Copyright 1994 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.  
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
March 28, 1994, MONDAY, FIVE STAR Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1A

LENGTH: 2600 words

HEADLINE: RELIGIOUS, 'PRIVATE' USE OF PUBLIC SCHOOL POSES PUZZLE

BYLINE: William H. Freivogel Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

DATELINE: KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y.

BODY:
Smiling kindergartners sing and bang on a drum. Teen-age girls, in long dresses, make treats for their preschool siblings. A young boy identifies hats and boots on an Apple computer screen, as the computer's voice cheers him on.

From every appearance, Sha'arei Hemlah is an ideal public school for handicapped children. Students are respectful, teachers devoted, the community committed. Drugs, alcohol, guns and teen sex - ghosts that haunt some public school corridors - are strangers here.

But it is a public school unlike any other. Everyone in this village belongs to one religion: the Satmar Hasidic sect, an ultra-orthodox Jewish group that frowns on radios, televisions, newspapers, fashions and sex roles.

Now, the simple brick schoolhouse is the setting for an important Supreme Court case that could redefine the legal wall of separation between church and state for the entire nation.

Can a government accommodate the religion and culture of a religious community by carving out a public school district especially for it, as New York did in 1989? The court will hear arguments on the issue Wednesday.

Opponents of the district say that the dissension that the school controversy has caused within the Kiryas Joel community is precisely the problem the Founding Fathers sought to avoid with the First Amendment.

Two blocks from the school, in Joseph Waldman's cluttered basement, the flickering images of an amateur video and the yellowing newspaper clippings on the wall paint a picture of this community far different from the idyllic school scene.

Waldman's is a tale of life in a small-town theocracy where leaders of a group of 500 dissidents have been ostracized by the community of 8,500.

After Waldman ran for the school board, his children were expelled from the private religious school, and windows were broken in his house. Later, windows were broken in the dissidents' private school, dissenters were stoned while visiting the congregation's cemetery, the names of dissidents were scrawled on village sidewalks, and a dissenting rabbi was denounced as an "informer."

A black-and-white amateur video record shows young men in the long black coats and tall hats of their sect stretching a banner across the town's shopping center, denouncing Rabbi Joseph Hirsch.

European Survivors

The Satmar Hasidic sect grew up after World War II among Holocaust survivors from Romania and Hungary. The sect's grand rabbi, Joel Teitelbaum, eventually brought his followers to Brooklyn.

Satmar families are large; 10 is not an uncommon number of children. In search of more living space, some families started a new settlement in 1974 on part of Averill Harriman's former estate northwest of New York City. Their three-story apartment buildings in the village became a distinctive island of urban-life in the middle of the countryside.

Most of the district's 3,000 children attend private religious schools. The public school at issue in the Supreme Court case only educates children with special needs, ranging from Down syndrome to minor learning problems.

In the 1980s special education students from Kiryas Joel went to the local public school district, Monroe-Woodbury.

Malka Silberstein said the public schools were traumatic for her daughter Sheindle. "It alienated her from her own family and her community," says Silberstein.

When Sheindle brought home Valentine's cards, Silberstein threw them in the trash. When Silberstein went to the winter play, she was appalled to discover that Sheindle was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

In addition, there were the nasty comments about the girls' dresses being in a 19th-century style and about the boys' long side-curls.

Legislature Acts

In 1989 the community persuaded the New York legislature to pass a law carving out a public school district for Kiryas Joel. Gov. Mario Cuomo signed the law.

The New York School Boards Association went to court to challenge the constitutionality of the district. The association won in the lower courts.

The construction of the school building in the summer of 1990 was a remarkable event, recalls Steven Benardo, the former public school official from the Bronx who became superintendent. It was like "an old-fashioned barn raising," he recalls. "Everybody turned out."

Benardo has been careful to keep religious symbols out of his schoolhouse. There were no menorahs at Hanukkah and no mezuzahs - depicting scrolls of biblical passages - in the doorways.

The entrance to the school has pictures of the presidents, with big drawings of Bill Clinton and George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Twin welcome signs, one in Yiddish and one English, stretch across the wall opposite the door.

Yiddish is spoken at home by most Satmar families; English is taught as a second language. Fourteen of the 18 teachers in the school speak Yiddish, although none lives in the community.

Unlike most public schools, this one does not try to be a melting pot. "This community believes that acculturation is annihilation," says Benardo.

"Our goal is not to make them Anglicized but to get them accepted by their parents. This is especially important for special-education children . . . I'm not going to do something here that the kids are going to be confused about."

Abraham Weider, the school board president, puts it this way: "I don't think the melting pot means that everyone should dissolve in one homogenous piece." He likens his community to Little Italy or Chinatown in New York City.

The key role that religion plays in the community shows up in the school.

Weider himself is a personification of church and state. In addition to serving as president of the school board, he is also deputy mayor and president of the temple.

Gender Roles

School officials acknowledge that the girls and boys have different roles in school, in deference to the sharp cultural differences between the sexes.

In the community, men and women do not shake hands. Women work at home and do not drive. In the school, only the girls bake bread on Fridays. High school boys and girls are also separated at lunch and in music classes. In addition, the state heeds the community's insistence on male-only bus drivers.

Silberstein, Sheindle's mother, states the sect's beliefs. "There are not the same problems as in the rest of the country because of the way we educate the children . . . We don't shake hands from the beginning, then we don't have any problems later."

The overlap of religion and public school affairs goes far beyond the separation of the sexes, says Waldman. He and other dissidents have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court case to show how entwined church and state are in the village.

Because the legal challenge to the Kiryas Joel district is a "facial" challenge, the way the district runs is largely irrelevant. The legal question is whether the act of setting up a public school district for an entirely religious community violates the First Amendment - not whether it has been run constitutionally since then.

Religious Domination

But the friend-of-the-court briefs from Waldman and other groups seek to underscore the dangers of lowering the wall of separation.

Although the village has maintained that anyone could move in, religious leaders have acknowledged in a court statement that anyone building there must make a $ 10,000 donation to the religious community. Waldman also produces a statement where new residents are asked to agree to abide by the religious leadership.

When Kiryas Joel elected its first school board in 1990, Grand Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, the leader of the world-wide Satmar congregation, and his son, Aaron Teitelbaum, the religious leader of Kiryas Joel, instructed residents to elect seven hand-picked residents. "I want to nominate seven people, and I want these people to be the people," the Grand Rabbi told his congregation shortly before the election.

Waldman, already on the outs with the religious leaders, ran as an eighth candidate in the school board race and lost. Two months later the Teitelbaums expelled Waldman's six children from the community's religious schools because their father was not teaching them to respect school authorities.

In a case separate from the current Supreme Court dispute, Waldman went to court to challenge the expulsion. Waldman's legal brief in the Supreme Court case describes the next day:

"Several hundred people, including the rabbi, demonstrated in front of his home, chanting, 'Death to Joseph Waldman' and broke windows in his home by throwing rocks."

Weider, the school board president, acknowledges that the demonstration but says there were no death chants and that the rocks came from a few young hotheads.

The state court ordered Waldman's children reinstated at the religious school, but the rabbi refused until a court found him in contempt. The children were temporarily reinstated and then expelled again, the following fall.

In explaining the objections of the dissidents to the public school, Waldman says he is speaking from his "Jewish side."

"The rabbis saw that they could control millions of dollars, and they gave away their religion. It is a disgrace for our belief in the Torah."

But Waldman acknowledges that - for himself - this religious objection is less important than a secular one.

"They have no democracy here."

Weider sees only the advantages of the school. "We have here 200 children who need help," says Weider. "For a theory should these children be sentenced to lives without an education, without hope?"

GRAPHIC: PHOTO; Photo By Times Herald Record - Joseph Waldman and his children, (from left) Fradel, 8, Pearl, 6, and Lazer, 10. The family is shown in a 1992 photo. Waldman opposed the leadership of the Satmar Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., ran for school board and lost.

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