Candle Lighting Allowed, but Candelabrum Can’t Be Left in Park : Santa Ana’s Ruling on Menorah Upheld

A Superior Court commissioner ruled Monday that the City of Santa Ana was correct in allowing candle-lighting ceremonies in a public park during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah while refusing to allow a menorah to remain in the park overnight.

Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Ronald L. Bauer rejected the claim of the Chabad congregation of Anaheim, an Orthodox Hassidic group, that the menorah is like a Christmas tree in that it is a “mixed symbol” of culture and religion.

“There is an enormous qualitative difference, frankly, between a lighted fir tree and a menorah,” Bauer said in ruling that the city has the right to regulate the “time, place and manner” of the display at Sasscer Park in downtown Santa Ana.

Each year the city has allowed lights to be strung on a fir tree in the park during the Christmas season. This year, in response to the Jewish group’s request, the city agreed on Dec. 22 to let a menorah be placed in the park for eight days.

But the American Civil Liberties Union protested that decision, saying it represented an endorsement of religion in violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. The city then decided to allow the lighting of a menorah on each of the eight days of Hanukkah but to require that the menorah be removed after the ceremony each evening.

Big Menorah Was First Choice

Chabad members wanted to light a 10-foot menorah and leave it in place in Sasscer Park throughout the “festival of the lights,” which commemorates the liberation of the Jerusalem Temple from the Syrians in 165 BC.

When permission for that plan was withdrawn, a small, portable menorah was lighted last Friday, the first day of Hanukkah, and was left in the park. City maintenance employees removed it after the group left. Another menorah was removed from the park by city workers after a candle-lighting ceremony Saturday, and the same thing happened Sunday.

Monday, the Chabad congregation went to court.

The American Civil Liberties Union supported the city’s new position as a balance between freedom of speech and the constitutional ban on government endorsement of religion.

Fred M. Blum, an ACLU attorney, said that allowing the menorah to remain at the park overnight as a “fixed” object would mean to the average citizen that “government is supporting that religious symbol,” especially since the park is across the street from City Hall and the federal and state buildings.

“In a different context, in a different park, you might not have constitutional problems,” Blum argued.

Lawyers for the American Jewish Congress, which describes itself as a national Jewish organization whose aims include the strict separation of church and state, argued that neither the Christmas tree nor the menorah should be allowed.

Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper argued that the Jewish group had the same access to public property as any other group and faced the same restrictions on leaving any “equipment” or religious artifacts there.

Monday night, Rabbi David Eliezrie lighted a small, portable menorah a stone’s throw from the star-topped, brightly lit Christmas tree and said the religious symbol would be removed at the end of the ceremony.

“We’re not going to break the judge’s order in any way, shape or form,” he said. Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, West Coast director of Chabad, said: “Thank God that we have the lighting ceremony. Thank God that we have the display.”