Jewish Man Sues Na’amat for Discrimination

By Renee Ghert-Zand December 1, 2011

In some Jew-on-Jew legal action, a male employee who was fired has sued his former employer, the Jewish women’s organization Na’amat, on grounds of religious discrimination.

According to Marshall Garvin, Susan Schwartz, his supervisor at Na’amat, harassed him for leaving work to say kaddish for his recently deceased mother. Garvin, an observant Jew from Riverdale, told the New York Daily News that he went to complain about this to Na’amat USA’s president, Elizabeth Raider, last March. Garvin, 65, claims that within an hour of his speaking to Raider, he was terminated.

In his suit, which he filed in the Bronx, Garvin alleges that Schwartz dictated to him which synagogue he could go to, “harassed him for daily reports of his whereabouts,” and caused him to miss kaddish minyans at least 15 times in the two months between his mother’s death in January and his firing in March.

Garvin has filed suit against both Na’amat and Schwartz. “No person of any religion should have to go through this. It’s unconscionable for a religious Jewish woman to behave this way,” he told the Daily News.

Na’amat, in the meantime, claims that Garvin was laid off in a “reduction of force.”

This is not the first time Garvin has filed a religious discrimination suit against an employer. He won two settlements for such suits against his former employer of 30 years, the U.S. Postal Service, according to records discovered by the Daily News.

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