Michael Sussman
Image by courtesy of Michael Sussman
The sleepy village of Goshen in upstate New York’s Orange County seems an improbable place to find someone shaking up the Jewish world. But civil rights attorney Michael Sussman, 57, is doing just that through lawsuits against two redoubts of ultra-Orthodoxy ensconced in the Catskills. The suits threaten, for better or worse, to upend what he sees as the Hasidic sects’ unholy fusing of religion and government.
In New Square, N.Y., the Skver Hasidic sect, under the leadership of Rabbi David Twersky, has established an enclave of some 7,000 residents where women are not allowed to drive and men and women must walk on separate sides of the street. Last June, an employee from Twersky’s household allegedly sought to burn down the home of dissident resident Aron Rottenberg, but instead ended up inflicting third-degree burns over half of Rottenberg’s body. Sussman, as the attorney for the Rottenberg family, is seeking to break Twersky’s hold over everything that happens in the village.
“That control, if it is going to be exerted as it has been, has to end,” Sussman told the Journal News, a local daily.
Sussman’s suit against the politically influential Satmar Hasidic enclave of Kiryas Joel in Monroe, N.Y., where more than 13,000 residents live, seeks the village’s outright dissolution. The suit, brought by dissidents who reject the leadership of Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum, flatly declares that Kiryas Joel “is a theocracy,” where affairs of government are so deeply entangled with religion “that its very existence as a municipality violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”
Sussman, who finished Harvard Law School at the top of his class in 1977, notes that he has one brother who is a rabbi and another who is an atheist. “I’m somewhere in the middle,” he says.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
