Saturday, April 03, 2010
Plans for a Synagogue Upset a Town
LIKE missionaries of yore, Rabbi Mendel Bogomilsky set out 20 years ago to establish a foothold for his faith in a wilderness of sorts.
Rabbi Bogomilsky is one of 4,000 emissaries of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitch Hasidic group, which has been setting up outposts across the globe to encourage more engaged Jewish observance. He put down stakes in Millburn, N.J., a genteel township with Reform temples and Conservative synagogues but no Orthodox house of worship.
“My continued motivation is the blessing I got from the rebbe,” he said, speaking of the group’s grand rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. “We are supposed to give of ourselves despite having lots of hard times or political opposition.”
In Millburn, the rabbi has conducted services out of two homes he owns, sometimes drawing 30 to 40 worshipers on the Sabbath and 150 on the High Holy Days, but also prompting repeated protests that he was disrupting his neighborhood’s suburban tranquillity. Now he wants to build a synagogue, and he has encountered strong resistance from Jewish and Gentile neighbors over his application for zoning variances.
Unrolling architectural sketches for a visitor, Rabbi Bogomilsky said he wanted to tear down his family’s home on Jefferson Avenue and a house next door that was donated by a supporter. He wants to replace them with a 16,000-square-foot, 144-seat Dutch colonial-style synagogue and social center, as well as a parking site for 50 cars. Since the two plots together total 1.8 acres, he needs a variance from the zoning board because the code requires houses of worship to be set on three or more acres.
More than 100 neighbors have banded together to block his request, calling themselves the Concerned Neighborhood Association of Millburn Township. They argue that the town’s leafy character would be violated by shoehorning an institution into this residential enclave.
James Welch, a retired Nabisco executive who lives next to the rabbi’s Jefferson Avenue home, said that he was bothered by periodic celebrations and fleets of parked cars, but that those annoyances were minor compared with the central issue — that a synagogue on so small a plot could open the door for day care centers or shelters to do the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/nyregion/04synagogue.html
Rabbi Bogomilsky is one of 4,000 emissaries of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitch Hasidic group, which has been setting up outposts across the globe to encourage more engaged Jewish observance. He put down stakes in Millburn, N.J., a genteel township with Reform temples and Conservative synagogues but no Orthodox house of worship.
“My continued motivation is the blessing I got from the rebbe,” he said, speaking of the group’s grand rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. “We are supposed to give of ourselves despite having lots of hard times or political opposition.”
In Millburn, the rabbi has conducted services out of two homes he owns, sometimes drawing 30 to 40 worshipers on the Sabbath and 150 on the High Holy Days, but also prompting repeated protests that he was disrupting his neighborhood’s suburban tranquillity. Now he wants to build a synagogue, and he has encountered strong resistance from Jewish and Gentile neighbors over his application for zoning variances.
Unrolling architectural sketches for a visitor, Rabbi Bogomilsky said he wanted to tear down his family’s home on Jefferson Avenue and a house next door that was donated by a supporter. He wants to replace them with a 16,000-square-foot, 144-seat Dutch colonial-style synagogue and social center, as well as a parking site for 50 cars. Since the two plots together total 1.8 acres, he needs a variance from the zoning board because the code requires houses of worship to be set on three or more acres.
More than 100 neighbors have banded together to block his request, calling themselves the Concerned Neighborhood Association of Millburn Township. They argue that the town’s leafy character would be violated by shoehorning an institution into this residential enclave.
James Welch, a retired Nabisco executive who lives next to the rabbi’s Jefferson Avenue home, said that he was bothered by periodic celebrations and fleets of parked cars, but that those annoyances were minor compared with the central issue — that a synagogue on so small a plot could open the door for day care centers or shelters to do the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/nyregion/04synagogue.html
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