Jewish parent Shel Lyons, who has a third-grader at the K-5 Carmel River School and is the parent of two of its graduates, has for some time scrutinized the school’s practices for what she describes as a pattern of favoring Christianity over other religions.
But this year, scrutiny came also from a federal judge after Lyons, an attorney, filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California.
Lyons says while Christmas-themed celebrations and symbols are everywhere at the school, symbols of other holidays, such as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, are not. When a Hanukkah song was sung at her child’s kindergarten holiday music show several years ago, it was introduced as an “Israeli” song, she said, implying to her that the Christmas songs were simply “American” songs.
The dispute raises questions about the difference between showing preference to a specific religion — which is unconstitutional by a public school, according to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — versus what officials at the Carmel River School are calling the use of nonreligious symbols to celebrate the holiday season.
At the center of Lyons’ lawsuit, filed Dec. 7 in federal court in San Jose, is a tree-lighting event, which was to take place three days later. The Dec. 10 gathering was hosted by the Parent Teachers Association, which required the permission of administrators to hold the event on school property.
Though described as a tree lighting, the festivities also involved decking the tree, planted on school grounds, with ornaments and lights. It was billed as religion-neutral.
The PTA invited families to bring an item to decorate the tree “that reflects their family, heritage, and/or faith.”
Lyons was not at all interested in decorating the tree with a Jewish or Hanukkah-themed object, she said in no uncertain terms; she and her husband “were shocked by the ignorance and offensiveness of that suggestion,” she said.
Instead, she asked to bring a Hanukkah object — a 6-foot tall inflatable hanukkiah, or Hanukkah menorah — to display alongside the tree.
The PTA and the school refused, saying it did not meet the qualifications for an ornament: that the object be able to fit into a paper lunch bag.
Legally, Lyons has a tough road ahead. That’s according to Charles Russo, a law professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in education law and in 2014 co-authored a paper on legal issues surrounding the celebration of Christmas in public schools. (Lyons has asked the judge to declare the Carmel River School’s practices unconstitutional, and to order school administrators to change course).
Russo pointed to the fact that the Supreme Court has determined Christmas trees and Santa Claus to be secular, not religious, symbols.
Full story at Jewish News of Northern California.
So much darkness in the world
Now our “elder brothers” know what it feels like when something you hold sacred is banned by the secular thugs.
Let’s see if your tune changes when the Muslims want to push their events on the schools
There will be no changing in tunes,,,sorry leftist you lose
Its a Catholic school, for goodness sakes!
It is a public school.
No it’s not, OMG
I understand this to be a public school.
As a Jew, our Lord would have celebrated Hanukkah. So where’s the problem? I spent part of my childhood in Washington DC. During Holy Days, a good third of the class were absent. The rest of us were a motley assemblage of ethnicities and creeds. In third grade, our teacher brought in a menorah and explained it to us. And all was well.
Nobody read the story, right?
Interestingly, the only mention of Hanukkah in sacred scripture is in Maccabees, not part of the Hebrew canon but, obviously, part of the historical Christian canon. And Jesus apparently was in Jerusalem for that feast (Jn 10:22). The orthodox celebrate the Feast of the Maccabee martyrs on August 1st. Hanukkah should not be a problem at all for Catholics to observe. It’s just that it falls in the penitential season of Advent.
With a name like “Carmel,” one might expect the school to be Catholic, but it’s not. According to Wikipedia, “Carmel River School is one of three elementary schools in the Carmel Unified School District, United States. It is a public school with about 430 students as of August 2006…”
Ironically, perhaps, Hanukkah is not mentioned in the Torah or the KJV; the story is initially based on the account from the Catholic Bible’s 2nd Maccabees.
The books of the Old Testament in the Catholic Bible are from the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, probably from 2nd century BC.
There are Jewish writings describing Hanukkah from the 1st and 2nd century AD.
The KJV originally included the Books of the Apocrypha which included 1 and 2 Maccabees.
In the 1800s, allegedly due to wanting to keep printing costs down, the Bible Society in England stopped including the Apocrypha in the King James Bible. Current editions do not include it.
The New Testament quotes from the Septuagint over three hundred times, and the Lord Jesus is said to have used the Septuagint version of Isaiah 29:13 in Mark 7:6-7. A good online source is “Deuterocanonical References in New Testament” by James Akin.
One Catholic priest told me that many of the early Jewish rabbis stopped using the Septuagint because the Church was making too many converts from the book of Wisdom, especially 2:12-20, as it so well describes the persecution and death of the Lord Jesus. The KJV’s Apocrypha has those passages in the Wisdom of Solomon 2;12-20.
By the way, I have no problem with a menorah in a holiday demonstration in a public school along with the Christmas decorations, after all the New Testament mentions the Lord Jesus going up to the temple in the winter to celebrate the dedication of the Temple, or the anniversary of such. A private school school would be a whole different situation, won’t get into that. Just my opinion.
Very interesting and thanks for the source.
You are welcome.
Wisdom 14:7, which says, “Blessed is the wood by which justice cometh,” is also said to prophesy Christ’s death on the cross. The New World Encyclopedia has a good article on the book of Wisdom.