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Scarsdale Golf Club Denounced by Church for Anti-jewish Bias

January 16, 1961
See Original Daily Bulletin From This Date
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The Scarsdale Golf Club which barred the escort of a local debutante from attending a ball at the club on the grounds that he was born Jewish, continued to be under attack today by high church dignitaries. The Right Rev. Arthur C. Lichtenberger, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, lauded the action taken by the Rev. George F. Kempsell Jr. of the Church of the Less here, when the latter announced that he would not welcome to holy communion, parishioners who had acquiesced in the bias incident against the youth who had joined the Episcopal church.

Father Kempsell, who denounced anti-Semitism as a “sin against God,” was also supported in his attack on the perpetrators of the incident by the Right Rev. Horace W. B. Donegan, Episcopal Bishop of New York. Michael C. Hernstadt, 19, who was identified today as the youth who was barred from the club, said that he was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother but that he and his two brothers “were allowed to pick our own religions when we became of age. At 17 I became an Episcopalian,” he said.

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