The lawyer for a suburban Washington synagogue that had been desecrated argued before the United States Supreme Court Wednesday that while Jews can not be considered a race, the vandalism was a racist act.
Patricia Brannan, a Washington lawyer, said that the eight men who sprayed swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on the Shaare Tefila Congregation synagogue in Silver Spring, Md., on Nov. 1, 1982, acted because they considered Jews to be non-whites.
However Deborah Garren, a Baltimore lawyer representing one of the vandals, claimed that while the act was one of religious discrimination it was not racist as defined by federal civil rights laws adopted in 1866.
Shaare Tefila, a Conservative congregation, was defaced with swastikas and other Nazi symbols and such slogans as “Death to the Jude.”
Eight persons were later arrested for the vandalism and two of them were convicted of damaging the synagogue. The synagogue filed a suit in federal court against all eight charging that the congregation’s civil rights had been violated.
SUIT SEEKS DAMAGES
The suit seeks $3,000 to cover the cost of repainting the synagogue’s walls with any other money awarded going to the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission. The synagogue is in Montgomery County, which borders Washington.
However, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., rejected the suit in a 2-1 decision which said Jews could not use the civil rights law for protection, as they were not a separate non-white race.
At the same time, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that Majid Ghaidan Al-Khazraji, and Iraqi-born professor, could sue under the 1866 acts over his charge that St. Francis College in Pennsylvania denied him tenure because he was an Arab. His case was also heard before the Supreme Court Wednesday.
Brannan, the synagogue’s lawyer, argued Wednesday that the intent of the law was to bar racist acts. While she stressed that she did not want the Supreme Court or any other court to rule on whether Jews were a race, she said that the ideology of the Nazis in Germany and neo-Nazis and groups like the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. is that Jews were non-whites.
She said this was the belief of the vandals and that their intent was racist.
Brannan is a member of the law firm of Hogan Hartson, which is co-counsel in the suit with the Jewish Advocacy Center, a non-profit group founded to bring legal action against those committing anti-Semitic acts.
SUIT SENDS MESSAGE
Kenneth Lipson, a co-founder of the Jewish Advocacy Center, told reporters after the hearing, that the purpose of the suit was to send a “clear message that anti-Semitic violence would not be tolerated.”
Rabbi Martin Halpern, the congregation’s religious leader, stressed that “our generation has been traumatized by the Holocaust, which has taught us that silence is not the answer to bigotry … When one human being or one institution suffers debasement, then we debase all of the human family.”
Brannan told reporters that she was particularly pleased that the congregation’s appeal to the Supreme Court had been joined by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors and the American Gathering and Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
A decision is not expected for several months.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
