Leaning forward on a straight-backed chair in the place he calls his living room, Rabbi Avraham Bernstein was adamant.

"This is not a temple," he said. "It is my private house. I don't want it to be a temple, because it is my house."

In an excited voice, his attorney, Gerald Marks, was equally insistent. "This 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 the municipal government in Freehold Township has said otherwise, issuing Bernstein a summons last April for "conducting a house of worship at the home" and not seeking a conditional use permit.

The dispute is shaping up as a test case of religious freedom (if you ask Bernstein) vs. the municipality's responsibility to uphold its zoning ordinances (if you ask the township).

The British-born rabbi, a member of the Chabad-Lubavitcher hasidic movement, lives in the house with his wife and their eight children.

"I am a Chabad rabbi that lives in this house. A Chabad house is a very vague term," he insisted.

In fact, Bernstein commutes seven miles each workday to a Chabad House in Manalapan, where he runs a day camp and after-school and evening "social events for kids."

"He does hospital visits. He does prison visits. All of that is done outside of here," added Marks. "He lives here."

But he also leads weekly Shabbat and occasional holiday worship services in the room in which he was interviewed.

Behind him, an ark, a bima, and shelves filled with leather-bound religious books coexist with stacks of chairs and a baby's plastic swing.

"The township has no obligation to give me a permit" for conditional use of his home as a house of worship, said the rabbi, declaring he was "absolutely" afraid it might reject such an application.

"We don't want to apply," said Marks emphatically. "We want to pray, and we don't want to convert this building into a structure that is primarily used for prayer. It's a house. There are eight children here. I'm not aware of any church or a temple or a synagogue or a mosque where people regularly sleep, brush their teeth, and eat three meals a day."

Such reasoning puzzles two legal scholars at Rutgers University's School of Law in Newark.

Professor Frank Askin, who directs the school's Constitutional Litigation Clinic, told NJ Jewish News, "I really don't know what's going on. If he filed a claim under RLUIPA" —the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which protects the rights of religious property —"he would have a very good claim. I don't understand why he doesn't do that."

Cynthia Blum, a professor of federal tax law, said, "It doesn't make any sense to me. I do not see any tax reasons for this. It would seem to me that a house of worship would be on tax-free land."

The Bernstein family has lived in the house on busy Stillwell Corners Road since 1998. Through the years, they have drawn complaints from several neighbors.

Neighbor Mary Ellen Sacco's screened-in porch stands back-to-back with the Bernsteins' yard. "We bought the property 11 years ago because of the big backyard, but we don't use it much on weekends anymore," she told a visitor. "It's because of their services —the traffic, the foot traffic, and the amount of people in their yard. The noise level has really escalated during the day on Saturdays."

"This is a residential neighborhood," said her husband, Ben. "That's why we bought here, and we'd like it to remain that way."

Other neighbors have similar complaints.

"I have nothing against him praying in his home. It's when he brings 15 or 16 or more of his friends, constantly, religiously, that's what I have a problem with," said Paul Sweda, one of the Bernsteins' neighbors, in a Sept. 6 interview on WWOR-TV News.

Marks is unswayed.

"Noise complaints are a ticketable offense," said the rabbi's attorney. "If there was a problem, no one has ever called. These are all unsubstantiated assertions."

Bernstein recounted that a police officer once responded to a neighbor's complaint. "He said, ‘The amount of noise you are making over here is no problem.' I have a good relationship with my neighbors. They are really very nice people."

In a timeline of events surrounding the rabbi's property provided to NJJN by Duane Davison, the Freehold township attorney, one entry on Oct. 1, 2006, cited "the ‘Chicken Thing,' a Yom Kippur ceremony in which "the rabbi ‘sacrifices' the chickens in a religious ritual."

Confronted by that allegation, Bernstein and his attorney roared with laughter.

"That has never ever happened that we have sacrificed or killed any chickens over here. There is a form of charity before Yom Kippur called kaparos," the rabbi said. "You make a prayer over the chickens, and the chickens are sent to a slaughterhouse, and the chickens are slaughtered and given to charity afterward. It is one night a year before Yom Kippur."

Rather than file for a permit that would acknowledge his home is a house of worship, Bernstein filed a lawsuit in State Superior Court in May. It charged that the township is "prohibiting him from practicing his religion."

Between June and August, the township trained a surveillance camera on his property from a window in the town hall just across the street. It operated during the hours of Shabbat to count the people attending services "so we could see what the numbers were," said Davison.

This time, Bernstein filed suit in the United States District Court for New Jersey, charging the local government's camera was violating the civil rights of his family and his congregants by placing them under surveillance.

"They put it up to harass me and to harass the people who come in here," said Bernstein. "They have no right to profile a group of Jewish people coming to a rabbi's house."

As the lawsuits work their way through the legal system, Bernstein was asked if his life has been made hellish by the years of conflict.

"Knowing that the government is looking down your back —you have a group of people in the government who are clearly out to get rid of you." But, he added, "I don't want to play the anti-Semitic card."

Neither do his neighbors.

"I want to make it clear that this does not have anything to do with anti-Semitism —absolutely," said Mary Ellen Sacco, who said her three children have been playmates of the Bernstein youngsters. "I think they are lovely people."

But, she said, "this has no bearing on the fact that it is a synagogue. Whether it be a Catholic church, a Presbyterian church, a mosque, I don't care. It doesn't need to be there. It is a home and it needs to remain a home."