The board of the Beverly Hills Unified School District, which operates five schools that educate more than 3,000 students, voted unanimously on Aug. 29 to rescind its resolution—which it passed days prior—to display the “Jewish Israeli flag” at each district school during Jewish American Heritage Month, which is held in May.
The board voted narrowly, 3-2, on Aug. 26 in favor of a resolution to display Israeli flags during the month of May after spirited discussion, including suggestions from board members who voted against the resolution that it would endanger people to display the Israeli flag.
On Aug. 28, Alex Cherniss, district superintendent, invoked the same reasoning, “heightened safety concerns,” when he said that “until further notice, no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the state of California.”
The school district confirmed to JNS that the superintendent works for the board, rather than the board, which he appeared to overrule, working for him.
The board convened an emergency meeting on Aug. 29, during which it voted unanimously not to display Israeli flags. It stated that the superintendent’s directive limiting flag displays “was appropriate in light of recent threats and disruptions.”
“Given the volume of public attention, international media coverage and ongoing threats against district staff and students, it is both urgent and prudent for the board to adopt a clear, permanent policy defining what flags may be flown or displayed on district property,” it said.
At the special meeting of the board, Cherniss said he acted due to what he called “misinformation” about the district planning to fly Israeli flags from flagpoles. He said that the district received “inappropriate feedback from people from all over.”
The superintendent—who declined to answer questions from JNS at the meeting—said publicly that the resolution would have displayed Israeli flags inside schools. He said the revised resolution on Aug. 29 was an effort “to calm everybody down and make it very clear that when we fly the flags outside of our schools, it will be the U.S. flag and the flag of California.”
It wasn’t clear why the superintendent didn’t say publicly on Aug. 28 that Israeli flags would continue to be displayed inside during Jewish heritage month but that they wouldn’t fly on flagpoles. In his statement, he said that no flags, beyond the country and state ones, would be displayed at all on campuses.
Amanda Stern, a board member who voted against the resolution on Aug. 26, said at the Aug. 29 meeting that she received 480 “highly negative, vulgar, antisemitic comments.”
“It would have been very prudent to anticipate that such a key word as ‘flag’ would have been misconstrued, and it was unfortunately vague and it should not have been in there in the first place,” she said at the meeting.
Russell Stuart, one of the board members who voted for the resolution on Aug. 26, told JNS on Friday after the Aug. 29 meeting that the board expected the flags to be displayed “in classrooms, in hallways and places of that nature” at the “discretion of the schools, the principals, the teachers and the students” rather than on flagpoles.
“Our intention was to celebrate and protect and make Jewish students feel like they were being recognized,” he told JNS. “That’s the most important thing.”
“We have a predominant Jewish student population. We obviously know the geopolitics that are going on,” he said. “Antisemitism is at its height since World War II, and we wanted to make sure our Jewish students felt recognized and protected.”
The new resolution addresses “the official stance of the district, of when that first day of the month comes, we call our maintenance people and go, ‘alright, go post this and hang that over there,’” he said. “Our stance is now, nothing. We’re not going to hang anything.”
The resolution “does not stop children from making flags of Israel, wearing clothing, presenting them in the classrooms,” the board member said. He added that teachers and students are free to “celebrate anything they want.”
Cherniss had “the legal authority to override the board because of the amount of dangerous messaging that was coming in,” according to Stuart. “Some statements were made by email and some voicemails were made that were very dangerous.”
Teachers and parents “were getting scared,” he told JNS.
Stuart said that a school’s maintenance department was fielding angry phone calls from people who thought that the school was going to fly an Israeli flag on a flagpole.
He also told JNS that his daughter asked him, of an Instagram video, “Daddy, why do these people hate you so much?” People were “posting things about my daughter, my family and vile, vile things,” he said.
Stuart blamed journalists for reporting that the district intended to fly Israeli flags on flagpoles.
The superintendent called Stuart and told him that “things are getting really bad” and asked Stuart about making a unilateral decision, Stuart said. Stuart told him “OK fine, but we need an emergency meeting.”
Stuart thinks Cherniss “wanted to do something super fast” to “try and calm some of the waters.”
“It wasn’t popular with some people. It wasn’t popular with some board members,” Stuart said, but he thinks Cherniss acted “with the understanding that the board resolution was coming the next day.”
Cherniss’s decision hasn’t calmed things down, according to Stuart, who has received “the most hate” since Cherniss’s announcement on Thursday.
John Mirisch, vice mayor of the city of Beverly Hills, told JNS that Cherniss’s decision was “rash” and “showed a lack of grace under fire.”
“The notion that we should use safety to, in eight months, say we’re not doing something makes no sense at all,” he said.
“People who are triggered by displaying an Israeli flag during Jewish American Heritage Month don’t say a word about displaying Mexican flags during Hispanic American Heritage Month or Armenian flags during Armenian-American Heritage Month or the Pan-African flag during Black History Month,” Mirisch said. “That indicates the problem.”
The way to respond to “a tsunami of Jew-hatred” is through “Jewish pride,” he said.
Mirisch said that Friday’s resolution applies “across the board, including any other flags, including the LGBTQ+ flag” and is a “consistent” policy.
During the Tuesday meeting, board members who voted in favor of the resolution said that the board had passed a prior resolution for schools to display the pride flag and the Israeli flag should be treated similarly.
Sigalie Sabag, voted for the resolution on Aug. 26 and said that “this is a time right now that Jews are being killed and slaughtered on the street and threats are happening” and that “we need to stand up and not do what the Jewish Germans did in Nazi Germany. They were too scared to speak up.”
“We never said we were going to fly a flag,” she said at the Aug. 29 meeting. “It’s very sad that we came to this point.”
“We all came here in an emergency meeting, so that it can be said that there is a new resolution with no flags, so that everybody can understand there’s no flags being on a flagpole, flying, displayed or elsewhere on the district building,” she said.
“I just hope that the Jewish community doesn’t think that this is us backing down, it is far from it,” Stuart told JNS. (He noted that other parts of the resolution remain intact.)
“We’ve never done Jewish American Heritage Month ever,” he told JNS. “That month is going to be celebrated like they’ve never seen,” he claimed.
Dillon Hosier, CEO and national co-chair of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, told JNS that given the shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota on Wednesday, “we understand the superintendent’s decision to prioritize safety and stability on campus.”
“That said, the board’s intention to display the Israeli flag during Jewish American Heritage Month was a meaningful gesture of solidarity with Jewish and Israeli-American students facing heightened threats,” he said.
Hosier said that the new resolution “shouldn’t inhibit any student or family from recognizing Jewish American Heritage Month the way they want, and at least now the district is being consistent.”
