Not In My BackYard?

I read this piece in last weekend's Long Island section of the NY Times with some interest, as I had blogged about the story a few months back. The article recounts the story of how a Chabad Rabbi, Rabbi Rafe Konikov, came to Southampton, one of the towns on the tony East End of Long Island, and set up shop. Of course, for a Chabad Rabbi, setting up shop includes setting up weekly services for his constituents in his home. And that is when things started to heat up in the town of Southampton.

"This is a center for Jewish life in Southampton," Rabbi Konikov, 36, said recently.

It is also the center of a dispute: whether his home should also be a house of worship. In 1999, after the family moved into the 4,000-square-foot house, which was purchased by the Chabad of Southampton, a nonprofit group, the first floor was reconfigured with a 1,100-square-foot sanctuary, making it the first Jewish house of worship in Southampton since the village was established in 1640.

Many of his neighbors are irate about the establishment of the synagogue, and are fighting it tooth and nail. The opposition group has hired lawyers, and has even gone so far as to compare those arguing in favor of the synagogue to "fanatics" who take "violent action in the name of God":

"It's essentially converting a small one-family home on an undersized lot to a full-blown religious center with all of its ancillary uses," said Daniel Palmieri, a partner in Reisman, Peirez & Reisman, the Garden City law firm representing the opposition group. Opponents have cited issues like parking, potential sewage problems, fire safety and traffic.

Kim White, a part-time Southampton resident and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, bought a house in 2001 on Hill Street, a mile from the Chabad, unaware that services were being held there. In August, Ms. White took out a full-page advertisement in The Southampton Press, a weekly, to run an open letter about the "high degree of ignorance surrounding the commercial enterprise at 214 Hill Street, also known as the Chabad."

"Wrapping oneself in a religious flag in the name of breaking laws smacks of fanaticism and irrationality," Ms. White wrote. "This is the same kind of mentality which provokes people to take violent actions in the name of God. Do the inhabitants of this village not understand that issuing a 'special exception' to one group invites other groups, whoever and whatever they may be, to follow suit?"

Strong words, of course. And it makes it all the easier to dismiss this battle as one between Orthodox Jews vs. everyone else - especially those who write Orthodox Jews off as religious fanatics. But that knee-jerk assumption would be ignoring a very salient point. Orthodox Jews are just as capable of rejecting the proposal of a shul being built on a neighboring property to theirs.

Case in point:

Just this week at the Shabbos table of friends, the conversation turned to a controversy that has been going strong in the Five Towns for quite some time now. It is over an age-old source of controversy in Jewish communities everywhere, the dreaded "breakaway minyan". Evidently, a group of young families in one of the neighborhoods that comprise the Five Towns decided, for whatever reasons, that the shuls that exist in their neighborhood do not meet the needs of themselves and their families. So they got together, put up some capital, and decided to buy some property on which to locate a new shul. Everything went along swimmingly, and the group managed to purchase what looked to them like a perfect piece of property, in a location that seemed ideal - complete with Orthodox neighbors who surely wouldn't have the inclination to object to a synagogue next door. Right? Wrong.

According to our fellow guests at the Shabbos meal, the group met up with fierce opposition from the Orthodox neighbors of the property in question - not once, but twice, on two separate properties, by two separate groups of neighbors. Apparently, the threats that were thrown about by those opposing the new shul, aimed at the group spearheading it, that would make your hair curl. The hostility was enough to make the group (as I heard it) break contract on two separate properties before finding a property with neighbors who were amenable to having a shul as a neighbor.

Obviously, when it comes to a shul, the NIMBY effect is not just an issue of anti-Semitism or anti-Orthodoxy . It cuts across all denominations and religions.