פלארידע קארט שפארט צו ביהמ"ד כמעשה הרא"ט-דוד עקשיין בקרית יואל

"If you want to laugh and shout and clap, there's a big parking lot out there where you can do that," special magistrate Carolyn Ansay said in one of her many futile attempts to impose some kind of silent decorum on the large, restless and irrepressible crowd of retirees.

Some had arrived at 8 a.m. for the 10 o'clock hearing, which swamped the 320-person capacity in the hearing room, and caused county officials to open two extra rooms where a closed-circuit feed of the hearing was broadcast.

The crowd, resembling more of a studio audience than court watchers, provided a gasping, clucking, moaning, chattering, muttering soundtrack to the proceedings. A kind of Greek chorus, minus the Greeks.

When one of the lawyers tried to elicit testimony from one of the residents who was going to give his opinion on the matter - an opinion which apparently would start with a World War II story - Ansay brought things to a merciful halt.

"It's not open mic night," the magistrate said. "I can't start letting people give their opinions."

Magistrate seeks refuge

Ansay said it was hard enough trying to avoid getting waylaid by commentary during the breaks, an obstacle that forced her to seek a distant restroom.

Nearly all the crowd had come hoping to put an end to the practice of one of their neighbors, Issac Feder, who bought a second unit in Century Village and turned it into a place of daily prayer for Orthodox Jews.

The county, responding to complaints by neighbors, many of whom are Jewish, cited Feder for using a residential unit as a place of assembly, which would require a new certificate of occupancy.

Leaflets were passed out in Century Village to attend Wednesday's hearing, which was a continuation of a hearing postponed from earlier in the month.

The star of the day was clearly Harriet Bluming, the 91-year-old retired schoolteacher who received a thunderous round of applause after her testimony. Bluming lives across the hall from Feder's makeshift synagogue, and provided some key reconnaissance information from the vantage point of her kitchen sink.

"I watch because at my age I'm always going to the sink to take pills," she said. "I mean legal pills."

The case hinged on whether the prayer meetings Feder holds at his Golf's Edge apartment were the primary use for the condo. If he actually lived at Golf's Edge, then having daily prayer sessions wouldn't have triggered the county code enforcement action, Assistant County Attorney Amy Petrick said.

Feder's neighbors claimed he clearly lived in the Kingswood Building, and not at Golf's Edge.

"He never gets any mail in the mailboxes," Bluming testified. "But for the rest of us, that's an important part of the day when the mail comes."

Feder, 64, testified that he bought the second condo because a pair of strokes prohibited him walking to a synagogue on the Sabbath, so he thought he could use a nearby second unit to pray. When the county began its action against him last year, he bought a daybed for the second condo and said that he and some of his 10 children and guests have used the extra unit as a place to occasionally live.

He testified Wednesday that he slept "12 to 14" nights in his spare condo this year.

Foot traffic and cigarette butts

"There's a lot of coming and going," testified Golf's Edge neighbor Lloyd Zirker. "It's kind of like a Motel 7 ."

The makeshift synagogue puts a stress on the building's parking lot and swimming pool, and amounts to a public facility in a residential building, neighbors complained, as strangers come and go day and night.

Bluming, who is on the building's landscape committee, said some of the people who come there to pray with Feder smoke outside the unit and leave their cigarette butts on the lawn. And she's sometimes irked by the questions these visitors ask her.

"One of the women asked me why I don't go to services," she testified. "I said, 'Only in New York. I'm here on vacation.' "

Feder's lawyer, Esther Zaretsky, tried to establish that Bluming really didn't know who slept in Feder's Golf Edge unit because Bluming took her final pill of the day at 10 p.m.

"Do you usually go to bed after your last pill?" Zaretsky asked.

"I usually watch a little TV, then take care of myself," Bluming answered. "There's a lot to do when you get older."

In the end, the magistrate ruled that Feder's use of his spare condo violated the residential code, and she told him he had 30 days to stop holding prayer services there, or he would be fined $100 a day.

But for now, the outcome was already made moot by its timing.

Feder, who has a summer residence in Monroe, N.Y., has already left Florida for the season, and his lawyer said he will certainly appeal, and may even file a religious discrimination suit in federal court by the time he's back in Century Village for next season.

For now, though, Feder said his short-term plans were simple.

"I'm going to pray more," he said.

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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Century Village, FL - Condo's Turmoil over Makeshift Synagogue
Spills Over

A Jewish civil war brewing in Century Village took a road trip Wednesday afternoon to a Palm Beach County code enforcement hearing room, turning what is normally a sleepy venue of mostly empty seats into a mob scene of agitated retirees who tested both the limits of the building's fire code and each other's patience.

For weeks, residents of the condominium complex near West Palm Beach had been spreading the word to show up for the hearing on whether resident Issac Feder was improperly using one of the two condos he owns at Century Village.

Feder, 64, part of a small but growing sect of Orthodox Jews in Century Village, is a snowbird from Monroe, N.Y., who lives part of the year in a unit in the Kinswood building. But he owns another unit in the adjacent Golf's Edge building, which he and the other members of his religious sect have turned into a makeshift synagogue for the past two seasons.

Men dressed in traditional black garb and formal hats walk from other buildings in Century Village to conduct twice-daily prayer services in Feder's spare condo.

This has infuriated other condo residents, who are mostly Jewish but not Orthodox and don't want their building turned into an ultra-religious house of worship. And they've complained to the county, which initiated a code enforcement action against Feder.

"It's really not about zoning," said Sam Koenig, 64, an Orthodox Jew who lives in a different Century Village building and is sympathetic with Feder. "This crowd doesn't want this because it reminds them of an Eastern European shtetl, and makes them feel as if they're going back in time."

It wasn't hard to find confirmation of that opinion.

"I see their women davening and dressing like they're in Alaska," said Frances Merel, a Jewish resident in a nearby building. "I don't want to see it. They feel like the rules aren't for them. They're arrogant."

Her husband, Maynard, chimed in: "If they win, I'm going to turn my apartment into a mosque."

Village's 'greatest threat'

Jewish residents at Century Village talk freely about their condo community being overrun by the more zealous members of their own religion, whom they view as clannish and disrespectful of social norms - most notably, turning community pools into ritual cleansing baths.

"If they can get three or four people on the board, they can get control of a building," said resident Elaine Brown. "And then they can change the rules. This is the greatest threat to the Village we've ever seen."

Aron Sandel, one of the seasonal Orthodox Jews who lives in Century Village, says most of his critical Jewish neighbors are overreacting to people who are simply practicing their religion.

"We don't have weapons. No guns. Everything is quiet," Sandel said. "In order to pray, we need a minyan, and that's 10 men. Sometimes we have a hard time making the minyan."

The group has shunned the Orthodox synagogue outside the gates of Century Village. Last year, when the dispute began, Feder said he was too frail to walk outside Century Village to pray, so he used his spare condo as a gathering spot.

But he now says he sometimes lives in the spare condo, a claim that may be significant in the legal argument of his lawyer, Esther Zaretsky, but is scoffed at by his neighbors who showed up in droves on Wednesday.

"There was a big propaganda about this," Feder's wife, Judith said. "They want to show we are wrong."

Postponement — and groans

Golf's Edge president Cookey Courier, a Jewish snowbird from Michigan, helped spread the word about Wednesday's hearing with fliers advising residents to meet at the clubhouse and use carpools to get to the hearing.

The crowd overwhelmed the hearing room's capacity of 320 people. Villagers lined the walls, spread several deep on the wings and spilled into the hallways of the county's Jog Road building.

The fireworks, though, never really developed, because Feder's lawyer was able to postpone the matter to March 23, which brought groans from the audience.

"This is what they do," Courier said. "They postpone, postpone."

Carolyn Ansay, the special magistrate hearing the case, said she was sympathetic to all those who had packed the hearing room expecting a resolution.

"There's never been a code enforcement case that garnered the attention of this one," she said.

Maybe next time the county could find a bigger room, she told the crowd.

Marian Watnick, who was standing near the front, shouted a suggestion to the magistrate:

"What about the convention center?"

תוקן על ידי 1satmar ב- 28/03/2011 13:44:29

תוקן על ידי naroinele ב- 28/03/2011 20:30:28

תוקן על ידי משהלע ב- 28/03/2011 22:52:46

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