Inclusive Long Beach prayer breakfast to celebrate 25 years this week

Gene Lentzner may be small in stature, but he’s been a fighter for all his 93 years for inclusion of all people in human relations.

That’s why he started the Interfaith/Intercultural Prayer Breakfast, which will be celebrating its 25th aiversary Wednesday at the Long Beach Convention Center.

The prayer breakfast, hosted by the Califoia Conference for Equality and Justice, has grown from a small get-together to one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the city.

“I am pleased how large audiences have come together, and so early in the moing, to be with people from different faiths and backgrounds,” he said. “What a great statement this makes about Long Beach.”

This year’s keynote speaker will be professor Margaret Buham, founder of Northeaste University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. She will be speaking on “Community Healing and Reconciliation.”

In 1962 Lentzner began to involve himself as a community volunteer after a successful career in the clothing business.

A life-changing event took place in the late 1970s when he became more deeply involved in the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now CCEJ).

He said he created a group of risk-takers who had coections and resources and who dared and were willing to change the state of human relations in Long Beach.

He helped create CCEJ’s Building Bridges program and other programs aimed at eliminating bias and bigotry and bringing people together.

In the early 1990s, Lentzner decided the then-Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast was too closely aligned with one religion, Christianity, to be sponsored by a govement agency.

“I’m not opposed to faith-based breakfasts, just religious breakfasts sponsored by the govement,” he said. “We have separation of church and state in the United States.”

In 1991, Lentzner started Under One Sky, the Interfaith/Intercultural Prayer breakfast open to all faiths. Each year it grows in bringing people together.

The mayors prayer breakfast faded away.

Lentzner will celebrate his 94th birthday on April 12.

He still drives his own car and, other than a few aches and pains, he shows little sign of slowing down in his efforts to bring people together.

“There still is much to do,” said the man who was bullied as a Jewish kid in an all Italian, Catholic neighborhood in St. Louis many years ago.

“After school I was attacked, cursed and chased by my classmates, who had been well-taught to hate people like me,” he said. “But I leaed to fight back, small as I was, and I still hold the school record for having four pairs of glasses broken in a single semester.”

Advertisement

While Lentzner has seen much discrimination in his lifetime, he also said there have been many victories, including a decrease in hate crimes, the emergence of minorities in business and public life and the greater acceptance of each other.

“It is amazing what we can do when we work together,” he said. “Improving human relations begins with each one of us.”

For more information on the prayer breakfast, call CCEJ at 562-435-8184.

Rich Archbold is public editor of the Press-Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected].

- - , .