Can a Jew be a Conscientious Objector?
The Case of John Scott Ruskay: C.O.
Official Tells Rabbi “No Jews can be CO’s”
Photo credit: FAO
This was published in May 1969 in the Yale Standard.
Can a Jew be a Conscientious Objector? A Jew can, obviously, object to war as conscientiously as any other human being, but sometimes just being a Jew makes it harder for him to gain recognition as a C.O.
Some young Jews find it extremely difficult, or impossible, to obtain exemption from military service on this basis. There are draft boards that do not consider that pacifism and Judaism go together, so they have an automatic reject mechanism for any young Jew seeking the C.O. classification.
Oddly enough, according to experts in the field, this is more likely to happen with draft boards that have Jewish members.
Ruskay believes that his draft board at Valley Stream, Long Island, turned him down on his application for the C.O. status, without considering it on its merits, because he is a Jew.
The case of John Ruskay, a 22-year-old student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in Manhattan, has thrown a spotlight on this question. Ruskay believes that his draft board at Valley Stream, Long Island, turned him down on his application for the C.O. status, without considering it on its merits, because he is a Jew.
What sets the Ruskay case apart from others in this category is that Ruskay, and his lawyers, believe he has proof that his Jewishness caused his rejection.
His rabbi believes so, too. The rabbi, with the lawyers, has made the first of what may be a series of moves to overturn the local board’s decision, or maybe even to overturn the local board itself.
John Ruskay appeared before local board No. 6 of Valley Stream on the evening of May 16, 1968. On the evening of May 17, a member of the local board attended services at Temple Beth El of Cedarhurst, Long Island, conducted by Dr. Edward T. Sandrow, the rabbi. Beth El is Ruskay’s home synagogue.
After the service, the rabbi and the local board member got into a chat in which the board member told the rabbi, “No Jews can be C.O.’s.”
It was a simple as that, as easy to apply as the shibboleth test of the Old Testament. All the board member had to know was one little fact about the applicant: Is he, or is he not, a Jew? If he is a Jew, wrap him in khaki and ship him to killing school. Case closed.
This made the rabbi angry—so angry, he admitted later, that he “almost split a gut.” Dr. Sandrow decided to take action, and he is, for a number of reasons, rather interestingly positioned to cry out against this procedure.
He was president of the New York Board of Rabbis until 1968 and before that he had been president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of conservative rabbis, from 1961 to 1962.
“I’m the chairman of the Commission of Jewish Chaplaincy of the National Jewish Welfare Board,” he said. “We supply chaplains for the military, and I am not a C.O. I believe that men ought to go in, that men ought to serve their country. However, when a member of the draft board says to me that Judaism does not permit of Conscientious Objection, that is not true. It certainly does.”
“I only want to refer you to the instance of Gideon in the Old Testament (the book of Judges, chapters 6 through 8). Gideon said to his men in his army, ‘Those of you who have no heart to go, who don’t want to go, you don’t have to.’ That is not to say that a man should refuse to serve his country. But it is left to each man.”
With the words “No Jews can be C.O.’s” echoing in his ears, Dr. Sandrow wrote a letter to the State Director of the Selective Service saying in part:
“I am disturbed primarily because I believe John Ruskay has been denied a C.O. because of the assumption that a Jew cannot be a C.O. I feel compelled at this time to bring to your attention an incident which supports my assertion….”
Dr. Sandrow told of his talk with Gerald Berman of Local Board 6: “He voluntarily mentioned to me that a member of my congregation (i.e., John Ruskay) had been before the Board during the past week. He told me that he had read the letter I had sent on Mr. Ruskay’s behalf, because seeing my name, he was curious to see what I had written. However, he pointed out that none of the other supporting letters and documents or Mr. Ruskay’s own papers were read because “No Jews can be C.O.’s.”
“I remember the incident clearly because I was shocked to hear Mr. Berman tell me that only ‘Unitarians, Quakers, and Seventh Day Adventists can be C.O.’s,’ which he pointed out, was not necessarily his opinion but was and is the assumption of the Board itself. I asked him, rather angrily, who gave the Board right to say that no Jews could be C.O.’s. Were they expert in Jewish law? Did they know that the rabbis have consistently supported the contention that Judaic tradition supports and allows for conscientious objection?”
The letter was written last December, after Ruskay had been turned down on appeal, but it was not sent until mid-April when a New York law firm came into the case.
Marvin Moses Karpatkin (Yale Law, Class of 1952, with an L.L.M. in ’53, also at Yale) and Michael N. Pollet of the New York firm of Karpatkin, Ohrenstein, and Karpatkin were brought into the case by John Ruskay.
Karpatkin was in the news last year when he represented Captain Dale E. Noyd, the professional Air Force officer who refused to train pilots for Vietnam (because he said he did not believe in that war) in a court martial case. Noyd lost.
Karpatkin sees the Ruskay case as involving a lot more than the right of one man. “It is an open secret,” the lawyer said, “that some draft boards turn down Jewish applications for the C.O. on this basis, but there’s no way to prove that’s how they do it. The difference here is that we have the word of a member of the local board that that’s how they did it.
On April 9, Karpatkin shot off a letter to the State Director of Selective Service in New York: “We are writing to bring to your attention for prompt corrective action the patently illegal and unconstitutional situation existing at local board #6 of Valley Stream, New York, wherein members of the Jewish faith making application for conscientious objector status are being discriminated against and denied the classification solely because they are Jews.”
The letter attacks “the unwarranted, unlawful and discriminatory belief by members of the local board that no Jew can be a conscientious objector” and it says, “this biased and discriminatory application of Section 6(j) of the Military Selective Service Act of 1967 is in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution…and Selective Service Regulations, and would render any subsequent induction order invalid.” (Ruskay reported for his physical examination of April 28 and was found entirely fit for service.)
The letter asks for “an immediate investigation of local board #6 by New York State Headquarters and a determination of all those instances in which board members have passed upon a conscientious objector application without in fact reading the registrant’s application.”
It asks “that steps be taken to effect the removal from office of each board member who is found to have participated or acquiesced in such practices.” And it asks that all other Jewish applicants for the C.O. classification who have been turned down by the same board members be given new hearings “before a tribunal found free of bias or discrimination.”
“Unless prompt corrective action is taken,” the letter says, “it is our intention to take all necessary and appropriate legal measures to ensure the equal protection of the law to registrants of all religious faiths.”
Leonard Jaffee of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors at Philadelphia commented that he had found that “draft boards are exceedingly reluctant to accept that a Jew may be permitted to be a C.O. solely because of their view of Judaism. Applicants are asked, “Well, how can you be a C.O.? You’re a Jew. And no matter what the answer given, the classification seems mostly to be 1-A. They think they are antithetical, being a Jew and being a C.O., and they sometimes read Bible passages in which Israelites are shown at war.”
With that slant on the question, it is difficult for such a board to reconcile a man’s being a Jew with the requirement of the law that a man be a C.O., not on the basis of “political, sociological or philosophic views or a merely personal moral code,” but specifically “by reason of religious training and belief.”
Rabbi Michael Robinson of the Jewish Peace Fellowship remarked that “there are Jewish members on the draft boards who are threatened by this “because they feel ‘America has been good to the Jews.’ They become very uptight about this,” Rabbi Robinson said. “They feel it would reflect badly on the Jewish people for young Jews to refuse service.
“There are draft boards who are really just not enlightened on the law or its execution,” the rabbi said. “Before World War II only members of historic peace churches could be Conscientious Objectors, but that law has been changed.”
According to Abraham Kaufman, chairman of the Metropolitan Board for Conscientious Objectors in New York City, “Getting recognition is still a problem because draft boards, even when there is the best intentions, consist of volunteers who give a marginal amount of their time, who may or may not be particularly interested, or who have varying degrees of knowledgeability regarding the law itself.”
“I think there are some 6,000 local boards in the country, and this has not seeped down to these boards.”
It is time, Mr. Karpatkin thinks, for it to have seeped, “It has not been required that someone be a member of a recognized pacifist sect since World War I,” the lawyer said. “That’s the 1917 law!”
“Some local boards have an image of some Gary Cooper type from a movie like ‘Friendly Persuasion’ as representing the C.O. and he has to wear a broad-brimmed hat and say ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ and unless he looks, feels, talks and smells like that image of a C.O., he doesn’t get the classification.”
John Scott Ruskay, a 1968 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, talks a convincing streak of conscientious objection, and that is why even rabbis who do not hold his view came forward to support him in his application for the exemption. He has, by the way, turned down the exemption to which he is entitled as a divinity student. “One of the roles a clergy man should perform in my view is to set an ideal for how people should confront moral problems and deal with them. I felt that to accept the 4-D, instead of confronting the moral problem directly and setting a model for how to resolve it would be ducking the moral issue.”
“He does not want to be out of the draft for any old reason; he wants to be out for the right reason,” Michael Pollet said. “He’s not interested in the ‘convenient cop-out of a seminary deferment.”
How does John Ruskay come by his pacifism via Judaism? His answer, in part: “As I re-examined my Judaic tradition in search of relevance for myself, I found that a constant value of Judaism—almost the constant thread—seemed to be sanctification of human life. For me the killing of a man would be the ultimate violation against my tradition—the sanctification of life. It was therefore my decision that I cannot participate in war, in organized killing.”
“I guess you could start from, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’” he said.
Shalom, anybody?