Alabama Jewish family faces harassment over school prayer.

Wayne and Sue Willis, a Jewish family living in rural Troy, Ala., say their four children are being harassed in the public schools because of their non-christian faith.

The Willis family are the only Jews in Pike County, and they say the public schools are saturated with fundamentalist Christian dogma. The couple has listed numerous examples of the harassment of their four children.

According to Sue Willis, her 14-year-old son, Paul, was disciplined for disrupting class by being forced to write an essay on "Why Jesus Loves Me." The couple's 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, had nightmares for a week after a fire-and-brimstone preacher lectured at the school about hell.

The Willises say Paul was ordered to remove a Star of David from his lapel and that one occasion a teacher, responding to Sue Willis' complaints, remarked, "If parents will not save souls, we have to." Paul and his brother, David, have been taunted as "Jew boys" and have had swastikas scrawled on their lockers.

"Every day that I send my children to Pike County Schools, I wonder if I am sending them into a war zone," Sue Willis told The Washington Post. "The moment one event is over, a worse one follows on its heels .... My children are growing up believing that America is a caste society and they are untouchables -- except for the purpose of getting beat up."

Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, the couple is suing the school system. The suit demands that various Christian practices in the schools be stopped and accuses the school system of persecuting the children for being Jewish.

School officials have disputed the Willises' account. "I'd say 95 percent or more of our children have never come in contact with a Jew or anything other than Christianity," said John R. Key, Pike County School Superintendent. "Most have never heard of a swastika. I can't comment on some of the behavioral problems, but most of what I'm getting from the teachers is that it's a two-way street. Sometimes children, and I'm not saying these, bring these things on themselves. The teachers try to prevent it, but if you have kids who brag and talk, other kids are going to do things to them."

ACLU officials insist that school officials will have to take steps to correct the problems. "We are still hearing in Pike County, We will excuse your children from religious exercises,"' said Pamela Summers, an ACLU volunteer attorney. "Well, religious exercises shouldn't be going on."

In other news about religion in public schools:

* Americans United and the American Jewish Congress have filed a joint brief before a federal appeals court asking it to strike down coercive prayers at public school graduation ceremonies.

The brief, filed in the Doe v. Madison School district case, challenges a policy at an Idaho school that permits students to discuss any topic -- including religion -- during graduation. The school district passed the policy to get around the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on mandatory religious worship at graduation. A lower court upheld the policy, and the case is on appeal before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition that trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student or his family," reads the brief. "Students in such institutions are impressionable, and their attendance [at graduations] is involuntary."