Unlit Menorah Allowed in City Hall : Would Be Religious Ceremony Only if Lighted, Judge Rules

No lighted menorah can be displayed in the Los Angeles City Hall’s East Rotunda in observance of Hanukkah, but presence of an unlit candelabrum is legally permissible, a judge decided Friday.

The controversy arose after the city attorney’s office advised a Hasidic Jewish organization, West Coast Chabad, that it must move its menorah lighting ceremony, set for 4 p.m. Monday, out of the rotunda to the City Hall steps because of the constitutional separation of church and state.

The American Civil Liberties Union, backed by the American Jewish Congress, asked the Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday to bar any religious observance inside City Hall or any observance using city property. ACLU attorney Carol Sobel argued futilely that the menorah, loaned to the city during Hanukkah by Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin of West Coast Chabad, was temporarily city property.

Judge Irving Shimer, who told attorneys that he would light his own menorah candles beginning tonight, sanctioned displaying the loaned menorah in the East Rotunda to call “to the attention of the public that Jews at this time of the year are celebrating a particular kind of holiday.”

But he forbade allowing any of the candles to be lit, or for the menorah to be lighted outside and carried inside as Rabbi Cunin had planned. Lighting the candles, he said, was a religious ceremony forbidden in taxpayer-owned buildings.

‘A Phenomenal Victory’

Neither the judge nor the ACLU objected to the plans for lighting a 15-foot menorah on the 1st Street steps of City Hall, which both Shimer and Sobel acknowledged was a public park or forum where religion could be freely expressed.

“This is a phenomenal victory,” Cunin said after the hearing, even though Shimer’s order altered his plans to light the historic menorah, given to him in Poland, and then carry it inside the building for display. “It is an incredibly beautiful country to see what happened with the judge where he stated that as Jews we have a right to have a symbol sitting in City Hall.”

Former City Atty. Burt Pines, representing the rabbi and Friends of Lubavitch, Inc., had argued that the lighted menorah was no more a religious symbol than the 20-foot lighted Christmas tree also placed in the East Rotunda during December.

Douglas E. Mirell, attorney for the American Jewish Congress, which supported the ACLU suit, said his organization is concerned that lighting a menorah anywhere near public property could secularize the ceremony, which symbolizes the Jewish recapture of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC from the Syrians Greeks and the miracle in which enough oil to last only one day lasted for eight.

Sobel said the ACLU will pursue its suit to prevent the city from using its borrowed property, the menorah, for any religious purpose.

Another court hearing is scheduled on Christmas Eve.