690
Opinion of the Court
Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Parts II (introduction) and II-A.
The village of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York, is a religious enclave of Satmar Hasidim, practitioners of a strict form of Judaism. The village fell within the Monroe-Woodbury Central School District until a special state statute passed in 1989 carved out a separate district, following village lines, to serve this distinctive population. 1989 N. Y. Laws, ch. 748. The question is whether the Act creating the separate school district violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, binding on the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. Because this unusual Act is tantamount to an allocation of political power on a religious criterion and neither presupposes nor requires governmental impartiality toward religion, we hold that it violates the prohibition against establishment.
I
The Satmar Hasidic sect takes its name from the town near the Hungarian and Romanian border where, in the early years of this century, Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum molded the group into a distinct community. After World War II and the destruction of much of European Jewry, the Grand
M. Freeman, and Samuel Rabinove; for the Committee for the Well-Being of Kiryas Joel by Joan E. Goldberg and Michael H. Sussman; for the General Council on Finance and Administration of the United Methodist Church by Samuel W. Witwer, Jr.; for the National Coalition for Public Education and Religious Liberty et al. by David B. Isbell; for the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U. S. A. et al. by Douglas Laycock; for the National School Boards Association by Gwendolyn H. Gregory, August W. Steinhilber, and Thomas A. Shannon; for the New York State United Teachers et al. by Bernard F. Ashe and Gerard John De Wolf; and for the Council on Religious Freedom by Lee Boothby, Walter E. Carson, and Robert W. Nixon.
Briefs of amici curiae in all cases were filed for the New York Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty by Stanley Geller; and for the Rutherford Institute by John W. Whitehead and James J. Knicely.
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