  A successful interpretation of the cross sections for elastic and inelastic
vector meson production can be made if one assumes the underlying dynamics to
be governed by hard partonic subprocesses. Extending these partonic approaches
to longitudinally polarized electron-proton collisions, we estimate the
expected production asymmetries at the HERA collider. The anticipated
statistical errors on these asymmetries mostly turn out to be larger than the
asymmetries themselves, such that an experimental observation of these
asymmetries at HERA looks not feasible.
