DODGER STADIUM, AN ANCIENT JEWISH BURIAL GROUND

The major league baseball season that began before Passover and extended until after Yom Kippur is about to start its playoffs. My favorite this year is of course my beloved hometown Los Angeles Dodgers, which finished with the best record in baseball and secured the home field advantage for the rest of the playoffs. This privilege will extend even if the Dodgers win the pennant and advance to the World Series, a milestone that has unfortunately eluded them since the waning months of the Reagan administration in October 1988. Home field advantage will hopefully strengthen the Dodgers’ chance of success, as sabermetrics gurus have long written about the advantages provided to the home team. As a lifelong fan of the Dodgers, I look forward to watching my team play on the sacred ground of Dodger Stadium, the third oldest stadium in baseball today. But as not many of the team’s fans know, the stadium sits near the former sacred ground of the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles, a fact which led the famous Los Angeles Jewish historian Max Vorspan to quip that Chavez Ravine, the area in Los Angeles where the stadium is located, should actually be called “Shabbos Levine.”

A far cry from Ebbets Field, the intimate home of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the highly urban neighborhood of Flatbush, Dodger Stadium is nestled just north of downtown, providing fans with a stunning view of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. The stadium itself is surrounded by tens of thousands of parking spaces sprawled over a large number of parking lots. Below the southernmost parking lot, parking lot 10, a hill slopes down to a street called Lilac Terrace. On the south side of this street, just west of the corner where Lilac Terrace turns into Lookout Drive, there is a bronze plaque for California Registered Historical Landmark No. 822. The plaque, which depicts a bear (the symbol on the California state flag) and two stars, reads as follows:



More: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/246434/los-angeles-dodger-stadium-jewish-burial-ground?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_term=Dodger+Stadium%2C+L.A.%27s+Oldest+Jewish+Burial+Ground&utm_content=oct2017

Cross posted to the Jewish Group