LA County rabbis help Eaton Fire survivors find missing cross in debris of burned property

A group of local rabbis is recounting the unlikely partnership they made with a Los Angeles County bishop in the wake of the Eaton Fire, helping them find a precious missing cross. 

"Yeah, right. Four rabbis go to a Christian bishop's house and say, 'What do you need us to find?'" Bishop Brenda Bos joked. "To clarify, you're asking the rabbis to find a Christian cross?"

Bos and her wife Janis Reid were among the thousands who lost their homes in January 2025 when the devastating fire erupted. They were out of town when their neighbor sent them a picture of where their house once stood. 

"It took us both a minute to figure out what we were looking at when we saw the picture and then Brenda said, 'Oh my God, that's your car, that's our house, it's gone,'" Reid recalled. 

In the weeks that followed, their friends and fellow religious leaders reached out to help however they could. One option was looking through the rubble for anything salvageable. 

"The opportunity came up to help some people sift through their houses, and I said, 'You know, I don't have an emotional attachment to your house or your belongings, so I can come in and do this,'" said Rabbi Keara Stein.

From there, four rabbis and two congregants, dressed head to toe in hazmat suits, began sifting through the tons of debris in search of a cross that Reid was gifted by her stepmother. 

"We're Christians and this is God's presence with us in our home," Reid said. "I really wanted something. I just wanted something from the property. I didn't want everything to be gone."

Though the chances of finding the three-inch cross in the debris were not high, the group was not one to lose faith. 

"All we were finding was melted little things and nothing worthy of keeping," said Rabbi Sarah Hronsky. "I could see that the frustration was setting in. Nobody gave up, and you were literally just pushing objects out of the way and flipping air conditioners and opening refrigerators."

After nearly an hour and a half of searching, they found it. 

"There was this shout, and there's a great picture of somebody in Tyvek, like celebrating, and it was really something," Bos said. 

"When we found that, we felt like there was definitely a deeper message to that," Rabbi Keara Stein said. 

In both Jewish and Christian tradition, ashes are holy. So the cross, as burned as it is, will go back up when Bos and Reid rebuild. 

"It's a good thing to hold a little bit of the broken and a little bit of the ash alongside any of the renewal and any of the growth," Hronsky said. 

Bos said they have no plans on refurbishing the cross. 

"We don't want to clean it up. I actually like that it's got this sort of ashy patina to it," Bos said. "To remind us about what we've been through."

Rabbi Stein said that the day before finding the cross, she was sifting through the debris of another property for a family she didn't know, when she found a menorah.