skirball is most urgently about. Not ancient history. Not religion per se. Not the murder of 6 million people or the birth of the Israeli state, though both receive moving depictions in the museum's core exhibition, ``Visions & Values: Jewish Life From Antiquity to America.''

If reinventing yourself is the essence of being American, then few museums have a better claim to citizenship than the Skirball collection. It began life in 1875 when Hebrew Union College was founded in Cincinnati. Since then, the college has had to reinvent itself twice after moving to Los Angeles in 1972. (The Skirball is an affiliate of HUC.)

``The Skirball speaks eons about where we Jews have come to in America, that not only are we not ashamed to talk about our identity and culture, but that we have built a building that will last as long as the Getty will last,'' says Martin Isaacson, senior lecturer in arts theory and criticism at UCLA Extension's Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts.

Isaacson doubts the Skirball could've been built here 25 years ago, when Jews mostly expressed their identity through synagogues.

``Now, whatever our culture, since the evil giant of communism is no longer the enemy, we're turning inward to discover who we are,'' he says.

In fact, a spate of new buildings such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles suggest that museums are becoming synagogues of the '90s.

``The fact that museums have this emotional power for Jews is really fascinating,'' says Deborah Dash Moore, professor of religion at Vassar College and author of ``To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Dream in Miami and L.A.'' (Free Press, 1994).

``Jews seem to be fascinated looking at representations of themselves and their culture.''

The Skirball's first year coincides with a period of intensified soul-searching and debate about what makes a Jew a Jew. Last month, the Brooklyn-based Union of Orthodox Rabbis caused an uproar by announcing it would no longer recognize non-Orthodox movements as Jewish.

Anxiety has taken other forms. In his new book ``The Vanishing American Jew,'' voluble attorney Alan Dershowitz argues that assimilation and rising intermarriage rates may wipe out American Jewry by the late 21st century.

In Los Angeles, a recent group exhibition at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, ``Too Jewish?'' several works angrily lamented the erosion of a Jewish ethic grounded in learning, family and social justice in favor of one based on consumer comforts.

Jewish identity always was shakier in Los Angeles than in older, settled communities such as New York and Chicago, says Vassar's Moore. Most Jewish newcomers, she says, left their sense of identity behind when they moved West.

``What it meant to be Jewish in this very new and very different world of Los Angeles was very open to question.''

In Los Angeles, the Jewish search for identity faced two particular challenges, Moore says: an unfamiliar suburban culture, in which nobody walked and there was no community center; and intermarriage rates as high as 75 percent, compared with New York City's 25 percent. (Nationally, Moore says, the rate of Jewish intermarriage has doubled in the past 20 years.)

Of course, consolations existed. Surrounded by clear skies and cascading bougainvillea, some Jews thought they'd found the promised land of their fathers.

``Now, people joke that only Jews would imagine this was paradise,'' Moore says, laughing.

If America hasn't been utopia, it's still been a blessing. Herscher feels that whenever he walks the Skirball's airy, sun-drenched halls.

One of his favorite things is to stop by the archeological dig, a shallow, rectangular depression filled with sand and mock artifacts.

The dig whets children's thirst for discovery, says Herscher. He hopes that all who pass through the Skirball will partake of that thirst.

``I want people to remember history not in the name of Hitler,'' says the 56-year-old former rabbi. ``I want people to know of the people who've enriched history, and not just of the evil in the world.''

When you dig in the desert, you never know what you'll find. Maybe a handful of dust. Maybe a hidden garden.

CAPTION(S):

6 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Judaism's torchbearer 

L.A.'s Skirball Cultural Center leads Jewish-American experience into the future

Photo illustration by Lori Valesko and Michael Owen Baker/Daily News

(2--Color) This arch at the Skirball Cultural Center is part of a replica of the Hammat Tiberias archeological site. Projecting 60,000 visitors in its first year, the center got 250,000.

(3--Color) Skirball CEO Dr. Uri Herscher hopes the center ``will last maybe for 1,000 years.''

(4--Color) ``The old museum was dull and dismal. You didn't get excited to walk in there. The new museum is, I think, a gorgeous piece of architecture,'' says Shirley Deedon.

(5--Color) The Skirball is home to more than 25,000 artworks and ceremonial objects.

(6--Color) Skirball Cultural Center

Photos by Michael Owen Baker