Nearly 175 volunteers cleaned up part of Pico-Robertson, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles, on Sunday.
"We, as the Jewish community, want to be good neighbors and be in good neighbor-ship with others," Becky Sobelman-Stern, deputy CEO of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, told JNS. "That's exactly what you're seeing here."
Community members were there, so "people can feel pride when they walk down their own streets and feel that they are clean and that they have contributed to taking care of their community," she said.
Volunteers donned gloves, trash pickers, brooms and other tools to clean up the streets.
Boaz Hepner, a nurse and community organizer who has organized neighborhood cleanups since 2009, told JNS he was "sick and tired" of there being "litter everywhere, because of homeless encampments, because of flyers that get left out, because of Jewish and Persian and Hebrew newspapers."
"There's just a lot of trash," he said. "There's not enough civic pride."
He organized the trash cleanup with the Federation and with other partners, including the office of Katy Yaroslavsky, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. Representatives from City Hall, a state Assemblymember's office and local synagogues and businesses also took part.
Hepner told JNS that he schedules cleanups after the High Holidays because "all of Pico is selling the lulav and etrog and everything, and as a result, it gets littered everywhere on the street." (The two make up part of the "four types" used on the Sukkot holiday.)
"We start off the holidays with more trash than usual, and it's our trash," he said. "Then the holidays happen, and people are walking around like crazy, because they're not driving cars and they're eating kiddush food, and more trash inevitably gets distributed."
He thinks there is less trash on the streets than in 2009, but homelessness has worsened.
"Every time there's an encampment that moves, they leave behind an entire pantry full of garbage, which attracts animals," Hepner told JNS.
'This is great'
This year's cleanup went "amazingly well," and there was "more of a variety of representation from different schools and organizations and synagogues," he said. "More people meant a larger area we managed to clean."
Harold Schloss, a leader in Troop 360, an Orthodox Jewish Scout troop with separate boys' and girls' troops, joined the cleanup with volunteers from Bank of America, where he works.
He told JNS that volunteers picked up trash from the streets and put it in garbage bags, which they left for the city's sanitation department to collect.
"There was a fair bit of man-made debris the whole way, as well as posters that were up," Schloss said. "There was at least one location where it looked like somebody had set up a sidewalk shop to sell lulavs for Sukkot, and they just left their trash in the gutter on the street."
"There was a lot of cardboard and some palm stuff to pick up and put in the trash," he said.
There were also signs along the streets advertising events from months ago that the group took down, Schloss said.
He has taken part in the cleanups that Hepner has led for the past three years and told JNS that it is "gratifying" to see everyone come together to clean up the neighborhood.
"It's nicer to see the neighborhood be clean, and the only thing on the sidewalk be the leaves on the trees," he said. "Other people, as we do this every year, come up to us and say, 'Hey, this is great, what are you doing?' And this year was not any different."
A local store owner thanked his group "profusely" for cleaning up the area, Schloss said.
"It's gratifying because people who live there or work there express themselves every year about how happy they are to see us cleaning an area up," he told JNS.