http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070130/NEWS/701300313
By Oliver Mackson
January 30, 2007
White Plains — A federal civil rights lawsuit filed earlier this month has echoes of a decade-old dispute between rival factions in the Satmar Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel.
Keren Chasanim, a charitable organization based in Kiryas Joel, contends that it nearly lost a building to a foreclosure sale because of more than $15,000 in unjustified sanitation fees.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court, contends that the issue behind the fees is a dispute between Kiryas Joel's dominant governing faction and a group of religious dissidents.
The suit names Mayor Abraham Weider and Village Administrator Gedalye Szegedin as village officials who are treating the directors of Keren Chasanim in "an inferior and hostile manner." In the case of the trash fees, the suit contends that Keren Chasanim opted out of village trash service.
The charity wound up having to pay the money to avoid having its $800,000 building on Garfield Place go into foreclosure, according to the lawsuit.
Both sides said yesterday that they hope to resolve the dispute without further court action. But Szegedin said the charity's building on Garfield Place has a mix of homes and businesses, and that "residential projects can't opt out, only commercial and industrial projects can opt out. There is not a single other residential building that has opted out in Kiryas Joel."
Michael Sussman, the Goshen lawyer representing Keren Chasanim, said that the Kiryas Joel administration hasn't been responsive to attempts at keeping the case out of court. Sussman describes the charity's mission as donating food to needy families in Kiryas Joel.
The suit claims that the governing faction in the village has refused to send representatives to meetings of a Community Relations Board that was created 10 years ago after another dispute between members of a dissident synagogue and the village's dominant synagogue. Some of the dissidents from the 1997 case are involved in Keren Chasanim.
"I had hoped that we would be able to resolve this," said Sussman, who represented the dissidents in the 1997 case that led to the creation of the Community Relations Board.
Alluding to the 1997 conflicts, Sussman said, "I hope we're not going that far back, but there certainly are rumblings."
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