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The House of Love and Prayer: A Radical Jewish Experiment in San Francisco

Gorner-Klein Wedding 7

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Life Magazine Wedding In addition to the weekly Shabbat celebrations, weddings were a big happening in the House of Love and Prayer community. As an essential part of Jewish lifecycle events, weddings became an important moment of the intersecting of Hippie Counterculture and Hasidic, Orthodox tradition, which caught the attention of a much wider audience.

A September 1969 issue of Life Magazine included a feature called “The Free-form Wedding Game.” The article documented numerous “free-form” weddings that eschewed traditional wedding ceremony rituals by adding a personal touch of meaning and relevance to each unique couple. One of the weddings featured in the article was of a young couple from the House of Love and Prayer, George Gorner and Pamela Klein, which gave the House the most widespread publicity it ever received. Life published photos along with a short description of the wedding ceremony, which took place in Golden Gate Park and was officiated by Reb Shlomo, who was adorned in love beads. After the ceremony, all those in attendance had a big party, which lasted late into the evening, eventually prompting park police to ask the group to leave. Undeterred, the celebrants simply moved back to the House of Love and Prayer and continued to party.

Marvin Kussoy, an amateur photographer and active member of the House of Love and Prayer community, took the photos of the wedding that appeared in Life. They illustrate a robust and multi-generational community simultaneously immersed in Hasidic tradition and the Hippie Counterculture. Among other examples, this is evidenced by George Gorner’s wearing tefillin [1] prior to the wedding ceremony and the clothes that the wedding guests are wearing at the wedding.

[1] Tefillin—often called phylacteries in English, based on an ancient Greek word meaning something that guards or protects—are the pair of black boxes attached to leather straps worn on a Jew’s arm and head during daily morning prayers (Judaisms, 35).
Food and Shabbat Meals Each week presented those running the House with a struggle to accommodate and feed the throngs who came for Shabbat, partially because they had no constant source of funding. With great effort, and a little bit of luck, every week they were able to provide Shabbat meals for all of their visitors.

For instance, the Sosnik family, which owned a local kosher food distribution business, routinely supplied them with food and wine. House members also went to a local grocery store on Clement Street to get donations of expired food, such as produce. Sometimes the House received random gifts and. In addition, though modest, the House of Love and Prayer was able to get funding from local Jewish organizations that felt obligated to help a group of Jews creating experiences for other Jews to engage in Jewish life.

Louise Berky, who, in many ways, acted as the House matron, presided over the kitchen every week. She organized the food, as well as those preparing the food. In fact, everyday life at the house was starkly gendered. The women always cooked, served, and cleaned. Partially because this was a few years before the nationwide Women’s Liberation movement had taken root, both men and women gravitated towards traditional gender roles. Each week for Shabbat the women made giant pots of soup, rice, and vegetables (or vegetable lasagna). Usually they cooked recipes out of the Zen Macrobiotics cookbook.
Photo Gallery This photo gallery provides a small sampling of the many photographs of the House of Love and Prayer. As a visual archive, this gallery is intended to document and preserve the memory of this important element of San Francisco’s Jewish history.

If you have photographs or other archival material from the House of Love and Prayer that you would like to include in this exhibition, please email info@mappingjewishsf.org.