Powerful Catholic groups intensified their opposition this week-end to the passage of legislation permitting Jews and other Sabbath observers who keep their businesses closed on Saturday for religious reasons, to open them on Sunday. This move followed a vote last week in the New York City Council requesting the state Legislature to grant the Council permission to adopt such legislation.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for a Protestant group expressed support of the “principle involved” in the liberalized legislation, but opposed further “commercialization” of Sunday. Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, hailed the Council’s action which marked an important step forward in the 30-year campaign to liberalize New York City’s Sunday blue law.
The Coordinating Committee of Catholic Lay Organizations of the Archdiocese of New York, representing 62 lay organizations with a membership of 200,000, issued a statement charging that adoption of a liberalizing bill “would mean the end of Sunday observance as we know it now.” The statement insisted that the proposed measure would not be a “fair Sabbath law, but a no Sabbath law.”
The Protestant spokesman, the Rev. Dr. Paul Rishell, head of the Department of Christian Social Relations of the Protestant Council of New York, asserted that most Protestants would be opposed to legislation permitting more business on Sunday. He questioned whether such a measure could be policed without abuse.
Rabbi Solomon J. Sharfman, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox group, insisted that the bill would end the “discriminatory regulation of enforcing the religious practices of one group upon the adherents of another.” It would, he continued, “finally give all citizens of the city the right to keep the Sabbath of their religious conviction without being penalized by forcible closing of their business on Sunday as well.”
In Albany the Legislature is expected to vote before it adjourns at the end of the month on a bill on the liberalization of the Sunday law introduced by Assemblyman Sidney Asch. Since the matter pertains to New York City alone, under the home rule provisions of its charter, it must be passed by an affirmative two-thirds vote in both legislative houses.
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.
