Menorah-Lighting Rite Moved Outside City Hall

A Hasidic Jewish organization’s menorah-lighting ceremony to celebrate Hanukkah will be held Monday outside Los Angeles City Hall, rather than in the East Rotunda, the city attorney’s office decided Thursday after other Jewish groups opposed the rite as a violation of church-state separation principles.

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, director of West Coast Chabad, however, said he was pleased that the 4 p.m. ceremony will be moved to the 1st Street steps of City Hall. The opportunity to draw a bigger crowd “would serve our purpose even more than an indoor ceremony,” he said.

Nevertheless, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith remained unhappy that the lighting of the traditional candelabrum to mark the eight days of Hanukkah will be conducted on public property and that the traditional candelabrum will then be displayed inside City Hall during the holidays.

The city attorney’s office concluded Thursday that lighting the menorah outdoors would be acceptable--legally, at least--because the park outside City Hall is “a public forum,” where the group has free speech rights.

“To engage in that conduct in the rotunda, which is not a public forum, means the city would be putting its prestige behind a religion,” Deputy City Atty. Marcia Haber Kamine said. “We can’t do that.”

Notwithstanding U.S. Supreme Court decisions on cases in other states, Kamine said, the California Constitution is more restrictive. Under it, she said, “We cannot do anything that advances religion.” Under the U.S. Constitution, she said, the city is simply precluded from doing anything that discriminates against a religion.

Not in City Hall

“The display of the menorah in City Hall would be inappropriate, in our view,” Neil Sandberg, western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said. “We think it’s wonderful that Jews and Christians wish to celebrate the holidays and share them with others, but we have a long tradition of separation of church and state. . . . We admire Rabbi Cunin and we really wish he would do it on private property, so we could join him. There is always the risk that this will carry over to government involvement.”

This will be the third year that Cunin has staged the City Hall lighting of the special “Freedom Menorah,” which survived the destruction of the Temple of Katowitz in Poland during World War II and was presented by him to the city.

He called the controversy “quite unfortunate” and said he was hurt that other organizations did not telephone him to talk it over before signing a Sept. 23 letter from the community relations committee of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles that was sent to City Council members and Mayor Tom Bradley. That letter said “experience has shown that the placing of religious statues or symbols on public property divides the community along religious lines and brings about interreligious disharmony and acrimony.”