A Secular Push: The Charter of Quebec Values would ban religious symbols from the public sphere. Image by Getty Images

MONTREAL (JTA) — A separatist Quebec legislator backtracked after criticizing a fellow parliamentarian for wearing a kippah in the legislative chamber on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

During a raucous session, Opposition leader Jean-François Lisée of the Parti-Québécois criticized David Birnbaum, the only Jewish legislator of the governing Liberal Party, for wearing the skullcap.

Lisée said doing so may have violated a rule forbidding partisan symbols in Parliament. He was responding to Quebec premier Phillippe Couillard, who had criticized Lisée for wearing his own party’s lapel pin in the legislative hall.

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Lisée said allowing the kippah while banning his pin constituted a “hierarchy between some convictions and others.”

An angry Birnbaum defended his actions. “I can wear that kippah anywhere,” he said.

“To suggest that a Jewish [parliamentarian] should be forced to hide his religious identity – on Yom Hashoah, no less – is grotesque and unacceptable,” B’nai Brith Canada CEO Michael Mostyn said.

On Thursday, Lisée posted a statement on Facebook conceding that Birnbaum did indeed have the right to wear the kippah, but said religious rights should not supersede others.

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