Jewish Groups Oppose Bill to Deprive Federal Courts of Hearing Challenges to Public School Prayers

Spokesmen for national Jewish organizations, testifying before Congressional subcommittees, expressed strong opposition today to legislation that would bar federal courts from hearing legal challenges to organized prayer in public schools.

Alvin Gray of Cleveland, co-chairman of the American Jewish Congress governing council, testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing on S. 450. Samuel Rabinove, legal director of the American Jewish Committee, testified at hearings of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties and the Administration of Justice.

Gray testified as a spokesman for the American Jewish Congress as one of the affiliated organizations of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), which also represents 108 local Jewish Community Councils. Both the AJCongress and the AJCommittee are member agencies of the NJCRAC.

Gray testified that “we believe firmly that any impairment of the authority of the courts to redress constitutional violations would imperil our system of law and impede progress toward unity and common “purpose in our society.” The amendment would deprive federal courts of jurisdiction in determining challenges to state and local laws calling for voluntary prayer in the public schools.

Gray said the amendment to S. 450 “manifests a hostility to the principle of church-state separation ostensibly under the guise of protecting religious freedom. All of the organizations joining in this testimony believe that any weakening of the barriers between church and state would cause a serious deprivation of religious liberty and should therefore be defeated.” He added that, “as organizations dedicated to the preservation of constitutional rights, we have frequently found that those rights can be protected only by the federal judiciary.”

CITE DANGEROUS PRECEDENT

Gray declared that if the amendment becomes law, it would establish “the dangerous precedent of disabling the federal courts from protecting constitutional rights when those rights become politically unpopular” and “in effect, overrule the salutary principle of judicial supremacy in matters of constitutional interpretation.”

Declaring that “we are opposed only to government-sponsored prayer,” Gray testified that “our opposition to prayer in the public schools extends not only to Christian prayers but to Jewish and so called non-denominational ones as well.”

Rabinove testified that the amendment was “legally unsound and, from a religious point of view, profoundly misguided.” He said public schools should “maintain complete neutrality in the realm of religion and should never undermine the faith of any child or question the absence of religious belief in any child. “He said the public school setting, “including peer and teacher pressure on the individual student,” was such that “organized prayer in public schools can never be truly voluntary.”

Citing Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963, which held unconstitutional the recital of non-denominational sure sponsored prayers or readings from the Bible in public schools, Rabinove argued that “no prayer can ever be truly non-denominational. In attempting to incorporate the tenets of several major religions, the meaning of prayer can only be diluted.” He added “it is simply not the business of our government to compose or to sponsor prayers for American children to recite” in public schools.

Rabinove testified that the proposed legislation “is of dubious constitutionality and would create a dangerous and unprecedented incursion into the jurisdiction of the federal courts” and would “undermine the cherished principle of separation of powers.”

He also contended, as did Gray, that the amendment was “perilous” because it would “open the door to future legislation to divest the federal courts of jurisdiction over other matters involving fundamental liberties.” If the amendment was adopted, he testified, “nothing in the Bill of Rights would ever be truly secure again.”