NEW ORLEANS — Three Jewish families are among a group of nine Louisiana families with children in public schools who have filed a suit in federal court challenging a new state law that requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms.
The lawsuit — filed on the families’ behalf by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation — argues that the law violates the First Amendment.
The complaint says that the language of the law “Approves and Prescribes One Particular Version of the Ten Commandments, to Which Many People Do Not Subscribe,” violating the Constitution’s prohibitions on establishing an official religion.
Similar bills have been proposed recently in state houses in Texas, Utah and Oklahoma. None has yet passed.
Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, is the first to sign such a law, doing so last month along with legislation against abortion rights and transgender inclusion that he said reflected his values as a Catholic.
The Ten Commandments, given by G-d via Moses at Mount Sinai in the biblical book of Exodus (and repeated with slight variations in Deuteronomy), are revered by both Jews and Christians. The Louisiana lawsuit argues that the text of the Ten Commandments mandated by the law is a Christian version and “does not match any version or translation found in the Jewish tradition.”
Jews and various Christian denominations number the commandments differently.
The version prescribed by the bill omits parts of the commandments, including the section of the first commandment in Judaism about G-d bringing the Israelites out of Egypt.
In the 1950s, director Cecil B. DeMille arranged for versions to be donated to public institutions as a marketing gimmick for his epic film “The Ten Commandments.”
They were prominently placed outside of courthouses, city halls, state capitols and public parks. How many of the DeMille tablets remain in place is unclear. Lawsuits questioning their constitutionality were filed.
Included in the suit are Gary Sernovitz, a board member of the Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, and Molly Pulda, a member of the board of the local JCC, who also have a child in public school.
They hoped to separate the child’s secular education from their religious education and cited “their desire to oversee the latter and ensure that it is consistent with their Jewish belief and practice.”
Their child goes to Hebrew school once a week and goes to Jewish summer camp and will begin attending Hebrew school twice a week next year, according to the lawsuit.
Sernovitz and Pulda “do not believe that the Ten Commandments are a universal benign ethical guide,” the lawsuit says, and also believe that the displays will cause an issue for their child as one of only a few Jewish students in their class.
According to the lawsuit, they worry their child may feel pressured to suppress the expression of their “own Jewish background and beliefs.”
They also oppose the law because, though it does not accord with the Jewish text of the commandments, they believe the displays “would violate Jewish tenets that oppose proselytizing,” the suit said.
Another complainant is Joshua Herlands, an attorney and business-school professor who has two elementary school-age children in local public schools.
For Herlands, the “displays will religiously coerce his minor children and usurp his parental role in directing their religious education, religious values, and religious up- bringing,” the lawsuit said.
