Prominent community activist, politician and attorney Barry Silver dies at 67

Rabbi Barry Silver, a longtime prominent community activist, attorney and former state lawmaker, has died at age 67 from colon cancer. The temple he co-founded, Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, announced his death on Thursday.

Even when he was a boy, long before fighting for people’s rights to seek abortions, wear thongs or feed the homeless, future rabbi and attorney Barry Silver was already honing his lifelong craft of rallying public attention to causes he championed — in this case, properly recycling newspapers.

It was the 1960s in Stamford, Connecticut, when he and his four brothers convinced the city to start a recycling program separating newspapers from other trash, his brother Noah recalled. “We would scout the neighborhood and tell people to keep newspapers separate,” Noah said. “Once a week, we’d go downtown to another town to get those recycled.“

In 1992, about nine years after being admitted to the Florida Bar, Silver gained national media attention when he came to the defense of a thong-clad street hotdog vendor named Gloria Gonzalez.

After hearing complaints about Gonzalez’s cheeky attire, Palm Beach County Commissioners passed a law that year banning street vendors from wearing G-strings, thongs and pasties. She sued. Silver represented her.

But he didn’t just fight in county court, he made his case in the court of public opinion, too. He earned headlines when he sent a thong-clad process server to a County Commission meeting to inform them of the case against them. "Especially in cases involving a public entity, public opinion can have a dramatic effect on the litigation," he said at the time.

"For some reason, when people have a problem with authority or government, they hear about me," he said in a 1992 interview with The Palm Beach Post. "I try to represent groups, causes and individuals who need strong legal representation and might not be able to find it."

Before the year was out, a judge had overturned the dress code as unconstitutional. And Silver had been featured not just in local news, but nationally on the Phil Donahue Show.

In 1989, Silver represented the National Organization for Women when they sued antiabortion group Operation Rescue for breaking state racketeering laws protesting women seeking help at abortion clinics. By 1994, a judge barred protesters from the clinics and ordered Operation Rescue and other groups in the suit had to pay Silver $216,040.

In 2007, when West Palm Beach City Commissioners banned feeding homeless people, Silver sued the city, representing the nonprofit Food Not Bombs. The city repealed the law and settled with Silver for $40,000 and attorney Sherri Lynn Renner, who represented another nonprofit in the caes, for $60,000.

Silver sued the state in 2022 over the 15-week abortion ban

More recently, Silver filed suit against the state of Florida over abortion restrictions and put book banning front and center by proposing that if state officials are bent on pulling certain material from libraries the Bible should also be pulled from high school shelves.

In 2022, on behalf of about 150 members of his Boynton Beach-area synagogue, Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor, he filed a lawsuit against Florida over the 15-week abortion ban Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis passed that year.

“The act reflects the views of Christian nationalists who seek to deny religious freedom to all others, including fellow Christians, under the arrogant notion that only they are capable of understanding God's law and judgments and the religious views of all others are false, evil and not entitled to respect of constitutional protections,” Silver wrote.

A Leon County Circuit judge dismissed the suit that year.

Silver also filed a formal challenge in June to ban the Bible from Palm Beach County schools after reports from across the state of schools removing books because of the state's parental rights law, often referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay law,” which bars materials on sexual orientation and gender. Silver argued that the Bible contained matters on violence and sexuality. His challenge and appeals were denied.

Silver, a Democrat, was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1996, representing neighborhoods west of Boynton Beach and Delray Beach. One of his colleagues who represented the same area, state Sen. Ron Klein, remembered him as a “Bernie Sanders” type of politician, referring to the independent U.S. Senator from Vermont who advocates expanding Medicare to all Americans and canceling college student debt.

“Barry had a march-to-your-own-drumbeat personality,” Klein said. Both men and their colleagues in Tallahassee were on the same side on issues such as barring mandated prayer in school, Klein said. But in lawmaking, collaboration and compromise probably clashed with Silver’s personality, Klein said.

Both men shared a conversation where they joked they both had three strikes against them from what Kelin described as the more conservative north Florida lawmakers: They were lawyers, they were Jewish and they were from South Florida.

Silver lost reelection in 1998. "He couldn't get reelected because he wouldn't take money. Even his own party said, ‘You gotta take money.’ He said, ‘No because then they’ll tell me what to do.’”

Silver's memorial service will be held Sunday at Rubin Memorial Chapel on 7340 Boynton Beach Boulevard.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Community activist, politician and attorney Barry Silver dies at 67