The words “We are all responsible for each other” crown the mural we helped create on the remaining wall of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center after it was lost in the Eaton Fire last year. On July 24th, the wall was defaced for a second time – a vandal had left those words of unity and friendship dripping with the black paint of swastikas.
We could never have imagined this heartbreaking juxtaposition when we first conceived this mural as a project of the Sparks of Kindness Youth, or SKY, Fund, a charity we founded in the wake of 2025 Fires. As two high school students who watched while flames tore through our hometown, from our friends’ homes to the playing fields we grew up on, we knew we needed to help.
First focused on replacing beloved children’s items lost to the flames, SKY Fund soon evolved into a way to support our neighbors in the communities of Altadena and the Palisades, whether at our holiday toy drive for the towns’ youth centers or a pickleball fundraiser for legal clinics for fire victims.
When we learned that after the105-year-old Pasadena Jewish Center had burned down, a surviving wall had been vandalized with antisemitic graffiti we reached out. Not only did we want to support this congregation that had already lost so much, but both of our families know what that hatred leads to – one carries the memory of the Holocaust, the other persecution in Iran.
Enlisting the artists collective, Art Over Hate, we worked with community children to design and then paint a bright and colorful symbol of resilience and unity. Both were embodied by the symbols chosen – a wildflower that still blooms across the San Gabriel mountains despite the ash lingering on their slopes, a native peacock whose plumes still illuminate against the blackened earth, and a yellow butterfly in memory of a classmate dedicated to our community who tragically passed away at sixteen. We hoped her spirit would help the congregation lift their wings too.
Then, last week, came the swastikas accompanied by the black scrawl, “Zionism is not Welcome.”
After seeing the vandalism, it would be easy for us to simply write that hate will not win, that we are stronger together. We believe both. But standing in front of that wall a second time, we found ourselves thinking less about defiance, and more about how recovery actually works. It is not a single triumphant act. It is a long endeavor, scaling one wall at a time, and this community keeps facing new ones on its way back to normalcy.
Some of those walls are cruel and deliberate, like twisted black lines painted over children’s art or blaming a small California congregation for events thousands of miles away. Others are quiet and bureaucratic. Families who lost everything in January are still waiting on permits, still navigating insurance, still waiting to rebuild. Indeed, in the ensuing 18 months, only 1% of fire victims of the Eaton Fire have been able to return to new homes.
Swastikas and permit backlogs cut differently. One an act of hatred; the other one of neglect. But to a community trying to return to what it was, both are walls between here and home. Resilience is not the moment you clear one. It is the decision to keep climbing the next.
That was always the message of our mural. We are all responsible for one another does not mean wounds stop hurting. It means when they do, we are the ones who answer, whether that’s a signature on a permit application, a warm welcome for children who lost homes to a new youth center, or neighbors standing in front of a defaced wall so no one has to stand alone.
This past Thursday, we addressed a gathering of over 200 neighbors and allies of every faith to say exactly that. Grateful and inspired, we stood in hope that rather than divide, this act of hate will serve only to strengthen the bonds of solidarity and friendship our city needs to rebuild.
In the days since, the mural been restored; the swastikas painted over with an olive branch added instead. The words painted along the top read as they always have. On the hills the wildflowers bloom and yellow butterflies flutter past. And if the next wall is waiting, whatever form it takes, we will climb it together because that is what community has always meant.
Caleb Yellin and Audrey Farahnik are the founders of the Sparks of Kindness Youth Fund. They are rising high school seniors in Los Angeles.