KIRYAS JOEL — It came smack in the middle of the High Holy Days: another court decision to roil the feuding factions of Satmar Hasidim.

The latest issue was a former apartment in the main synagogue in Kiryas Joel that dissident community members have used for more than 25 years for their own worship — an unlikely haven for opponents of the village's chief rabbi, right inside his symbolic headquarters.

On Sept. 22, between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, a state appeals court ruling on a lawsuit involving the dissident synagogue affirmed that its congregants — known as Bais Yoel Ohel Feige — must belatedly seek approval from the village to use the former residence as a sanctuary.

The main congregation, Yetev Lev, took that as its cue to order the outpost vacated and then to shut off its electricity, water and sewer service, which happened on Oct. 1 on the eve of the weeklong holiday of Sukkot.

"The Congregation will not provide utility services to an illegal, unapproved use which is now subject to a court injunction," its attorney, Richard Mahon II, warned in a letter.

Outraged and determined, opponents tapped electricity from a neighboring property and ran a hose to their synagogue for the essential hand-washing that precedes prayer. But they hit an obstacle when a truck driver delivering portable toilets to their shul was ordered away.

That's when the sacred turned farcical.

Enter one Joseph Waldman, a onetime dissident firebrand who has largely been absent from Kiryas Joel's internal squabbles of late, and who prays three times a day at the dissident synagogue.

A YouTube video shows Waldman, who commandeered the potty truck, defiantly driving it to the synagogue entrance, where he and his fellow congregants unloaded the toilets and dragged them inside a fence.

He later seethed about the attempt to close the shul, which was bequeathed to his group years ago by the late wife of Satmar rebbe and founder Joel Teitelbaum.

"They are barbaric, un-Jewish," he said. "No religion in the world would do this."

Equipped with improvised utilities, dissidents continued using the synagogue during Sukkot last week, but their Planning Board application still looms, and more legal fighting is certain.

[email protected]