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Heimishe Mentch on the Bench, Supreme Court Justice David I. Schmidt, honored in Brooklyn












When discussing the legal profession, virtues like compassion, charity and selflessness may not immediately spring to mind — but for the past 33 years, the Catholic Lawyers Guild of Brooklyn has honored judges and attorneys who demonstrate these qualities.

This year, about 225 people attended the guild’s annual dinner at Gargiulo’s Restaurant, according to immediate past president Annalise Cottone.

Brooklyn Civil Administrative Judge Ariel Belen swore in Joseph Bellard as the new president of the guild, which honored Judge Belen, Brooklyn Law School Professor Richard T. Farrell, Civil Court Judge Bernard Graham, state Justice David Schmidt and attorney Andrea Bonina.

Justice David Schmidt accepted the Guild’s Ecumenical Award on behalf of his parents, who were both Holocaust survivors. Schmidt said his father never spoke about his experiences until right before he died.

Schmidt had a case against a synagogue in Williamsburg where a worker fell from a scaffold. He mentioned the case to his father, who then told him how he was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

“There were hundreds of people in the car. The train traveled for seven days and seven nights; they were given no food or water. When the train arrived … everyone had died except my father,” Schmidt said. “My father thought all the Jews in the world were killed.” The first people he saw at Bergen-Belsen were the rabbi of this synagogue and his father.

“One of the reasons that the Holocaust succeeded in killing so many people is that when the Nazis started passing all these racist laws in which Jews could not marry non-Jews, own property or businesses and could not belong to any of the professions, no one protested,” Schmidt said.

The lawyers supported the laws and the judges did not protest the removal of their colleagues, nor did they find these laws invalid or unconstitutional, Schmidt said.

“We as judges and lawyers in the greatest country in the world have a duty to fight racism and bigotry wherever we find it,” Schmidt said. “It is our duty to make certain that no one is persecuted based on their religious beliefs or [ethnicity].”

He quoted Martin Niemuller, the German pastor who outspokenly opposed the Nazis and suffered in concentration camps. In a 1959 seminary address in Atlanta, Ga., Niemuller said, “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Webster’s defines “ecumenical” as “fostering religious unity,” Justice Schmidt noted. He said he was especially honored to receive this award from the Catholic Lawyers, who “strive for higher ethical morals and standards than the law requires.

“I, as a Jew with a yarmulke, who wears religion on my sleeve, similarly strive for higher ethical morals,” Schmidt said.

The judge graduated from Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School, and served for 11 years as law secretary to Justice Gerard Rosenberg before being elected to Brooklyn Civil Court in 1995. He was appointed as an acting state Supreme Court Justice in 2000, and was elected to that bench in 2006.

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=13106