Joel EngelhardtCity Attorney Max Lohman expresses anguish over an antisemitism accusation after threatening to deck anyone saying that to his face.
The removal of a menorah years ago from a City Hall lobby has sparked an impassioned debate in Palm Beach Gardens, raising profound issues of antisemitism, the right to religious speech and city governance.
It has brought together longtime rivals Sid Dinerstein, a Republican who championed term limits years ago, and Eric Jablin, a Democrat who lost his seat because of term limits.
It drew attention to longtime City Attorney Max Lohman, who expressed frustration on Dec. 4 over an accusation of antisemitism. If anyone dared to call him an antisemite to his face, he declared, “You will probably find yourself laying on your back.”
It included a forceful defense from Ron Ferris, the longtime city manager, telling the City Council that to display a menorah outside a specially created free-speech zone is illegal and “you cannot direct us to do something that’s illegal.”
And finally in a second, emotional rebuttal on Jan. 8, Lohman expressed regret over his choice of words but also frustration over finding a way to respond to the indefensible.
“When somebody accuses you of that, where do you go? That’s kind of the problem with the discourse in our country, right? … You call somebody racist, you call them this, you call them that, then what do you have left? ‘I’m not’? — you have to prove a negative.”
Menorah removed in 2022
The menorah and an accompanying creche were quietly removed in 2022, a Dec. 9 city memo obtained by Stet News explained. The removal drew no public notice until Jablin brought it up under public comments at the Dec. 4 council meeting.
The memo showed that Ferris and Lohman decided to remove the menorah after a request from the Jewish Community Center for a city-sponsored Hanukkah celebration to match the city-sponsored Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.
The city said it explained to the JCC that it does not sponsor religious holiday events and that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1989 opinion, differentiated between a Christmas tree, which it ruled is not a religious symbol, and menorahs, crosses and creches, which it said are religious.
The exchange with the JCC spurred Lohman and Ferris to review a 2006 policy and quietly remove the menorah and the creche from the piano in the City Hall lobby.
The city continued to allow religious expressions of any kind in the free-speech zone initially at the Burns Road Community Center before it moved to Fire Station No. 61 across the street.
The decision was meant, Lohman wrote in the memo, “to avoid being required to include the display of other religious or anti-religious symbols that are antithetical to this country’s historical acknowledgment that there is a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in that God.”
The Dec. 4 council meeting
At the Dec. 4 council meeting, Jablin, a council member from 1992 until 2017, said he placed a menorah in the free-speech zone then stopped by City Hall, where he saw no menorah on the piano.
He pointed out that he had helped procure the menorah years earlier. It had been welcomed for years, and meant a lot to the city’s large Jewish population, he added.
“I need to know why you’re doing this. Now, if it’s a legal reason, fine, tell me it’s a legal reason, but you’ve defended other people’s rights in this city before, and you put money in back of it,” he said. “Why aren’t you doing that for the Jewish population in this city?”
Two former council members, Rachelle Litt and David Levy, who are running against each other and Heather Deitchman-Levy for a council seat in March, backed him up.
Mayor Marcie Tinsley asked whether the city had been sued over the menorah.
City manager’s response
Ferris responded that the city had not been sued but had been threatened “if we didn’t remove it, we would be sued.”
He went on.
“You know, it’s amazing that the three of you (an apparent reference to Jablin, Litt and Levy) sit there and talk about this menorah issue, this religious symbol, after years of being told that it’s illegal to do what it is you’re asking us to do.
“We took it down so that the city would not get in a lawsuit and protracted newspaper articles.”
Documentation Ferris sent to the council on Dec. 9 included letters in 2006 and 2007 from a resident and her attorney, urging city support for Christmas events. The Dec. 9 memo also summarized the 2022 JCC communications but did not include copies of those emails.
The memo included an administrative order signed by Ferris in November 2006 creating the free-speech zone.
“Keep in mind,” Ferris continued at the December meeting, “the city is very aware of its history, of its current population, and we try to be fair to everyone.”
He took credit for including a dreidel scene at the city’s annual Christmas tree-lighting in a city park and ordering an overpass be outlined in blue lights after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israelis by Hamas “in recognition of the struggle that was occurring in Israel.”
“So to come up here and paint the city as, whatever term you want to use, that we’re insensitive to that, I’m sorely disappointed in all of you for doing that.
“We’ve gone out of our way, and I don’t know how to tell you anything other than to display the menorah in any place outside the free-speech zone is illegal, and you cannot direct us to do something that’s illegal.”
City attorney’s response
But that didn’t end the conversation.
At the end of the Dec. 4 meeting, Lohman walked the council through the religious meaning of the menorah. He also left the impression that the removal followed a lawsuit threat, saying “we did receive a — it wasn’t a take it down or we’ll sue you, but it was pretty clear that it was a threatened lawsuit — and I can’t remember which organization it was, but we received a threat about the fact that we had the menorah on top of the piano.”
When asked later by Jablin to produce the letter, the city sent only the 2006-07 exchanges without reference to the JCC communications.
“There’s always somebody that’s going to complain about something and find something to be offended about,” Lohman continued, “and we’re always the lucky ones that seem to get people to come out of the woodwork and wander into our lobby and then complain about something. So we didn’t immediately remove it, but then it was decided that it would be wise not to put it back up the next year, rather than paying for a lawsuit.”
He told the council that he would have loved to have kept the menorah and the creche on the piano but said those items had to go in the free-speech zone.
“It is certainly not anything that is anti-Jewish or antisemitic or anti-Christian, I can assure you of that,” he said.
He added: “Not that I need to justify myself, but I know that it has been said by people that I am an antisemite, which I would dare someone to say it to my face, lawyer or no, police presence or no. If you are to say it, you will probably find yourself laying on your back.”
He concluded that he drafted resolutions supporting the Jewish community not just because it was his duty.
“I did it because I believed in it, and so I again, I dare anyone in this audience to call me an antisemite or to imply that the legal advice that I give this city has anything to do with antisemitism, I dare you. But pack a lunch, because I will not fight you with words.”
Dinerstein-Jablin unite
Word of Lohman’s comments spread, setting the stage for Jablin to be joined by Dinerstein, a longtime head of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, at the next City Council meeting.
Dinerstein, long a critic of Lohman, disputed Lohman’s advice to remove the menorah and urged the council to fire him, an action it did not take.
“Our city attorney is wrong, either through incompetence or malice,” Dinerstein said. “Our city attorney then used his faulty version of the applicable case law as a club to bludgeon the City Council and end all adult discussion.
“He then twice threatened bodily harm to anyone who exercised their First Amendment rights to make statements that he, the city attorney, found disagreeable.
“There is not a City Council in the country that would still be employing a staff member who threatened bodily harm to anyone,” he said. “I call on our five council people to fire our city attorney tonight before he takes away any more of our rights, or he follows through on his threats to harm us citizens.”
Jablin expressed surprise at the tone of the response from Ferris and Lohman to his Dec. 4 request for information about the menorah removal.
“I’ve always been nothing but respectful when it comes to my dealings with the city attorney and/or the city manager, and I would hope that despite any difference of opinion we may have, that we maintain that mutual respect. I’ve lived in the city for almost 40 years, and in that time, I’ve served on the City Council for more than 25 of those years, as a councilman, vice mayor and mayor. In that time, I’ve never been treated by or spoken to by any member of this city staff the way I was the last time I was here.”
As a matter of city policy, Jablin said, the council, not the city manager, should have made the decision to remove the menorah.
Another resident, Linda Stoch, cited court rulings to contradict Lohman’s reading of the law.
Damien Murray, who is running against Vice Mayor Dana Middleton for City Council, and Levy vowed to return the menorah to the piano if they are elected.
Deitchman-Levy, a council candidate who began monitoring the council after the April 2024 decision to lease Plant Drive Park to a nonprofit to build an ice-rink complex, said the issue pointed to the city manager’s repeated failure to keep the City Council and the public informed.
“This is not a new issue,” she said. “It’s one I recognized long ago, and it’s a pattern that has existed in the city for years. That is why it needs to be addressed as a system problem, not an individual one.”
Council’s Jan. 8 response
When Tinsley asked council members to weigh in toward the end of the Jan. 8 meeting, Middleton and Council Member Chelsea Reed both asked to speak.
Middleton asked for more discussion of actions that could expose the city to lawsuits and to discuss not only the menorah but the creche as well.
Reed, who leaves the council in April because of term limits, pointed out that the council has until December and that the decision shouldn’t be part of anyone’s campaign.
If a solution is not reached before she leaves the council, she said, “I know that our staff, our city manager and our city attorney will all work together with whomever is on council to find a way to make sure all voices are heard.”
Council Member Bert Premuroso urged a quicker timeline, a suggestion backed by Tinsley.
“Let’s get it done sooner than later and stop waiting and keeping this kind of self-inflicted issue in the public,” said Premuroso, who is retaining his seat in March without opposition. “I think we need to just resolve it and be done.”
Tinsley said she would like to see the menorah returned.
“We always prided ourselves to shaping the future, and setting a standard, and why should we not do that now?”
City attorney’s regrets
Premuroso circled back to Lohman’s comments during the December meeting.
“I think the comments last month were a little strong. … There is kind of a public sentiment that he’s a little over his skis on that,” he said.
He asked for an apology letter. “The bodily harm issue is something we should not be doing on this side of the aisle.
“On the flip side of that, the antisemitism comments, we have to defend Max on that. Because we are his bosses. And I’ve never seen or nobody’s ever told me that he’s that way, and we did not defend him last month as well. So I just want to put that out there as well, that Max, ‘We, in no way, think you’re that way. No way in hell.’ OK?”
Lohman agreed to write such a letter and explained how an accusation of antisemitism is impossible to refute.
“I do regret getting as emotional as I did,” he said.
“There is an individual who did accuse me of being antisemitic as it relates to removal of the menorah, which I found obviously particularly offensive,” he said. “And the person that said it said they knew when they said it that it wasn’t true but they would continue to publish that lie about me if that’s what it took to get the menorah back on the piano, as if that was my motivation for removing it.”
After the meeting, Lohman said the accusation did not occur during the Dec. 4 meeting. He declined to reveal who called him antisemitic.
He told the council that he believes there is a legal way to return the menorah and the creche to the City Hall piano.
“I’ve never said that they could not be displayed or that they were absolutely not permissible. As I said last week, what I said was that the reason that I have counseled against it is because, and it’s the reason that the city, back in ’06, established the free-speech zone, is that, it can give rise to other symbols, people demanding free opportunity to put their symbols up there.
“So there are ways to do it and I would be happy to look into it in more detail to try and come up with a methodology that will put us in the most defensible position possible,” he said.
He conceded that he worked to avoid public debate “to avoid the potential politicization of it, the news media of it” because it draws people who “want to come cause problems.”
And he expressed his frustration with fending off the attack on his personal beliefs.
“And so I do apologize for that. But it was, I think, quite obviously, it was not lost on anybody how deeply wounded I was.”
Editor’s note: The writer of this story, Joel Engelhardt, serves on the board of the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society, as does Eric Jablin.
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
