Meed a
change
of scene?
Jews Split Over
Kiryas Joel Case
Orthodox say court ruling goes too far in quest to
keep government religion-neutral.
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onday's Supreme Court
ruling in the Kiryas Joel
case — which affirmed
a New York appeals
court decision overturning the es-
tablishment of a separate pub-
lic school district to serve a
chasidic community in a village
north of New York City — un-
derscored divisions within the
Jewish community over church-
state issues.
Advocates of strict church-
state separation hailed the deci-
sion as a major step back from a
string of court decisions that
seemed to suggest a dismantling
of existing church-state law.
"We recognize that there are
unresolved questions about the
educational needs of disabled
children," said Jerome Chanes,
director of national affairs for the
National Jewish Community Re-
lations Advisory Council. "But
this was not a peripheral viola-
tion of church-state separation.
It was a core violation that jeop-
ardizes the principle that the
state needs to be neutral with re-
spect to religion."
However, Orthodox groups re-
acted with dismay, insisting that
the 6-3 vote was a blow against
"reasonable government accom-
modations" to the needs of reli-
gious groups. The Union of
Orthodox Jewish Congregations
of America, in a statement, ar-
gued that the decision reinforces
"a wooden interpretation of the
separation clause" that unfairly
excludes religious groups from
government benefits based on
non-religious needs.
David Zwiebel, director of gov-
ernment relations and general
counsel for Agudath Israel of
America, said the decision could
have a chilling effect on other gov-
ernment accommodations for spe-
cific religious needs, including
laws protecting Sabbath ob-
servers.
The Kiryas Joel school district
was created in 1989 by the New
York legislature to provide spe-
cial education services for the dis-
abled children of the Satmar
community living in the Orange
County village also called Kiryas
Joel.
That unusual arrangement
came after Satmar parents com-
plained that their children, who
dress in chasidic garb and speak
Yiddish, were taunted while at-
tending public schools in the
Monroe-Woodbury school district,
and after negotiations to provide
alternative state-funded services
broke down.
Writing for the majority, Jus-
tice David Souter argued that
while the Constitution allows the
government to accommodate re-
ligious needs by alleviating "spe-
cial burdens," the establishment
of a special school district at
Kiryas Joel "crosses the line from
permissible accommodation to
impermissible establishment."
In creating the special school
district, he wrote, the state had
implied a preference for a specif-
ic religion, thus violating the First
Amendment's "establishment
clause."
He pointed to several alterna-
tive methods of meeting the spe-
cial needs of disabled Satmar
"In making the
decision, the court
has helped protect
the religious
freedom of all
Americans, and
religiotis minorities
in particular."
Rabbi David Saperstein
children, including the creation
of a program by the Monroe-
Woodbury school district at a
"neutral site near one of the vil-
lage's parochial schools."
In a scathing dissent, Justice
Antonin Scalia argued that the
special school district was based
on the cultural distinctiveness of
the Satmars, not their religious
characteristics. The decision, he
wrote, "continues and takes to
new extremes a recent tenden-
cy in the opinions of this court to
turn the Establishment
Clause into a repealer of our
nation's tradition of religious tol-
eration."
He was joined in his dissent by
Justice Clarence Thomas and
Chief Justice William H. Rehn-
quist.
The decision was good news for
a long list of Jewish groups that
had regarded the special Satmar
school district as a flagrant at-
tempt to win political sanction for
sectarian goals.