I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
TO MALKA SILBERSTEIN, whose family had been Satmar for at least four generations, the laws of her faith were not a burden at all but a wonderful, magical blessing, a code of honor that she proudly observed.
True, the sect strictly adhered to the six-hundred-plus commandments of Jewish observance and obediently followed laws governing everything from diet to sexuality to keeping the Sabbath. True, that strict adherence separated the Satmar from the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism. True, the group’s anti-Zionist stance further distanced them from the other descendants of Abraham. But it was exactly that uniqueness, that collective spirit, that allowed the Satmar, nearly destroyed by the Holocaust, not only to survive but to thrive and to rebuild their community on another continent. Malka’s own parents were Holocaust survivors.
In her faith, Malka found a joy and unity with God that she loved to share with her family and her community, reveling in the opportunity to devote her life to raising Hasidic children in concert with rules and traditions laid down thousands of years before and interpreted by the great Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum.
Malka Silberstein, who grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the same neighborhood and on the same block where her parents had lived after they fled Europe in the wake of World War II, had a dozen children, the last one born in 1982 when she was in her early thirties. When the grand rebbe first moved to Kiryas Joel, she remembers envying the early colonists who moved up there with him. But Malka and her husband weren’t quite ready to uproot their family and venture outside the Williamsburg cocoon that constituted their entire universe; neither of them had ever spent more than a weekend away from their Brooklyn neighborhood. Although in the 1970s and ’80s New York City was growing increasingly dangerous and seemed poorly managed, and popular American culture was becoming much more difficult to suppress, the prospect of leaving their tiny, cramped, urban cosmos was daunting.
Her daughter Sheindle made the difference.
The last of the Silbersteins’ children, Sheindle has Down syndrome, a condition not that unusual among the Satmar, who, because they regularly marry within the sect and also regularly bear children well into their forties, experience a high rate of developmental disabilities—including not only Down syndrome but also deafness. The Satmar had made little progress in integrating their disabled members into society. When one’s place in the community is all important and that place depends on demonstrations of piety, and piety depends on practicing and understanding a complex and ancient tradition, there’s not much of a framework for dealing with the needs of those who suffer disabling conditions.
Even so, Malka desperately wanted Sheindle to be part of their community—the only community her family knew, the only community they understood. At first, she simply longed to bring Sheindle with her to weddings, but fearing the gossip often typical of such an extraordinarily tight-knit community, she was reluctant to do so on her own. So she gathered a group of other mothers of children with disabilities who agreed to bring their kids to important events and parties.
Although this was real progress, it wasn’t enough to overcome the obstacles facing Sheindle—the biggest of which was school. The Satmar in Williamsburg, eager to ensure that outside cultural elements not spoil the purity of the Hasidic experience, sent their boys to receive an education that consisted almost entirely of Torah study in private yeshivas and the girls to special private academies to learn the things necessary for their lives as mothers and homemakers in the community. But children with severe disabilities might be unable to grasp the Torah or master the art of being a good Hasidic woman.
Simultaneously, beginning in the mid-1970s, state and federal education officials were enforcing new federally mandated requirements for special education, requiring that children like Sheindle receive appropriate schooling at substantial public expense. New York had enacted its legislation in 1976, and I was part of the team that had drafted the legislation as a representative of then secretary of state Mario Cuomo. In late 1977 I was offered the position of “assistant commissioner of education for the education of children with handicapping conditions.” I was the third person to hold the position, and my mandate was to enforce the new legislation. In accordance with the new laws, we curtailed funding for seventy-five of the three hundred private schools serving severely disabled children with tax dollars, and moved five thousand children with disabilities from the public schools to less restrictive learning environments. We also engaged in a huge crack-down on the New York City school system to ensure adequate services for children with special needs.
Malka was encouraged but also troubled—eager for anything that would promote the growth and development of Sheindle and others like her, yet very mindful that in a public school, these children would surely be exposed to the perceived corrupting influences of American society. They would discover the existence of rock stars, junk food, animated superheroes, and all the trappings of popular culture. Nevertheless, the Silbersteins and other parents reluctantly agreed to give it a try, and with considerable trepidation they sent their special needs children to New York City public schools to receive the education they needed and deserved, while struggling to keep the outside influences at bay.
But it was unworkable, as Sheindle found it impossible to live in two diametrically opposed cultural worlds. What was exciting and interesting at school was taboo at home; what was expected and normal at home was foreign and unintelligible to the non-Satmar children at school. Sheindle and other Satmar children with disabilities were now overwhelmed by the prospect of adjusting to two quite different ethoses.
Then, in the mid-1980s, Malka learned that Kiryas Joel was planning to open a private school that would serve the disabled children of the village. It seemed like the perfect solution to her problems. At a private Satmar school, Sheindle would receive the government-mandated education without being tainted or taunted by American culture.
The Silbersteins decided to move. They bought a home in the newly developed village of Kiryas Joel. It seemed a godsend. Vistas of the Catskills replaced the Brooklyn cityscape outside their kitchen window. Their children went off each and every morning to the yeshivas or girls’ institutes, and the Silbersteins were at last able to rest easy. In all probability, their children would not have to see or be seen by a single non-Satmar child in their new community. They would never again pick up a USA Today they found on a bus, or come home with the words of a crass popular song spewing from their innocent lips. Questions that should not be asked or answered would not be asked or answered. And Sheindle would be safe and secure, embraced with the opportunity to become all that God would enable her to become.
But it never came to be.
The leaders of Kiryas Joel came to the realization that special education is extraordinarily expensive, far too costly for this tiny village to fund and support. Besides, the residents of the village were already paying school taxes to the local Monroe-Woodbury Central School District, and both state and federal law made abundantly clear that children, even those enrolled in private schools, are entitled to special education services. It was the district’s responsibility and obligation to provide for these children.
Monroe-Woodbury recognized its obligation, and for a short while sent its teachers to Kiryas Joel to provide special education services at an annex to Bais Rochel (“House of Rachel”), the girls’ school in the village, named after a prominent biblical figure. That worked well enough, but only for about a year until 1985, when the US Supreme Court held in Aguilar v. Felton* and School District of the City of Grand Rapids v. Ball† that sending public school teachers into private schools violated the Constitution.
That left the Monroe-Woodbury school board in a bit of a bind. The school district had to raise taxes every year to make ends meet, and its constituents were growing angry and less inclined to divert funds they thought should be spent on their own children to provide special accommodations for a small, aloof minority group that didn’t want anything to do with them anyhow. In the minds of many, the leaders of Kiryas Joel pushed their luck a little too far when they insisted not only that the public school district educate their special needs children in private schools but that they do so in Yiddish.
On the other hand, Kiryas Joel—or “KJ,” as it was becoming known to outsiders—was something of a cash cow and powder keg all in one. It provided millions of dollars in tax revenue to Monroe-Woodbury while costing the district relatively little. The school board did provide busing for the five thousand Satmar children, but the vast majority of them were educated by the United Talmudic Academy and Bais Rochel, both of which operated schools at several sites throughout the village. And, critically, the village was growing to the point where the leaders could muster a voting bloc that just might shoot down any budget presented and oust the members of the school board. That had happened before in communities with large Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox populations, including the town of East Ramapo in nearby Rockland County, and it was apparent that the leaders of KJ were quite willing to exert their voting bloc power.
The inevitable standoff had nearly come to a head the year before, when Abe Wieder confronted the school board, introducing himself as mayor of the village of Kiryas Joel, pointedly reminding the board members of the district’s legal responsibility to provide transportation for the Satmar children—and then asserting that the KJ children could not be driven by bus drivers of the opposite sex. Wieder insisted that the boys not be subjected to or exposed to women operating such vehicles.
“None of our children can ride in a bus driven by a woman,” Wieder told the school board. “Women do not drive in our community. At all. We do not want our children to think it is all right or even possible for women to drive machines like that.”
The board initially considered compromise.
“Well … could we maybe put a curtain around the bus drivers so they wouldn’t be seen?” one of the school board members asked.
Abe rejected the idea out of hand, along with every other suggestion, and the community was infuriated. The notion that a sect whose children were getting free busing to private schools could dictate the gender of publicly employed bus drivers was beyond the pale. But the school board was able to duck the issue: the contract with the bus drivers’ union allowed the drivers to choose their routes by seniority; ironically, all of the senior bus drivers were female, and they all had chosen KJ routes. “You’ll have to take it up with the union.”
And Wieder did just that, challenging the union all the way to New York’s highest court—and losing resoundingly every step of the way. Ultimately, the male students would begin walking to school rather than riding in buses driven by women.
The 1985 US Supreme Court decisions rekindled the tensions, especially after the school board refused to accommodate the Satmar children with special needs anywhere other than in the local public school. Abe, whose daughter was deaf and in need of special services, went back to court, attempting to force the district to educate KJ’s disabled children at a segregated facility in the village. Monroe-Woodbury could have done that. In 1988 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that while the district did not have to provide the accommodations Abe demanded, it could do so if it wished. But the school board was fed up with Abraham Wieder and, by this point, was spoiling for a fight that it desperately hoped would be over before the Satmar had enough votes to wrest control of the entire school district.*
Meanwhile, Malka Silberstein was torn. She loved the isolation of Kiryas Joel and the cultural sanctuary it provided for her family. But they had moved to KJ for Sheindle, and it appeared that the only way the girl would receive the education and services she would need to be a content and contributing member of her community was to enroll in the local public school. Reluctantly, the Silbersteins and the parents of a dozen other special needs children sent them to Monroe-Woodbury.
The result was disastrous.
Not only were the children exposed to cultural shock, they were teased, goaded, ridiculed, and humiliated. Some of the staff, through indifference, resentment, or almost unimaginable ignorance, were incredibly insensitive. There was a feeling that the community was taking out its frustration with the Satmar on the children it was meant to be educating.
“They would go out to lunch at McDonald’s, and our children are not supposed to eat at McDonald’s,” Malka told the San Francisco Chronicle. “My daughter’s retarded. How can I explain to her that eating kosher is very important to us?”
One day in the fall of 1989, Malka was at the school for a meeting with school administrators when she made an unannounced visit to Sheindle’s classroom. There she saw the students rehearsing for a Christmas pageant, and all their attention was focused on one child decked out in antlers and a big red nose while the other kids pointed and laughed, mockingly singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” It was Sheindle.
And it was the last straw.
“My child was learning about pagan and Christian holidays,” Malka complained. “My child could not be part of our family, she could not be part of our community, she was not here and not there.”
Within days of Malka Silberstein’s witnessing her daughter subjected to this humiliation, the rage of the Satmar had spread to much of the Hasidic and Orthodox community in New York State. The outcry had been heard by the governor and senators, by congressmen and mayors. And the town of Monroe, a town that had survived about eight wars, four monarchs, and forty presidents, was facing demographic and budgetary Armageddon.
Naturally, the Silbersteins first turned to Abe Wieder with their problems. As horrified as Wieder was to learn of the Rudolph incident, he seemingly grasped its political utility. Wieder was the go-to guy for dealing with the multitude of governmental officials within the state and, indeed, at the federal level. For almost ten years he had been one of the leading men in Kiryas Joel. Wieder had developed a business with a nationwide reputation and had important government connections. He learned from the battles over zoning issues and pushed for the creation of the village as a solution to those problems. He spent the better part of four years in a losing fight with the Monroe school district, first over busing and then the location of special education services, battles in which he had relied entirely on the US legal system. Wieder had come to believe that all of the issues faced by KJ—from busing, to care for the disabled population, to zoning disputes—came down to one thing: freedom of religion. It seemed, perhaps because the religious life and culture of the Satmar are inseparable, that he could not easily distinguish between the right to freedom of religion and the more theoretical concept of separation of church and state. Nor did he try.
Wieder viewed every attempt to thwart the growth of Kiryas Joel and the public funding of its services as either a denial of the right to freedom of religion or an expression of anti-Semitic bias. When the town said that a single-family home could not include second cousins or that city-style housing could not be built under rural zoning laws, Wieder saw anti-Semitism. When the town refused to provide only male drivers on buses carrying male students, he saw a denial of freedom of religion. When the school district refused to teach KJ’s disabled children at a site in KJ, he saw both. Look at the Saint Nicholases in the schools! Look at the Christmas stories they read in grade school. If the Christian children could run around shoving store-bought Saint Valentine’s Day cards into heart-decorated boxes on their classmates’ desks, how dare anyone question his right to a simple thing like male bus drivers! There was little question in his mind about what constituted religious discrimination.
It’s easy to deride the inability of the Satmar to see what has long been obvious to most Americans (including American judges): Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus, and Saint Valentine are expressions of secular American culture, their religious or semireligious roots all but obliterated by department store razzle-dazzle. But the propriety of Christian symbols or the appearance of the word “God” in or on various public instruments is a two-sided coin. It forces us to acknowledge that there is no neutral cultural ground: religious sentiment is so integral to Western culture that expressions, symbols, and images of religion are inescapable. To those who care, no matter what their religious beliefs happen to be, this is serious stuff. On the flip side, it’s frivolous, because not only can nothing be done about it but the offense caused by religious references in the Pledge of Allegiance, holiday decorations, and the presence of “God” on money is perceived by many to be so insignificant (and, from a legal perspective, “ceremonial” rather than spiritual) that only a publicity hound or a zealot would haul the government into court over such issues. Yet the court system has spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how many angels are dancing on the heads of these pins.
Wieder was staunchly protective of his community—especially its children, especially after the reindeer incident. But the courts had disappointed him in the past, and Wieder didn’t want to waste his time with another lawsuit. Rather, on the advice of other leading Satmar, he turned to the politicians who had come through for him in the past. His assistant dialed, in quick succession, Congressman Ben Gilman; local state senator Art Gray (the first Democrat elected in the area since the Civil War, who slipped into office when his predecessor was thrown in jail for corruption); George Pataki, Kiryas Joel’s assemblyman in Albany; George Shebitz, Abe’s politically connected lawyer; and Roberta Murphy, the president of the Monroe-Woodbury school board. A meeting was scheduled for the following day at Roberta Murphy’s home.
Everyone knew that Roberta was a potent force. Since the Monroe-Woodbury school board was one of the more active boards in the state, she was well known among education professionals throughout New York. Murphy’s reputation rested largely on her indifference to the distinguishing characteristics of the national parties and her obvious enthusiasm for brass-knuckled local politics, which had carried over from her formative years spent in Brooklyn. Roberta approached school board elections with a seriousness that major parties rarely gave to even congressional elections, fervently parsing the sub-sub-microtrends of suburban Orange County by households.
Once everyone had assembled on the back deck of Murphy’s cedar-sided house, lawyer George Shebitz, speaking for Wieder, explained that Kiryas Joel wanted an immediate political solution to settle all current and future disputes within the Monroe-Woodbury school district over school budgets, special education, and busing. Shebitz reminded everyone how such disputes had turned his own school district, East Ramapo, into a virtual war zone between the Orthodox community and the board of education. The Monroe-Woodbury superintendent, Daniel D. Alexander, had previously been an assistant superintendent in East Ramapo, and was quite familiar with the threats that Shebitz was subtly articulating.
Alexander had a solid career in educational administration and was well known and highly regarded statewide, deemed a growing force by the state education officials. When he was at East Ramapo, ultra-Orthodox Jews had moved into the community in large numbers and begun demanding more and more funding for their children, who were mainly educated in yeshivas. When the school district, which was one of the largest and most successful in the state, resisted, the Hasids joined with the ultra-Orthodox to defeat a series of school district budget votes. They also began running candidates for the East Ramapo school board and eventually got the majority, which shifted resources to the private yeshivas. The East Ramapo school district morphed from a coherent, thriving school district to a cauldron of religious controversies.
Alexander had written his doctoral dissertation on the Ramapo situation and was determined to prevent history from repeating itself in Monroe-Woodbury.
Murphy doubted that the Monroe community was willing to give an inch on any of Wieder’s concerns, despite the threat KJ voters posed to the school budget. The congressman and the state legislators debated a variety of possible options, from Albany or Washington, to little effect. There was some discussion of asking the state education department to intervene, using its significant power to enforce education laws and regulations (when I was the assistant commissioner in the department, we had actively intervened to secure student services that a district refused to provide). But no one thought the administrative route would work. The group, it seemed, had no answers.
And then, George Pataki had a brainstorm.
When he was the mayor of Peekskill, a small city in Westchester County, Pataki had been frustrated by the fact that the school district boundaries didn’t match the political district lines in the area. Because different parts of the city belonged to different school districts, Pataki had a difficult time addressing the interests and complaints of constituents—to say nothing of ensuring consistent standards throughout the city. He helped introduce several measures designed to change the school district borders so that all Peekskill schools would be within one district contained within the city’s borders. Recalling this earlier solution to a similar problem, Pataki suggested that the Satmar ask Albany to draw a new school district coterminous with the village of Kiryas Joel. He didn’t point out that no other village in the state had responsibility for educational services. Indeed, it was a responsibility not afforded to any county, town, or city, either—except for the school districts in the state’s largest five cities (New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers). The provision of education had always been kept separate from the politically responsive municipal jurisdictions, precisely to preserve the independence of educational decision making.
At first Pataki’s idea was rejected outright, not only by Senator Gray, who thought it impractical, but also by Wieder, who was not keen on the idea of running a secular school district. Being forced to send special needs children to public schools was one thing, but being forced to conform to the state’s decidedly secular curriculum was something else entirely. Wieder was not at all sure the village could run a school district and abide by the voluminous rules of state education law while still remaining true to Jewish law.
But the discussion was all about political expediency. Neither the First Amendment to the US Constitution nor the so-called Blaine Amendment* to the New York State Constitution ever came up; seemingly nobody gave a thought to whether the plan would violate church-state prohibitions.
Also absent from the discussion was the unmistakable fiscal impact on the Monroe-Woodbury district. Excising the village from the surrounding district was bound to result in a loss of millions of dollars of revenue. Under the current system, thousands of nondisabled students were being privately educated in the village at little cost to the district. If the village left the school district, the Satmar would no longer be paying property taxes to the Monroe-Woodbury district, and the state and federal aid generated by their presence in the district would be lost.
Nor did the group consider the state master plan for school districts, which had been adopted by the New York State Board of Regents, with legislative approval. This plan called for consolidation of existing districts, not the creation of new ones. The idea was to improve administration, as well as to provide more comprehensive educational services. Indeed, no new districts had been formed in decades.
As the afternoon wore on and nobody came up with a better idea, Pataki’s plan became more and more appealing. By the end of the meeting, only Roberta Murphy remained uncommitted—because of reservations about whether the school board would back it. But Murphy had an ulterior motive. She knew that following the decennial redistricting coming up in 1990, a seat in the county legislature would be available, and she wanted it for herself. She was also certain that she could dominate the county as she dominated the school board.
When the meeting drew to a close and all but Wieder had left, a pact was made. Murphy reminded Wieder of all the power that comes with running a school district—the power to tax, the power to control staff and to some degree curricula, the power to control the bus and transportation funds for all of the students in the district, including those in private schools. And she mentioned to him that the county legislative lines would be redrawn after the upcoming redistricting, and wouldn’t it be nice if there was a new district that encompassed only Kiryas Joel and a few other homes—such as hers? Wieder was sold, and Murphy saw a bright political future in her tea leaves.*
All that remained was figuring out a way to make it happen in Albany.
And Pataki had a plan.
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* In Aguilar v. Felton, 473 US 402 (1985), the US Supreme Court ruled against, as a violation of the First Amendment, a New York City program in which public school teachers were sent to parochial schools to provide remedial education services to disadvantaged children. The court found that the program violated the constitutional bar on excessive church-state entanglement. Aguilar was later overruled in Agostini v. Felton, 521 US 203 (1997).
† In School District of the City of Grand Rapids v. Ball, 473 US 373 (1985), the Supreme Court held that state aid to religious schools violates the Establishment Clause when it has the primary effect of advancing religion.
* To this day, Kiryas Joel is viewed suspiciously by many of its neighboring residents in Orange County, who have long suspected that the community routinely games the system. For instance, in 2011 the New York Times reported that according to census figures, Kiryas Joel is the poorest municipality in the United States, where 70 percent of the residents claim to live below the poverty line and half the inhabitants receive food stamps. Yet they used their political clout to obtain $10 million for a “luxurious” postnatal maternal care facility where women can recuperate for two weeks after giving birth. To many critics, the members of the sect, through self-dealing and outright deception, avail themselves of numerous benefits at public expense. William Helmreich, a sociology professor at City College specializing in Judaic studies, told the Times, “I cannot say as a group that they are cheating the system, but I do think they have, no pun intended, an unorthodox way of getting financial support.” See Sam Roberts, “A Village with the Numbers, but Not the Image, of the Poorest Place,” New York Times, April 20, 2011.
* Many states, including New York, passed a “Blaine Amendment,” named after former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and unsuccessful 1884 presidential candidate James Blaine, during a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry. Blaine could not persuade Congress to pass his amendment barring the use of government funds at “sectarian” schools (although he came within four votes), but dozens of states carried his torch. The New York State Constitution, as ratified in 1894 and amended in 1938, reads, “Neither the state nor any subdivision thereof shall use its property or credit or any public money, or authorize or permit either to be used, directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance, other than for examination or inspection, of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination or in which any denominational tenet or doctrine is taught, but the legislature may provide for the transportation of children to and from any school or institution of learning.”
* Indeed, Murphy was eventually elected to the county legislature and rose to the chairmanship. She enjoyed the unbridled support of Kiryas Joel.