By Nicholas David

The fog-swept corners of the outer avenues may not seem beholden to the passage of time. Owe it to the grey sheet overhead, or the mist in the air, or the Pacific Ocean crouched behind the dunes. At times our neighborhoods can feel timeless, like nothing has changed or will for a while.

But history happens, too, in the Outer Sunset. Storefronts come and go, buildings change hands, whole communities slowly give way to new ones. At Taraval Street and 46th Avenue, traces of history remain, almost 50 years later.

“Nathan Green, 67, retired, the owner of a small shop and residential building in the Outer Sunset District near the ocean, recently discovered that his new downstairs tenant is a local branch of the American Nazi party,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle on April 1, 1977.

“As book stores go, this one is not terribly impressive,” wrote the San Francisco Examiner the day before. “Its window is boarded up; its door is often locked. Inside, about 20 books line shelves against one wall; there’s a stained green rug, a desk, a wooden bench, and from the back room, a baby cries. Yet, this bookshop – within sight of Temple B’nai Emunah – at 3608 Taraval has provoked and shocked its neighbors since it opened Monday.” Merchandise inside, as various newspapers reported, included Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” alongside other white supremacist texts and T-shirts bearing swastikas and racist slogans.

Green himself had been a victim of the German Nazi party some four decades prior, and survived Auschwitz, where five of his immediate family members were murdered. Here in San Francisco, the Nazis rented from Green under the guise of opening a bookstore, and Green had agreed, unaware of their affiliations. Following displays of Nazism on his property, he sent them a formal eviction notice, but it would not be necessary. The Examiner would report that the store was “demolished … by about 50 persons swinging tire irons and axes.” The Nazis were expelled from the neighborhood five days into their tenancy.

Many of those “persons” – incensed by the large swastika window sign facing Taraval and the genocidal texts inside – were, like Green, survivors of the Holocaust. The San Francisco Examiner and other publications reported extensively on Auschwitz survivor Tauba Weiss, whose husband Morris (also a survivor) was arrested alongside their son Allen for “malicious mischief.”

Central to this story, as most outlets reported at the time, was a certain tension among Outer Sunset neighbors between due process and forceful eviction.

“Neighbors – Caucasian, Jew and Chinese alike – view the Nazis with a distaste that borders on abhorrence. But there is an odd kind of tolerance often, too,” wrote the Examiner. In the days leading up to the riot, the store and temple were both vandalized, and neighbors debated each other and contradicted themselves over the limits of freedom of speech.

“I believe they have the right to open this store. And I have the right to walk in my neighborhood without seeing this living symbol of hate and desire to destroy my people,” one Jewish neighbor told the Examiner.

After the riot, the same tension persisted. The Examiner would report that Green “had intended to handle it all legally, through an eviction notice. But as Supervisor Quentin Kopp, who was there yesterday, said, that point is now moot.”

The story continued with Temple President Edgar Friedman, who put it another way: “‘I am personally satisfied if they go out in these circumstances,’ he said, although ‘it is against what I as president of the congregation would have been in favor of.’”

The New York Times ran two stories, one immediately following the April 1 riot that drove the Nazis out, and another on April 5 in the aftermath.

“The neighborhood is quiet now and the bookstore that last week bore the Nazi swastika is boarded up, but anger and pain remain in the voices of many of the survivors of German concentration camps who live nearby,” the Times reported.

Local photographer Dave Glass was raised in the outer avenues by and among those Holocaust survivors. He was around 25, he said, when his family witnessed the events of that day. Since then, he has kept a trove of newspaper clippings from the incident.

“San Francisco had a pretty robust Holocaust community,” Glass said in a recent interview. He knew the Weisses as family friends, and Nathan Green was something of an uncle to him.

“He came to our house every Friday night, and my mother would cook fish head soup for him,” Glass said.

Growing up, he heard that Green hid from the Nazis by living in a barn for months during the Holocaust.

“A lot of (Holocaust survivors) came to San Francisco from Stockton via Bergen-Belsen, Germany,” Glass said. “A ranch east of Stockton sponsored many of the families. They eventually migrated to San Francisco, and pretty much scattered all over the Sunset and the Richmond.” Others, he noted, came by way of Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world which offered refuge to Jewish people without visas during the war.

These Nazis were no strangers to the west side, and they were experienced rabble-rousers. Chief among them was Allen Vincent, who features prominently in the 1975 cinéma vérité-style documentary “The California Reich.” In it, he can be seen clashing with protestors at San Francisco State University, two years before opening the propaganda outlet on Taraval Street.

Though perhaps a fading memory today, this localized event represents a pivotal moment in American Jewish identity nationally. At the time, the majority of American Jews had come from Europe two or three generations before the Holocaust. Those who had survived Nazi Germany – Green, the Weisses and the Glasses – came to America poor, unassimilated, Yiddish-accented. Until this period, the Holocaust had not been central to the American Jewish story, and the complete history of the genocide was still being written. This chaotic week in Outer Sunset history coincided with a reckoning across the country.

The nonprofit organization Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco cites this incident as a significant impetus behind its Holocaust Center, an education and research program, as well as the Holocaust Memorial in front of the Legion of Honor Museum. Tauba Weiss, who died in June of this year, served as a founder of the Holocaust Center in 1979 and helped inaugurate the memorial sculpture in Lincoln Park in 1984.

Today, a cocktail bar stands where the bookstore once did, and the synagogue across the street is now a preschool. The phrase, “Congregation B’Nai Emunah,” has been ripped from the building’s entablature. Still, the shadow of the 20th century looms. For Glass, current political powers resemble the forces his community survived in the 1940s and resisted in the ’70s. He recalled how Vincent and the Nazis received police protection while his family friends were arrested.

“Nazism and racism are almost acceptable in some parts of society, some parts of the country,” Glass said. “To have a Nazi bookstore in a Jewish community in 1977 was one thing, but it’s been forgotten because it was almost a half a century ago. Now we have a whole new demographic living on the west side of San Francisco that probably have never heard this story – a story that should be told.”

Dave Glass provided historical materials and interviews to aid this story. Find more information about the Jewish Family and Children’s Center’s Holocaust Center at holocaustcenter.jfcs.org. The Holocaust Memorial is at 34th Avenue and El Camino Del Mar, across from the Legion of Honor Museum.