CJL Shoah program raises church-state issue for Cudahy school
If there is a religious community in the United States that worries about violations of the constitutional principle of church-state separation, it is the Jewish community.
Yet recently, an area public school canceled a planned trip to a synagogue for one of its grades because some parents were concerned that visiting it and hearing about Judaism at that site would violate church-state separation.
This past week, a group of more than 200 eighth graders from the Cudahy Middle School was scheduled to travel to Congregation Shalom on March 24 to participate in a program called “From Ignorance and Fear to Knowledge and Understanding: Jews, Judaism and the Holocaust.”
The program was created by the Holocaust Education and Resource Center of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
According to CJL executive director Steven Baruch, Ph.D., some 5,000 Wisconsin middle school and high school age students have participated in the program, which is about three years old.
The program involves bringing groups of students to a synagogue to do “simulation activities” about prejudice and to hear a Holocaust survivor speak. The students also hear a rabbi or other knowledgeable person like a synagogue educator do a brief presentation about Judaism.
Baruch said large groups of students are brought to a synagogue partly to save “wear and tear” on the few remaining local Holocaust survivors willing and able to speak.
Many schools want to bring survivors in to speak, but “it’s a strain for them to go to all these places,” Baruch said.
Moreover, having this program in a synagogue with a brief presentation about Judaism also serves an educational purpose, Baruch said. “Many teachers said it would help their students understand because they didn’t know much about Judaism” and “many of the students had never been in a synagogue before,” he said.
But this aspect of the program proved troubling to some parents of CMS students, according to school principal, Gene Bibis.
No religious institutions
In a telephone interview, Bibis told The Chronicle that one parent in particular had written a letter to the superintendent concerned about possible violation of church-state separation by bringing children to a synagogue and having them hear about Judaism. He later heard from others, fewer than ten, he said.
Bibis emphasized that teaching about the Holocaust “was not the issue” in these concerns or in the canceling of the visit. “It was the religious instruction component” and the visiting of a synagogue, he said.
He said that in the five years he has been principal, CMS students have not gone on field trips to any religious institution. He also said that while religion and religious groups do get discussed when the subject arises in the context of other courses, like world history, “we do not talk about any specific religion” or give anything like a comparative religion class.
Bibis also cited a set of guidelines that the Cudahy school district follows in contemplating such issues, a copy of which he faxed to The Chronicle. The list is titled “How can school officials tell when a planned school action or activity violates the Establishment Clause?” and sourced as being from “The First Amendment in Schools” published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Bibis said the CJL program, as he understood it, had the potential of violating at least two of these guidelines: “Can I ensure that this activity is not designed in any way to either promote or inhibit religion?” and “If I am teaching about religion, am I balanced, accurate and academic in my approach?”
Even though field trips and other “extended curriculum” activities “are important for students, we need to make sure that we are following rules and guildelines,” and “we have to be very aware of rules and laws about separation of church and state,” Bibis said.
Yet his concern puzzles Baruch, since “we’ve never had schools cancel before” and the program is not about “religious instruction, but about history and values and the questions raised by the Holocaust for all of us.”
Dan Elbaum, a Chicago attorney and the Midwest civil rights counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, told The Chronicle in a telephone interview that “The mere fact that an educational activity takes place in a church or synagogue does not render that activity religious and does not violate the doctrine of separation of church and state as long as you’re not preaching or proselytizing.”
However, Elbaum also acknowledged that a school’s administrators might not want to “give any appearance” that the school is “preaching or advocating a particular religion.”
Bibis and Baruch said they had discussed with each other the possibility of presenting the program either at CMS or at a “neutral site,” but nothing has been scheduled yet.
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