The only public beach with separate sections for men and women for religious reasons in the New York metropolitan area and the second in the United States has been approved by the Long Beach City Council at the request of an Orthodox rabbi and will begin functioning in May when the bathing season starts.
Rabbi Lazar Kahanow, spiritual leader of the Young Israel of Long Beach, the principal Orthodox synagogue in the area, said he had asked for such an arrangement when many Jewish residents refused to use the beaches because of mixed bathing by scantily clad men and women. He noted that such co-mingling contravened Jewish tradition.
Kahanow told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that 30,000 of Long Beach’s 35,000 residents are Jews. He said four of the five members of the City Council, two of whom are Jews, voted for the special beaches on a section of the three-and-a-half miles of oceanfront.
MODE OF SEPARATION
Kahanow said “a few hundred feet” of the oceanfront is being set aside for the two special beaches, which will be marked. Plans call for creation of sand dunes to separate the two beaches and that, if this method does not work, a wall will be erected. He said the Long Beach Orthodox Jewish community would cover any costs involved.
City Manager Laurence Farbstein said the City Council had agreed to Kahanow’s proposal because “there are groups” of Long Beach residents who are “de facto disenfranchised” from using the beaches for religious reasons, including Catholic residents.
Kahanow said he doubted that policing would be necessary. He said it was expected the signs designating the separate beaches would be heeded and that if any bather missed them and headed for the wrong section, the lifeguard could warn such a bather. Farbstein said the arrangement was informal rather than by ordinance to avoid any possible lawsuit on its constitutionality.
Kahanow said the first such separated beaches arrangement was established in Boston 40 years ago by the late Richard Cardinal Cushing. He added that Boston rabbis, including Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the world’s leading Orthodox scholars, had endorsed the Boston arrangement.
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