IT WAS THE first Sunday in November 1994, and I had the distinct impression that I had fallen down a rabbit hole to a world where nothing was real and nothing made sense.
There I was, an obscure, liberal Jewish lawyer from Upstate New York appearing on the most watched program on television to explain my lengthy and seemingly endless battle with an Orthodox Jewish sect and with a man who was to me a mentor, a friend, a brilliant constitutional scholar, and a liberal icon: Mario Matthew Cuomo, then governor of New York and darling of the national Democratic Party.
I would tell Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes how an extremely insular group of Hasidic Jews had bought up land in a rural area, populated it exclusively with members of their sect, founded a village composed of members of their religion, and then exerted extraordinary political pressure to persuade Cuomo and the New York State Legislature to create a publicly funded school district catering to the interests of their sect—marking the first time in American history that a governmental unit was established for a religious group.
I tried to explain why Governor Cuomo had signed legislation that he must have known was unconstitutional, and why both houses of the New York State Legislature were continuing to make an end run around the entire court system and the Constitution, even after the US Supreme Court had spoken. But several months after the Supreme Court issued what should have been the last word, the story was still unfolding and would continue to develop for many years. Before the last chapter was written, the dispute had weaved its way through seven trial courts, thrice visiting the New York Court of Appeals, the most esteemed state high court in the nation.
This is the full story.
It is a story of personalities, religion, culture, religious apartheid, government, politics, soul selling, and constitutional law, all centered on a small community of Satmar Hasidic Jews that chooses to be so far outside the American mainstream that it cannot assimilate. Yet this group was oddly blind to the fact that by inviting (actually insisting upon) government accommodation and financial support, it was undermining the very instrument that protects its traditions and customs from government interference: the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It is, to me, an object lesson on the critical importance of church-state separation with implications far beyond the village of Kiryas Joel* (pronounced KIR-yas Jo-EL), and a beaming illustration of the concerns Thomas Jefferson expressed two centuries earlier when he argued forcefully for a “wall” of separation between church and state. If the Satmar could obtain for themselves a public school district, why couldn’t a group of neo-Nazis or Islamic extremists do exactly the same thing: buy up a bunch of farmland, subdivide it to their members, and form an exclusive school—and then force the public to pay for it with no voice in how it is run?
The Satmar Hasidim has its roots in the city from which its name derived, Satu Mare (“St. Mary”), now in Romania. After World War II, members of the group followed a charismatic leader and Holocaust survivor, Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, to the United States and settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Their numbers grew geometrically over the decades, and they became one of the most powerful voting blocs in New York City. Since Brooklyn is the most populous Democratic county in the state, this made the Satmar one of the state’s most potent pressure groups, for the simple reason that they vote strictly as directed by the rebbe. There is no loyalty to any particular political party or politician, only to their spiritual leader. So the leader is in a position to promise—and deliver—virtually all of the votes in the community. Despite their relatively small numbers, by voting as a group the Satmar can, and do, determine the outcome of close elections. Their collective clout far exceeds their numbers.*
But the group is independent not only of the political parties but of the Jewish establishment as well. As fierce opponents of Zionism† who do not support the state of Israel, the Satmar are on the fringes of the Jewish community, a subculture and in some ways modern-day Pharisees.‡ Yet on select issues, when choosing to mobilize the collective power that comes from bloc voting, the small, insular group is a political wrecking ball. This can happen only to the extent that the Satmar can maintain their unique identity and their leaders can govern with authority unchallenged by outside influences and, therefore, deliver their votes.
In 1975 Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, increasingly doubtful of his ability to keep American culture at bay in New York City, suggested the sect expand into an isolated community in Upstate New York, where their children would not be distracted by such cultural pollutants as sports and blue jeans. They began buying up land in the town of Monroe, Orange County, about an hour north of the city, and set out to build their community. Once they had the requisite five hundred inhabitants to legally form their own village, they did so. The village of Kiryas Joel (“Joel’s Village,” named for the grand rebbe) was established in 1977. The Brooklyn community remained—to this day, some fifty thousand Satmar live in the borough—but Kiryas Joel emerged as its large and growing cousin.
The village was governed largely as a theocracy. The children were educated in private yeshivas (religious schools), and civil disputes were resolved by Jewish law, not the laws of the State of New York. Residents generally spoke Yiddish, not English. Television, radio, and newspapers were eschewed if not banned outright. There was no baseball, no jeans, no sneakers, no birth control, and no private interaction between males and females prior to marriage, which was arranged and always within the sect. Religious leaders and religious tradition ruled virtually every hour of every day, and night, of the citizenry.
“We want isolation,” said Rabbi Elliott Kohn, who was dean of the village’s religious school for girls. “That’s why we have no TVs or radios. We don’t want to expose our kids to the entire society, to the entire world. We want to keep our tradition.”
Kohn continued. “The boys never, never meet any girl. They only have boy friends. They never meet girls or see all those things on television.”
A sign welcoming visitors to Kiryas Joel admonished visitors to “maintain gender separation in all public areas”—although apparently not in private areas. In order to expand and further populate and perpetuate their community, the Satmar procreated with gusto; many families had a dozen or so children, and the community’s population continues to double every decade.* With some degree of inbreeding inevitable—the group was so small and exclusionary that many married couples would unknowingly share recessive genes—a disproportionate share of the children had disabilities.
And therein is the root of the problem.
Children with disabilities require a wide variety of intensive services. Under state and federal law, children are entitled to special education services even if they are enrolled in private school. Special education, however, is very expensive, and the schools in Kiryas Joel were not able to provide the services to which the children were legally entitled. Understandably, and appropriately, the Satmar demanded that the local school district, Monroe-Woodbury, provide and fully fund those services. But they insisted that these services be provided only on terms they deemed consistent with their religious and cultural practices.
Initially, Monroe-Woodbury sent its public school teachers to provide the necessary special education services in an annex to one of the religious schools in the village. But a year later, in 1985, the US Supreme Court, in Aguilar v. Felton, struck down a New York City program in which public school teachers were sent to parochial schools to provide remedial education—which is what was occurring in Monroe-Woodbury. When Monroe-Woodbury stopped providing the services in accordance with the court decision, the parents of children with disabilities in Kiryas Joel reluctantly consented to having their offspring bused to the local public school.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
With their atypical clothing and habits, the children did not fit in, and neither the parents nor the Satmar community had any desire for them to do so; they did not want their children exposed to secular culture in any fashion. They would not permit their daughters to be taught by men or their sons by women. They objected to women driving school buses. They were unreasonably and unceasingly demanding. But Monroe-Woodbury also showed incredible insensitivity, on one occasion bringing the children to McDonald’s—hardly a glatt kosher* establishment—and on another casting a disabled child from Kiryas Joel as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a Christmas pageant. The parents withdrew their children from Monroe-Woodbury and refused to send them back.
And who could blame them?
“We look different—like a person from a different planet,” Rebbe Teitelbaum explained. “These children feel hurt if they go to a different school. They are broken children anyway.”
Against that backdrop, the village leaders successfully lobbied in 1989 for legislation to establish a public school district within Kiryas Joel, one that would serve only members of the Satmar Hasidic community who lived there. That legislation was enacted in secret, in the dead of night, and sent to Governor Cuomo for his approval.
At the time, I was executive director of the New York State School Boards Association. The association viewed the legislation as a violation of both the state and federal constitutions, and I personally viewed it as a threat to my own religious freedom. Who knows better than a Jew, especially one who grew up in West Virginia, the insidious danger of church-state entanglement?
I went to see Governor Cuomo. I had served as his special assistant for three years before he became governor, and I greatly admired his intellect and principles. I assumed he was largely unaware of the legislature’s mischief (not knowing until years later about the governor’s secret political role in the bill’s preliminary stages), and I urged him to veto the bill.
“Do you know how insensitive the public schools have been to these people’s religion?” Cuomo asked. “These people don’t ask for much, Luig,* they just want to send their children somewhere where they won’t be insulted. It’s our duty to protect these immigrants.”
I agreed, entirely. The Satmar children had been treated atrociously. They were entitled to special education services at taxpayer expense (the parents, after all, were taxpayers), and I absolutely agreed that the government had an obligation to help resolve the crisis. However, I thought that the bill was an illegitimate solution to a legitimate problem. I understood the political implications: if the governor vetoed the bill, he would offend a large and powerful voting bloc in New York City, his stronghold. But I argued that the bill was so flagrantly unconstitutional that the courts would strike it down. Since the governor had served as a law clerk to a judge of the state’s highest court, had only half-jokingly suggested he’d rather be chief judge than governor, and viewed himself (quite legitimately) as a legal intellect and constitutional scholar, I argued that he would look quite foolish. Cuomo shrugged me off with a wave of his hand and suggested no one would dare, or perhaps bother, to challenge him.
“Who’s going to sue?” Cuomo asked dismissively and, I thought, rather arrogantly as he escorted me out of his office.
“I will,” I responded. The governor smiled at me with a condescending grin that I had seen many times when I worked for him. He clearly didn’t view a former bureaucrat running a largely obscure state association of school boards as much of a threat.
Ten days later, Cuomo signed the bill over the objections of every one of his top advisers, telling them, too, “These people don’t ask for much.”*
The 60 Minutes story was filmed in the summer of 1994 but aired two nights before the November election, in which Governor Cuomo lost his office to then state senator George Pataki. As an assemblyman, Pataki was the initial sponsor of the original legislation to create the unconstitutional school district in 1989. The television segment showed Cuomo campaigning for reelection in the village of Kiryas Joel, where he promised to enact whatever legislation was necessary to keep the school district running and vowed to push and push and push until the courts finally gave in.
I was stunned and terribly disappointed in the governor’s disdain for the judicial process. He had always spoken so eloquently and, I thought, sincerely about the rule of law. But here he was, essentially saying that he’s all for the rule of law as long as he gets what he wants.
It was only the latest in a long series of disappointments. Since the legislation was first enacted half a decade earlier, I had slowly begun to understand how a seemingly simple squabble between a religious sect and the broader community escalated into a major national dispute that pitted the New York political leadership against the state court system, the US Supreme Court, and the media. I saw how national religious and educational organizations distorted the fact patterns in the litigation to fit their agenda of the moment, ignoring the enduring legacy of the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”). But mostly, I was devastated that people I admired would so cavalierly abandon the Constitution when it didn’t fit their needs.
What follows is the inside story of the decadelong battle that ensued, told from the perspective of someone who was there every step of the way and witnessed the extraordinary and terrifying power that a small religious conclave, which votes heavily and contributes heavily, can exert over our political system and our government.
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* Kiryas Joel maintains an extensive website detailing its history, current news, photographs, and other materials: www.kjvoice.com/faq.asp.
* Consider the congressional election of 2006. A six-term Republican congresswoman, Sue Kelly, who had won her seat with strong Satmar support, was up for reelection and vulnerable for a number of reasons. Because she had not, in the eyes of the Kiryas Joel leadership, provided the “pork” to which they felt entitled, the leaders threw not only their support but that of the entire village behind Kelly’s challenger. John Hall, a former rock star, was elected with 88 percent of the village vote, which accounts entirely for his narrow 4,760-vote victory.
† A photograph published in the Village Voice on March 4, 2015, accompanying an article titled “Ultra-Orthodox Jews Protest Netanyahu’s ‘Provocative Politics’ Outside Israeli Embassy,” shows Satmar Hasidic demonstrators, one of them holding a sign that reads, ZIONISM IS ANTITHETICAL TO JUDAISM. See http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2015/03/thousands_of_satmar_protestors_speak_out_against_netanyahu_speech.php.
‡ “Pharisee” comes from the Hebrew word perisha, which translates to “separated ones.”
* In his 2014 book The Pious Ones: The World of Hasidim and Their Battles with America (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), Joseph Berger tells the story of Yitta Schwartz, a resident of Kiryas Joel who died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three—leaving behind some two thousand descendants.
* Glatt kosher technically refers to meat from animals with defect-free or smooth lungs. Today, it generally means meat processed under a strict standard known as kashrut.
* Although I always addressed Cuomo by his title—and called him “Governor” even after he left office—he often referred to me as “Luig,” an Italianized version of my name. I got a kick out of it and had always considered it an expression of affection and friendship.
* Actually, they ask for, and receive, a great deal, with a huge percentage of the population, and the community itself, receiving government subsidies.