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Friday January 4, 2008

State Supreme Court dismisses Lipner suit

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

After more than five years of serpentine legal maneuvering, Rabbi Pinchas Lipner’s defamation suit against the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and its former president Richard Goldman appears to be all but finished.

In a 6-1 ruling released Dec. 24, the California Supreme Court tossed the Hebrew Academy dean’s $10 million suit, claiming he’d waited far too long before taking legal action in 2002.

Lipner’s lawyer, Paul Kleven, said he’d petition the high court for a rehearing, but acknowledged that such a move “doesn’t happen often.” Calls to Lipner were not returned.

The rabbi’s suit stems from statements Goldman made in a 1992 interview conducted by the Regional Oral History Office of U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

Forty pages into the roughly 100-page transcript (one of more than a dozen oral histories of former federation executives or presidents housed in the library), interviewer Eleanor Glaser queried Goldman about Hebrew Academy. Over the next page and a half, the federation president from 1981-82 made the following statements:

n “I think [Rabbi] Lipner is a person who doesn’t deserve respect for the way he conducts his affairs … I don’t think he is an honorable man.”

n “Anyone who would take children away from a school and use them to protest by sitting in at the federation offices is someone who doesn’t appeal to me.”

n “I remember a couple of occasions visiting the Hebrew Academy. When he would walk into the room, the children would stand at attention as if it were the Fuhrer walking in.”

Very few copies of Goldman’s interview exist; in order to read his statements about Lipner — prior to this suit — one would have had to venture to the Bancroft Library or visit the federation or Goldman himself. The interview is not available online.

Contacted by j., Goldman expressed satisfaction at the ruling and reiterated his disdain for Lipner: “A fellow like that doesn’t do the community a bit of good.”

In 2001 or 2002 an associate of Lipner’s discovered the interview in the library. When the rabbi filed suit, he claimed the statements tarnished both his and the school’s reputation, caused him emotional distress and damaged the school’s ability to elicit funds.

In 2004, Superior Court Judge Ronald E. Quidachay ruled that Lipner had allowed the one-year statute of limitations to lapse before taking action. Yet, in 2005, an appeals court found that the obscure Goldman interview was “inherently undiscoverable.” That led to an October 2007 hearing before the State Supreme Court, which, in last week’s ruling, echoed Quidachay’s sentiments, without touching on whether Goldman’s statements were defamatory or not.

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