Visitor speaker at the Kinus Hashluchim Grand Event was Attorney Nathan Lewin, who recounted his part in the legal dispute for the Rebbe’s Seforim and the triumph on Hey Teves, just as his long term battle for the option to have Menorahs shown in open regions.
A Conversation with Attorney Nathan Lewin
By Dovid Margolin – Chabad.org
At the point when Nathan Lewin addresses the virtual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries (Kinus Hashluchim) as its feature this Sunday evening, there will be no requirement for a presentation. Over the past 50 years, Lewin has become famous as a skilled litigator and become renowned as one of the country’s superior safeguards of the Bill of Rights, especially the strict freedoms cherished in the First Amendment.
Having begun his legitimate vocation clerking for Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan II in the last part of the 1950s, at that point proceeding to work in Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department—Kennedy sent the youthful Shabbat-noticing man to Nashville, Tenn., to help indict Jimmy Hoffa, and he later filled in as appointee collaborator principal legal officer for social liberties—prior to going through a long time in private practice, the 84-year-old Lewin keeps on standing out as truly newsworthy.
Lewin and his girl, Alyza Lewin, spoke to Menachem Zivotofsky for a very long time in his family’s mission to have Jerusalem, Israel, written in Zivotofsky’s U.S. visa. Zivotofsky was simply conceded such a visa at the U.S. international safe haven in Jerusalem this October. Lewin moreover came up during the ongoing Supreme Court selection measure, depicting now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s work in the interest of Jewish causes while she was a youthful partner at Lewin’s law office in 1999-2000, including the free protection of a public menorah show in Jersey City, N.J. Barrett filled the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with whom Lewin had a long and warm relationship. Truth be told, Ginsburg’s office called Lewin not long after she joined the Supreme Court for his direction in appending a mezuzah to her chambers.
All through his profession, Lewin has been known to be an energetic backer for causes he accepts to be simply. “In interviews,” The New York Times expounded on him in a 1988 profile while he was protecting U.S. Principal legal officer Edwin Meese, “a few legal advisors, most shameless admirers of Mr. Lewin, blamed him for now and then being excessively enthusiastic in his promotion—an analysis Mr. Lewin acknowledges. ‘I move … diverted by what I believe is correct,’ ” he told the paper.
Maybe it was this, just as his standing for determination—10 years sooner, Lewin sued the Times into letting it be known had blundered and giving a remedy relating to Lewin’s time safeguarding previous President Richard Nixon—that in the late spring of 1985 grabbed the eye of Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, administrator of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the instructive arm of the Chabad-Lubavitch development, and a secretary of the Rebbe.
A few months sooner, bookkeepers at the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad had seen that uncommon books from its inestimable document assortment were disappearing. Reconnaissance film demonstrated this to be crafted by the irritated grandson of the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of honorable memory, who in the wake of being gone up against guaranteed the books to be his own legacy. At the point when he would not quit selling these important books on the open market, Krinsky went to Lewin.
“I got a bring in the night from Rabbi Krinsky,” Lewin reviews to Chabad.org. “That is the way it started on my end.”
Lewin promptly looked for and acquired a limiting request charging the grandson from selling anything else of the books in his ownership, and afterward documented suit in government court in Brooklyn to set up, as the Rebbe kept up, that the library was a mutual belonging having a place with the Chabad-Lubavitch people group. The Rebbe didn’t say something regarding each progression of the protection’s work, demanding this was the part of the group of legal advisors drove by Lewin, yet gave understanding that end up being significant.
“In our underlying gathering [of lawyers] with the Rebbe he pointed at the letter composed [by the Sixth Rebbe] to [Alexander] Marx [the custodian of Jewish Theological Seminary in New York] as the key,” says Lewin. In it, the Sixth Rebbe had clarified that the library was not his very own property but rather an important asset for the whole Jewish individuals, and had a place with the development he drove. “We featured that bit of proof and Judge [Charles] Sifton along these lines cited it completely.”
“The Rebbe was absolutely aware of each progression we were taking, he read the records, all the pretrial procedures,” reviews Lewin. “I was dumbfounded by how comfortable he was with all that had been said during the hearings.”
The months Lewin spent moving to and fro between Washington, D.C., and New York planning for the case, trailed by the 23-day-long preliminary, eventually paid off. On Hei Tevet 5747 (Jan. 6, 1987), Sifton decided that the library completely had a place with the Lubavitch development. During a time before WhatsApp, the news soared the world over with celebration breaking out at Chabad central command in Crown Heights, Brooklyn—a short good ways from the government town hall in downtown Brooklyn—just as gathering places and Jewish people group all over.
“I need to state that the Nat Lewin I met eighteen months back isn’t a similar Nat Lewin … that we’re going to get with,” Krinsky told a pressed, euphoric crowd at a celebratory occasion held two evenings after the court triumph. “This is the Nat Lewin—Reb Nosson Lewin—who will be expounded on for ages … throughout the entire existence of Lubavitch as one of the saints of this [painful story].”
“I think each other legal counselor in the United States has begrudged me throughout the previous two days,” Lewin advised the group to extraordinary praise. ” … There’s no attorney in the United States whose triumph in court has been met by … days … and evenings of moving and singing and bliss in the roads!”
After ten months, on Nov. 17, 1987, the 25th day of Cheshvan—precisely 33 years prior—the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit collectively maintained Sifton’s region court administering.
“I thought we had an incredibly, solid ground for supporting Judge Sifton’s choice, so I was pretty positive about terms of the allure,” reflects Lewin. “However, it was unquestionably a brachah [blessing] that it was insisted.”
Menorahs and Light
Lewin has battled endless strict freedoms cases in his times of training, especially those relating to the Jewish people group. Among the cases he has contended, including handfuls under the steady gaze of the Supreme Court, have been the privileges of Jews to wear kippahs and whiskers in the military; the altruism of shechitah; and the option to put a Chanukah menorah on open property. As his little girl and law accomplice at Lewin and Lewin, Alyza, has called attention to, “there is no lawful issue that has confronted the Jewish people group in the United States in the past 50 years that doesn’t have Nathan Lewin’s fingerprints on it.”
Obviously, the milestone menorah case and the many subsequent meet-ups Lewin battled have a specific association with the 5,000 Chabad messengers he will be addressing on Sunday. Not long after the Rebbe first dispatched his Chanukah mindfulness crusade in the mid 1970s, Chabad messengers—first in Philadelphia and San Francisco, at that point around the nation—started raising goliath public menorahs to share the message and motivation of the Chanukah lights with the whole gang. This incorporated a 36-foot-high menorah raised outside of the White House, initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Chabad of Western Pennsylvania took action accordingly in 1982, setting a menorah outside of Pittsburgh’s City Hall with the chairman’s authorization and investment. After four years, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, a case that wended its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Lewin would be the one to safeguard the Jewish people groups’ entitlement to put a menorah on open property.
At last, Lewin disclosed to a group of people at One-to-One, a 12-hour discussion held at the New York Public Library in 2016 investigating the Rebbe’s social effect, it was the narrative of “how the Rebbe won … and changed the course of First Amendment law in the United States.”
In a 6-3 choice passed on the most recent day of their meeting in July of 1989, the Supreme Court governed for the lawfulness of the menorah. Equity Henry Blackmun’s larger part assessment even contained the gift for lighting the Chanukah menorah—twice. The case didn’t end there. At the point when the new city hall leader of Pittsburgh denied the menorah demand the following year, Lewin at last got a crisis administering from Justice William Brennan, got an hour prior Shabbat and the beginning of Chanukah that year, permitting the menorah to go up indeed.
For Pittsburgh’s situation, the menorah had remained close to occasion images of different religions, thus in 1992, Chabad’s menorah in Grand Rapids, Mich., was tested because it remained solitary, unaccompanied by some other images. By and by, Lewin effectively shielded the menorah, as he did in cases that followed. While Lewin keeps on helping anybody wishing to put a menorah on open property right up ’til today, at this point, on account of his work, the legalities encompassing the subject involve settled law.
“The menorah suit in the United States was an ideal case of how the Rebbe’s emphasis on a demeanor towards religion in America at last won,” Lewin advised the crowd at One-to-One.
Lewin has for some time been a natural face at the Kinus. “I put forth an attempt to come since this is consistently an astounding demonstration of Jewish soul and the overall effect that Chabad has,” he told this essayist at the 2013 gathering. “You sense it in the room when you come here togethe
