Shannon Mullen

@MullenAPP

TRENTON - In a ruling that could have implications for other zoning disputes tied to Lakewood’s expanding Orthodox Jewish community, a federal judge Friday cleared the way for a Talmudic academy that was bitterly opposed by residents in Ocean Township.

U.S. District Court Judge Rita Freda L. Wolfson said the township’s Zoning Board of Adjustment violated federal law when it voted April 26 to deny a use variance to Yeshiva Gedola Na’os Yaakov, a post-secondary religious school for Orthodox men ages 18 to 22 that’s currently renting space in Lakewood. The school sought to relocate to a larger, existing school building at 1515 Logan Road with enough room to provide housing for up to 96 students.

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In her order, Wolfson limited the academy to no more than 80 students, all of whom will live on-site. None will be allowed to bring motor vehicles on the property, except on a temporary basis.

Township officials were not immediately available for comment on the ruling.

A broader impact?

The federal law in question is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Person Act of 2000, which protects houses of worship and other religious institutions from unduly burdensome or discriminatory land use restrictions.

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Better known as RLUIPA, the act also is being invoked in similar, pending appeals involving Orthodox applicants in Toms River and Howell, and it may come into play in a developing zoning dispute involving a proposed Talmudic boarding school in the Cliffwood Beach section of Aberdeen. A public hearing on that application is set to resume Sept. 7.

“Each case is unique, but the current case will help resolve the other two,” predicted the yeshiva’s co-counsel, Donna M. Jennings of Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer, Woodbridge, referring to the Toms River and Howell appeals.

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Those two cases are being handled by the yeshiva’s lead attorney, Roman P. Storzer, of Storzer & Associates in Washington, D.C., who welcomed Wolfson’s order Friday.

“Zoning regulation should never be used as a tool to accommodate the unreasonable fears and prejudice of small-minded individuals desperate to keep a certain population out of their neighborhoods,” Storzer said in a prepared statement.

“Unfortunately, this has become all too common in New Jersey. In a rare bipartisan effort, Congress had enacted legal protections against this type of bigotry and we will seek to have these rights enforced where they are threatened.”

In Ocean Township, the zoning ordinance explicitly prohibits religious schools beyond grade 12 from operating anywhere in town, while it allows for secular post-secondary schools, including art schools, dance schools and business schools, according to the yeshiva’s lawsuit.

Anti-Semitism alleged

As has happened in Toms River, Jackson and other communities in the Shore area in recent years, Yeshiva Gedola’s application to the zoning board, originally submitted on June 11, 2014, met with fierce and well-organized community opposition.

The crowd was so large at some of the nine scheduled public hearings that the meetings had to be postponed for fire safety reasons. At one point, a banner plane flew along the beachfront bearing the rally cry, “NO DORM ON LOGAN ROAD," according to the yeshiva's federal lawsuit.

Meanwhile, some posts on social media took on an ugly, anti-Semitic tone.

In its lawsuit, the yeshiva contended that the zoning board's denial stemmed from "animus" toward Orthodox Jews and "unsubstantiated, undefined and biased fears about the men attending the yeshiva." As detailed in the lawsuit, Orthodox Jews were referred to in some online comments as “locusts,” “dirty,” “religious zealots” and “long coat gangsters” who belonged to a “cult.”

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At the same time, other opponents of the project, who raised concerns about safety and the tax-exempt status of the property, chafed at the implication that they were motivated by religious hatred or bias.

“Ocean Township has a fairly high percentage of Jewish families living in it, probably a higher percentage than in the general population. Yet until this group came along there were never any issues between the Jewish community and the other religious groups in Ocean,” Logan Road resident Robert R. Drummond wrote in an email to the Asbury Park Press earlier this year.

“I am sure I will now be called bigoted because I disagree with them,” he added.

A subtext of the opposition to the project was the fear that Ocean Township could become, as some have said, “another Lakewood.” Under RLUIPA, however, such fears can’t be the basis for zoning decisions, said Perry Dane, a Rutgers constitutional law expert who specializes in religious issues.

The law requires local communities to have a “compelling interest” to justifying barring a particular religious group from coming into a town, and all groups are to be treated equally, he said.

“Yes, there are powerful protections (in the law), but they are necessary ones,” Dane said.

Dane called a community’s desire for “things to remain more or less the same” a “temptation” that “runs smack up against what are the religious rights of those groups.”

In the end, such disputes "are ideally going to have to be resolved by people getting to know each other,” Dane believes.

“One of the sad pieces of this is the process of litigation, I think, makes that more difficult,” he said, “because you wind up with these folks seeing each other as adversaries.”

Contributing: Staff Writer Dan Radel

Shannon Mullen: 732-643-4278; smullen4@gannettnj.com

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