Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times
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May 7, 1997, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk 

LENGTH: 910 words

HEADLINE: Court Rules Against Hasidic School Plan

BYLINE:  By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA 

DATELINE: ALBANY, May 6

BODY:
The eight-year effort by the state's elected leaders to accommodate a small Catskills community of religious Jews by giving them their own school district for handicapped children foundered again today as the state's highest court ruled it unconstitutional for a second time.

But state officials would not declare the struggle over, leaving open the possibility that they would try again to create a district for the Orange County village of Kiryas Joel, made up almost entirely of adherents of the Satmar Hasidic sect.

Over the years, politicians have gone to unusual lengths to accommodate Kiryas Joel, a village of 12,000 in the town of Monroe settled by Satmar Hasidim from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. While the sect is small in numbers, its leaders have become practiced at turning the wheels of government. It tends to vote heavily and as a bloc.

In the ruling today, the Court of Appeals unanimously struck down the second attempt by the Legislature (under then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo) to create a district for Kiryas Joel.

The court said that a 1994 law intended to address the village's desire for a district to educate its disabled children violated one of the core principles of the Constitution, the division between government and religion. The court threw out a previous law on the same basis four years ago, in a decision later upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, writing for the Court of Appeals, said the 1994 law "operates not as a generally applicable, religion-neutral law, but has the same non-neutral effect of singling out Kiryas Joel for special treatment that caused this court and the Supreme Court to strike down" the previous law.

It was not clear whether the community would appeal the decision, but Dr. Steven Benardo, Superintendent of the Kiryas Joel district, vowed, "This community will not give up on its children."

The state's elected leaders would not say whether they intended to appeal again to the United States Supreme Court or to try a third time to draft a law that would pass constitutional muster, nor would they call the issue dead.

"I think in some way we've got to come up with a way to take care of the children that are affected by it," said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat. "I hope that we can reasonably come up with a system that makes everybody happy." The Republican majority leader in the state Senate, Joseph L. Bruno, made much the same point.

Gov. George E. Pataki, and Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco, both Republicans, said they would have to study the decision before deciding how to proceed.

Louis Grumet, executive director of the State School Boards Association, the lead plaintiff in the case, hailed the decision as a victory for church-state separation.

"We don't use government funds to build ghetto walls around religious groups, even if they ask for it themselves," he said. "A wall that can be built at the request of those inside can be built at the request of those outside."

He interpreted the strong language and unanimity of the court's decision as a signal of the court's displeasure that the matter had not been put to rest.

Kiryas Joel -- named for the chief rabbi of the Satmars, Joel Teitelbaum, who died in 1979 -- was founded two decades ago to allow the sect to live apart from outside influences, with control of its local government. Most of its children attend private religious schools, but those schools cannot accommodate the community's disabled children.

For a time, in the 1980's, the village sent its handicapped children to the surrounding Monroe-Woodbury Central School District, but parents and community leaders described that alien world as being too taxing on the students. The district refused to accommodate the Satmars' demand for a separate school in Kiryas Joel, a refusal the Court of Appeals upheld in 1988.

Village leaders petitioned the Legislature and Mr. Cuomo to create a Kiryas Joel district, and in 1989, they complied.

In 1993, the Court of Appeals ruled, in a 4-to-2 decision, that the law creating the district violated the Constitution's First Amendment provision that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," a prohibition that has long been accepted as applying to the states as well. The Supreme Court agreed a year later, in a 6-to-3 vote.

Four days after the Supreme Court ruling, Mr. Cuomo introduced, and the Legislature passed, a more broadly worded law, allowing communities meeting certain criteria of incorporation, population, geography and tax base to establish their own districts.

Proponents acknowledged that the law, known as Chapter 241, was designed specifically for Kiryas Joel, but they said it had wider application and could be used by a few dozen villages around the state. But that argument fell apart in court.

"Plaintiffs submitted affidavits from two experts demonstrating that Kiryas Joel is the lone municipality, out of 1,546 municipalities statewide, currently eligible to create its own school district," Judge Ciparick wrote. "Defendants offered no evidence to demonstrate that any other municipality is eligible at this time."

"Notwithstanding its purported facial neutrality," she wrote, "we interpret Chapter 241 as having the non-neutral effect of allowing the religious community of Kiryas Joel, but no other group at this time and probably ever, to create its own school district."


GRAPHIC: Map of New York showing location of Kiryas Joel: The Hasidic village Kiryas Joel in the Catskills is seeking its own school district.

LOAD-DATE: May 7, 1997