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PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — An effort to stand behind Jewish law has failed to shield the parents of accused baby-killer Amy S. Grossberg from giving testimony that may incriminate their daughter.

The president judge of the Delaware Superior Court has ruled that Alan and Sonye Grossberg of Wyckoff, N.J., must appear before the state's attorney general to answer questions about their private conversations with their daughter — despite the fact that such testimony would not be permitted in a Jewish court.

Grossberg and her boyfriend, Brian C. Peterson, both 19, have been charged with first-degree murder by abuse or neglect in the November 1996 death of their newborn son.

The pair stand accused of dumping the infant's body in a trash bin behind a motel in Newark, Del., where Grossberg was attending her first year at the University of Delaware.

In July, her parents were served with subpoenas summoning them before the Delaware attorney general to disclose everything their daughter has revealed to them about the incident.

In November, the family's attorneys filed a motion in the Delaware Superior Court in an attempt to quash the subpoenas on religious grounds.

They argued that the Grossbergs are Conservative Jews and, as such, are protected by halachah — Jewish law — from having to give testimony against their child in any legal proceeding.

Their brief included an affidavit from Rabbi Joel Roth, Finkelstein professor of Talmud and Jewish law at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, citing the ancient halachic statutes of the Mishnah, the 12th-century code of Maimonides and the 16th-century code of the Shulchan Aruch.

"Under Jewish law, a mother and/or father are not allowed to give testimony against their child in any legal proceeding," wrote Roth, a member and former chair of the Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.

To force the Grossbergs to testify against their daughter, the attorneys argued, would thus infringe upon the parents' First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion.

However, in late January, Superior Court Judge Henry duPont Ridgely denied the motion. "While the specific issue raised here has not been addressed before in Delaware," Ridgely wrote in his 13-page opinion, "the preference for using neutral principles of law rather than religious doctrine to decide matters before the courts in clear."

The judge cited a 1978 New Jersey case, United States vs. Braunstein, in which the court rejected an argument similar to the Grossbergs'.

"`Compliance with secular law in a secular court does not infringe [upon] the free exercise of his religion,'" Ridgely wrote, quoting the Braunstein decision. "It does not oblige him to alter his beliefs, even though it may compel him to do an act contrary to those beliefs.

"In this case, because it is the Grossbergs' freedom to act, not their freedom to believe, which is implicated by any testimony about their daughter," the judge wrote, "this Court finds that the Grossbergs' freedom to act must yield to the compelling state interest in hearing everyone's evidence."

Ridgely's ruling also rejected the Grossbergs' claims that testifying about private conversations with their daughter — or about what they had told their attorneys regarding those conversations — would violate a parent-child privilege or attorney-client privilege.

Asked to respond to the ruling, Philadelphia attorney Jack L. Gruenstein, one of three attorneys representing the Grossberg family, said, "There's a gag order, so I really can't comment on the judge's opinion."

He added that he had no knowledge as to when Alan and Sonye Grossberg would have to answer to the subpoenas.

"I imagine," he said, "the attorney general will notify us as to the date they want the Grossbergs to appear."