Notes from Quebec 

Hasidic Jews take a hit! 

April 11, 2008 

Surprise! An extremely courageous Quebec Court of Appeal has just castigated a colony of Hasidic Jews (nope, not Mormons, not Baptists, not Christian evangelicals, but JEWS!) and denied their attempt to use “freedom of religion” as an excuse for not adhering to a small Quebec town’s municipal regulations. 

Can you imagine? A unanimous three-judge court upheld a previous Quebec Superior Court’s equally courageous decision and declared that a congregation of 200 odd Hasidic Jews had exhibited bad faith, evasion, false declarations, deliberate omissions, deceptive behavior, dissimulation, and, in contrast to the extreme patience of the municipality, a disloyal attitude. This decision was thoroughly celebrated by Marie-Andrée Chouinard in an editorial in Le Devoir, Quebec’s thankfully independent newspaper. (The Montreal Gazette, owned by the Jewish Asper family of CanWest, simply reported a few basic facts.)

Note that pretty much a whole community is being described here, not just one or a few individuals. But of course this makes sense when one is dealing with a group of Jewish fundamentalists who act in concert rather than as individuals.

What happened, briefly, is that the Jews bought a couple houses within a residential zone of the town of Val Morin, Quebec, back in the 1980s, as if they were to be residences. But then they surreptitiously began using one as a synagogue and the other as a school. When neighbors and then the town officials complained because of the noise and crowds, the Jews simply ignored them for many years — even though the sect owned non-residentially zoned land a short walk away (they claimed poverty for not having constructed a synagogue and school in that zone). Finally the town went to court and won the right to enforce zoning regulations. But the Jews then appealed, supported by the Canadian Jewish Congress which of course represents Jews generally, thus implicating a whole ethny. The lawyer throughout was one Julius Grey (an Eastern European Jew), well known in Canada for defending religious (and not just Jewish) practices under the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights and Freedoms.

The Hasids’ pattern of behavior throughout was one of deception and deceit such that if one trick didn’t work, they then tried another trick, all apparently under the guiding hand of Julius Grey.

Having lost their case at the highest provincial level, they immediately announced that they would appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. As Grey explained, they want to find out “if the fact of not having been 100% honest [“franc”] in the past should have a bearing on their freedom of religion” [my translation]. Hey, no worries here about reinforcing anti-Semitic stereotypes!

Nevertheless, there may be a lesson here: it is apparently possible today in a Western, Euro-Canadian society, for a judiciary to operate according to the rule of law and stare down extremely powerful ethnic interests.  (Or is it only a few French Quebecers who have the balls to take on the “chosen people”?)

That is the good news. The bad news is that this case has cost the town of Val Morin $125,000. Just the threat of such litigation seems to have been a very useful gambit over the years for Hasidic Jews in Montreal in obtaining special dispensations from local regulations. For example, rather than pay a lawyer to enforce a blizzard of carefully orchestrated parking violations, one by one, the elected officials of the Outremont borough worked out an informal “deal” with the Hasids who thereby received special parking privileges during Jewish holidays.

One might ask how the Hasids can afford all this litigation. On the one hand they claim to be extremely poor (and are suspected by non-Jews of making considerable use of the Quebec Welfare system). However, at least one of their number is an extremely wealthy real estate developer, and several others have been convicted of major financial fraud in recent years, the profit from which has never been totally recovered. Also, it is conceivable that their lawyer, Julius Grey, works for them pro bono, given his principled (Orwellian) and publicly stated advocacy of waiving regulations for such religious minorities.

In any case, the capacity of certain Jewish groups to undertake so much litigation constitutes a constraint on Quebec municipalities’ efforts to treat all its citizens equally. The threat of being sued also constrains many individual Quebecers’ willingness to complain about the behavior of Hasids. 

There is a similarity here to SLAPPs (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”) with which companies in North America have severely limited their environmental critics’ freedom of speech. The Quebec government is now promising to imitate 25 American states in protecting citizens from such SLAPPs. It would be interesting to see whether legislation could be devised to protect against these other forms of intimidating lawsuits that are likely to become more frequent in our diverse and multi-cultural society.

Permanent Link: Quebec-Hasids