Rabbi Avraham Bernstein, right, with his former attorney, Gerald Marks, in the living room of Bernstein’s Freehold home in September 2007, where a child’s swings shares space with an ark and a bima.
Photos by Robert Wiener
July 31, 2008
Despite months of protest from Rabbi Avraham Bernstein, the Zoning Board of Adjustment in Freehold Township decide unanimously that the Lubavitcher rabbi is indeed operating a house of worship in his home on Stillwell’s Corner Road.
For more than a year, Bernstein and his attorneys have been feuding with township authorities, contending that the building is strictly a residence for himself, his wife, and their eight children.
Bernstein takes that position despite the fact that on Friday nights, Saturday mornings, and Jewish holy days, prayer services are held in his living room, where an ark and a bima coexist with stacks of chairs and a baby’s plastic swing.
“This is not a temple,” Bernstein told NJ Jewish News during a visit to the building in September 2007. “It is my private house. I don’t want it to be a temple, because it is my house.”
His former attorney, Gerald Marks, insisted at the time that “it is not a cathedral. It is not a mosque. It is not a synagogue in the traditional sense. A synagogue is just a place to gather.”
But on July 24, the zoning board said otherwise and ruled that the house met the definition of a house of worship.
“If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it probably is a duck, and without question, this is a duck,” zoning board member William Nero said, according to a report in the Asbury Park Press.
The backyard of the Bernstein home as photographed from the house of his neighbor, Mary Ellen Sacco, in September 2007.
Neither Bernstein nor Vincent Manning, the rabbi’s newly hired attorney, attended the July 24 meeting.
“I did object to the board voting and notified them in writing,” Manning told NJJN. “I don’t think what they are doing is lawful, and I don’t want to be seen to be participating in something I don’t think should be occurring.
“‘House of worship’ is a technical term,” he contended. “The principle developing here is the state can’t be in the business of telling people what they are doing is establishing a house of worship as they define it. Why do you need state approval to perform religious rituals in your home? The city of Freehold seems to think that you do.”
The board vote gave Bernstein 45 days to appeal its ruling, but Manning said he is unsure whether that will happen.
“Where do we go from here? I am not certain where the matter goes from here,” he said.
Asked what the zoning board intended to do next, its attorney, Dennis Galvin of Jackson Township, said, “Nothing. There is nothing the zoning board can do.”
“The board tried to be as objective as possible based upon the information that was presented,” Galvin said. “The rabbi could have put more of a case in. If his house was used as a residence and not as a house of worship he could have had an opportunity to present that. He chose not to do that.”
Citing Bernstein for a zoning violation “is up to the municipality,” Galvin said. “You would think they would do something.”
As of press time, the Freehold Township Committee had taken no action on the matter.
The zoning board ruling is being applauded by some of Bernstein’s neighbors, who have been complaining about noise levels since a year after he purchased the property in 1998.
Mary Ellen Sacco, whose backyard on Woodcrest Drive is adjacent to Bernstein’s, attended the meeting and was pleased at its results.
“My reaction is they made the right decision,” she said. “I think many of the neighbors were pleased. I think the legal process will run its course. We will leave it up to the courts to decide.”
She said there has been no change in the situation since September 2007, when NJJN visited the Bernsteins and their neighbors.
At the time, Sacco complained that her family didn’t use their yard much on weekends anymore.
“It’s because of the services — the traffic, the foot traffic, and the amount of people in their yard,” she said. “The noise level has really escalated during the day on Saturdays.”
Bernstein could not be reached for comment.
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