Jewish Congress Protests Taking Religious Census in Public Schools

The American Jewish Congress here has submitted a complaint to the New Jersey State Commissioner of Education protesting the conducting of a religious census in the public schools. The Commissioner was asked to prohibit this practice on the grounds that the use of schools for a religious enumeration violates constitutional provisions separating state and church.

“The religious census is an unproper lending of school facilities for religious purposes,” the protest said. “The mandate of neutrality forbids moral and psychological assistance as well as monetary assistance. The conscious and intended stamp of approval placed upon the religious census by its integration into the regular operation of the school system constitutes and aid to religion far more valuable than any financial allocation.”

The AJC asserted that the introduction of religious distinctions into the public school classroom through a religious census must have deep adverse effects. “What could be more natural and inevitable but that schoolchildren upon returning with their cards properly filled out should compare their answers, and, perhaps, for the first time, should come to think of each other not merely as classmates, but as Protestants, Jews or Catholics,” the Congress stressed.