SIMCHA FELDER Intrigue over Jewish Sabbath. (
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That ain’t kosher!
Pro-choice Democrats in the state Senate plotted to ram through an abortion-rights amendment during the Jewish Sabbath to prevent pro-life Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder, an Orthodox Jew, from casting a vote, critics charged.
The controversial June 28 deliberations put Felder in a quandary. If he left Albany to observe Shabbat, the abortion proposal had a chance of passing. But if he stayed, he would be violating religious observance.
“The Democrats were counting votes. They were waiting for Simcha to leave. They thought they were going to get away with that,” said Deputy Senate GOP leader Tom Libous.
“I told Simcha, ‘They’re waiting for you to leave.’ They didn’t care. It was extremely insensitive,” Libous added.
Felder agreed it was wrong to have a conscience issue like abortion brought up on or just before a religious observance.
“I was told that they [the Democrats] were waiting for me to leave,” Felder said. “I was pretty dumbfounded why the vote couldn’t take place a day or two before the Sabbath.”
Felder, though a Democrat, is a social conservative who caucuses with the Republicans.
With the abortion issue not coming up for a vote by mid-afternoon that Friday, he consulted with a rabbi on how to proceed.
“I was told because abortion is an issue of life and death, I was compelled to stay and cast a vote,” Felder recalled.
When Felder didn’t leave, Sen. Jeff Klein, head of the four-member Independent Democratic Caucus, finally brought the amendment up for a vote at 4:50 p.m.
Felder voted no, and the bill failed to garner the 32 votes needed to pass. Felder then raced to get home before sundown.
The abortion-rights measure was proposed by Gov. Cuomo. Up to that point, Klein, who is part of the power-sharing majority with the GOP, was getting hammered by women’s-rights groups, the governor and regular Senate Democrats for failing to push the measure.
The IDC and the regular Senate Democrats denied that they were scheming to wait out Felder.
Staten Island Sen. Diane Savino, an IDC member who was floor leader during the vote, said, “Why would we conspire with the Senate Democrats?”