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Op-Ed: Board Rejected Sukkah but Embraced Islam

by Andrea Peyser – NY Post

Chana Paris and her husband, Rabbi Zalman Paris, the head of the Chabad of TriBeCa, in Duane Park, the spot where they originally planned to build a sukkah.

As the holidays bear down on this city, the war on faith has arrived early. The latest chapter in the religious wars takes place in TriBeCa. Community leaders there went positively postal over a request to the Parks Department by the Jewish group Chabad — to erect a sukkah in tiny Duane Park.

To the uninitiated, a sukkah is a flimsy hut in which Jews like to eat during the eight-day festival of Sukkot, which begins next Monday. You may see a gourd hanging in a sukkah. But gnarly vegetation is verboten in Duane Park, where — holy separation of church and state! — members of Community Board 1 fought like hyenas over whether the structure would result in something more sinister than revelers catching cold.

That gourd magnet would violate the Constitution!

“If I want to go to a park, I want to just hang out in a park,” board member Paul Cantor said last month. “I don’t want to look at a sukkah, or a nativity scene, or anything religious at all.”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer jumped into the pro-sukkah fray, writing to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, “It is entirely appropriate for the faith community to be given access to our parks.’’

Of course, there is a punch line. Community Board 1 is the same entity that voted last year to welcome the mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero to the community. Apparently, members don’t see the irony of a government body kissing up to one religion while slamming the door on another.

A few months later, the board forbade the placement of a Christmas tree in Duane Park — though members made the excuse that the tree was rejected because a law firm wanted to put its name on it.

So Islam is good. And Judaism and Christianity are suspect. One board member, who asked not to be identified, grumbled that Community Board 1 was out of control with “political correctness.”

“I saw the pope in Central Park,” the board member said. “The Dalai Lama was in Central Park. Billy Graham had a rally. And people get up in arms about a sukkah!”

The board was headed for a rumble when chair Julie Menin found a privately owned lot nearby whose owner was willing to take in the sukkah. Menin contends that a public square is no place for religion.

“If you’re going to say, yes, we’re going to have a sukkah in the park, you must say yes to all religions,” she said. “You can’t discriminate.”

Rabbi Zalman Paris of Chabad of TriBeCa/SoHo shrugged off the sukkah hostility as “a little ridiculous” and said he was OK with moving the hut to private land. He added that he’d been bombarded with legal advice from “many’’ people urging him to fight.

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17 Comments

  • Milhouse

    Um, the mosque is on private land that the Moslems own. If it were in a park the same people who were against the sukkah would be against it too. I’m against the mosque, because I think it will be a victory marker for the terrorists and a slap in the victims’ faces, but the point this writer makes is ridiculous.

  • ZV

    It’s not Eisav that is causing all of these issues rather Yaakov is leading this battle against his very own people. “Machrevayich Umehorosayich Memaich Yetzaihu ”!

  • chaim36

    That decision is correct. We must keep our religion private and not shove it into the faces of the goyim. That;s the reason why Chabad has problems in many cities. Use private land for the menorah, succah etc.

  • Ed Greenberg

    Oh come on. The Islamic center did not want to put itself in the park.

    Should they have allowed the Succah? Probably. But this comparison does not hold water.

  • peace & long life

    You made the right decision by not fighting only because you had a acceptable alternative. Long term though the community board needs to be exposed etc. for what they are & shamed brought down to size

  • Thinkster

    I think if we go like menches to the head of the Community Board, a Mr Mohammed Al Allah Akbar, then he’ll surely listen to the logic of having a sukkah in the park. Right? Anyone?

  • Post is Whack

    Not sure why there is an analogy to the mosque, as that wasn’t sanctioning a religious use of a PUBLIC space like a park. The Board may be wrong on the sukkah as a matter of community policy, but this is far from a “war on faith.” Anyway, I’ve been to Duane Park, it’s tiny and covered with trees, where was this sukkah going to be? (You can check it out on GoogleMaps.)

    NY Post: Skimpy on Facts, Extremely-Massively-Literally-Evil with Hyperbole

  • Milhouse

    #4, “we must keep our religion private and not shove it into the faces of the goyim”?! What happened to the MITZVAH of kiddush Hashem? What are we in golus for, indeed what are we in the world for, if not to shove our religion in the faces of the whole world, so that “yakiru veyeid’u”?

  • Mendy Hecht

    The argument, “Oh, no! If we let in one religion we’ll be bombarded with EVERY religion!” is bogus for two reasons:

    1. Who says all several dozen major religions will suddenly want religious fixtures in the park? It’s never happened. Not in California Chabad’s fights for menorahs in public places and not anywhere else.

    2. And what if they do? There’s nothing illegal. Every religion DOES have a right to access the park.

    This is nothing more than a bunch of embarrassed-to-be-Jewish liberal Jews trying to keep those pesky embarrassing Orthodox Jewish cousins of theirs out of sight.