If a rabbi regularly holds worship services in his home, is his home a house of worship?

That question is at the heart of a dispute between Rabbi Avraham Bernstein, whose 10-member family resides just across the street from the Freehold Municipal Building, and the township.

In separate state and federal lawsuits, Bernstein is contending that the township is “prohibiting him from practicing his religion” and violating the civil rights of his family and those who gather at his home by placing them under video surveillance.

According to township attorney Duane Davison, however, the township is merely trying to uphold its zoning ordinances and to determine if in fact the house is being operated as a synagogue without the proper permits.

In May, the rabbi sued the township in New Jersey Superior Court after the township issued a summons saying he was operating a house of worship in violation of local ordinances, according to Bernstein’s attorney, Gerald Marks of Red Bank.

“It is a house, a rabbi’s residence. Yes, he has a Torah, he has an ark. Absolutely,” Marks acknowledged. However, he said, “We don’t operate a house of worship. We pray there, and we have a constitutional right to do that. Only a small area was used for worship, and it was only used on Fridays nights for an hour and Saturday mornings for two-and-a-half hours.”

But, said Davison, the rabbi could have avoided a summons by applying for a “conditional use permit” from the township. If approved, the permit would allow him to use his home as a house of worship.

The Bernstein family moved into the house on Stillwells Corner Road in 1998. According to the Chabad.org Web site, Bernstein is codirector with his wife, Zisi, of the Chabad of Freehold, a center affiliated with the Brooklyn-based Lubavitch hasidic movement. According to the Web site, which lists the Stillwells Corner address, its provides such services as religious school, burial services, holiday programming, and “Synagogue.”

The year after the family moved in, said Davison, the township “began getting complaints from neighbors concerning the level of activity going on.”

Davison said the town cited Bernstein for “conducting a place of worship in a residential zone.”

According to the citation, the rabbi had large groups of visitors to his home for weeknight study sessions as well as Shabbat services, triggering neighbors’ complaints about noise and parking problems.

Part of the contention has been over numbers, according to Davison.

“The rabbi said, ‘I have 10 to 20 people coming there.’ The neighbors say he has 50 to 70, and often 100, coming there. So, the question became ‘Who is right? Are the neighbors exaggerating?’”

In order to get an accurate reading, the township installed a video camera in a window of the Freehold Municipal Building, just across the street from the Bernstein house. Davison said it was intended to be used “for limited duration” and was in place from the beginning of June until the beginning of August.

According to Davison, the tapes showed that 35 to 50 people — men, women, and children — turned up at Bernstein’s home during Shabbat.

“It doesn’t bear out what the neighbors said, and it doesn’t bear out what the rabbi said, but the numbers are large enough to be problematic,” Davison said.

To Bernstein and his defenders, the camera was cause for the federal complaint filed Aug. 28 in the United States District Court for New Jersey.

The complaint alleges “a civil rights violation.”

“They are trying to chill religious observance at the rabbi’s house,” said Marks. “The videotaping will be a turnoff to some people. When I visit somebody’s house, that’s my business. That’s private. It is not government business. When you do this, and you only monitor one house, that’s prejudicial surveillance.”

Coming to Bernstein’s aid is the Rutherford Institute, a conservative, Virginia-based group that often represents Christian groups in church-state cases.

“If I set up a camera across from your house, you’d be concerned,” said John Whitehead, the institute’s president. “Here you have the government videotaping at specific hours a specific exercise at a person’s home. They are trying to put him in a cage. That’s exactly the way I feel about it. It is wrong, it is invasive, it is upsetting some of the people who want to come to participate in religious exercises. In America, those things are not supposed to happen,” he told NJ Jewish News.

Davison said such criticism of Freehold Township is unfair.

Portraying the township as “big, bad, ‘We’re out to crush them’ — nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.