Suit Seeks to Block Funds for Tolerance Museum

A lawsuit seeking to halt the state from giving $5 million in public funds for a proposed Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies was filed Wednesday by attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, contends that construction of the museum on the campus of Yeshiva University of Los Angeles would directly benefit a private religious educational institution in violation of the state Constitution’s mandate of separation of church and state.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of both the center and the university, said Wednesday on learning of the suit that the center has obtained a legal opinion from a constitutional law expert holding that the state’s grant “in no way violates the doctrines which separate church and state.”

Furthermore, he added, “Preventing the spread of hatred and bigotry is the responsibility of all and has nothing to do with the issue of church and state.” Hier said the center is prepared to “vigorously defend” the constitutionality of the state grant.

Matching Funds

The bill authorizing the grant was carried by state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and will provide $5 million in matching funds for construction of the museum to educate the public about genocides throughout history.

Roberti was out of the country Wednesday and could not be reached for comment. During Senate floor debate on the bill, however, Roberti said the state “has a very definite obligation to educate and to teach in regard to prejudice and how we can help combat prejudice.”

Moreover, he said then, the museum would not be limited to examining the slaughter of millions of Jews and members of other groups in Europe by the Nazis in World War II, but also would focus on mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I.

ACLU volunteer attorneys Lisa Rosenbaum and Fred Blum filed the suit as a taxpayer action in the names of David and Rosetta Cohen, whom the attorneys would identify only as Los Angeles taxpayers.

Cory Is Defendant

The suit names state Controller Kenneth Cory as the sole defendant. It seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions restraining the state from disbursing the funds and a court declaration that the appropriation of public money for the project as it is now conceived is unconstitutional.

Ground breaking for the $20-million museum is scheduled in November.

The suit alleges that, despite the center’s becoming a corporation separate from the university last March, it is operated as a division of Yeshiva and the two have overlapping boards of trustees.

Also, according to the suit, the center intends to use the (state) funds . . . to build its new facilities on land owned by Yeshiva, thereby increasing the value of Yeshiva property.

It further alleges that the center “intends to use the fact that matching funds are needed to obtain the appropriation as a means to . . . gain monies for Yeshiva projects” and to use those matching funds to build classrooms, a library and synagogue at the site.

‘Preferential Treatment’

“The act constitutes preferential treatment by the state to the Jewish religion and is therefore in violation of Article 1, Section 4 of the California Constitution,” the suit states.

Rabbi Hier said Wednesday that there are no plans to include a synagogue on the site, adding that the new facility will house, besides the museum, an auditorium, lecture halls, theater and archival and seminar rooms.

“In its eight-year history,” Hier said, “the Simon Wiesenthal Center has earned a respected national reputation for its nonsectarian educational programs on the Holocaust, which are brought to campuses of our public, private and parochial institutions in the state.”

He said that noted state constitutional law expert Jerome Falk, president of the San Francisco Bar Assn. and himself active in the ACLU of Northern California, has said that the grant does not violate the doctrine of separation of church and state.

Jewish Opposition

A number of major Jewish organizations oppose the grant, including the American Jewish Committee, four California chapters of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the Pacific Southwest Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

The council’s regional social action chairwoman, Evely Laser Shlensky of Santa Barbara, said in a telephone interview:

“Because of our concern with church-state separation, our understanding of the California Constitution leads us to believe that the state’s funding of the Museum of Tolerance represents an entanglement of state with a religiously sponsored institution.”