A Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox sect seeking to create an Orthodox Jewish community in a New Jersey township accused township committee officials today in a court suit with blocking the project for discriminatory reasons.
The suit was filed by the Yetev-Lev congregation in Superior Court in Morristown against the Mount Olive Township Committee. Mount Olive is about 10 miles northwest of Newark.
The suit asked the court to permit the Hassidic sect to file the required municipal performance bond and to enjoin the township “from interfering with the orderly development and construction of the project. ” The suit accused the Township Committee of being “motivated by considerations regarding the nature and ancestral characteristics of the persons who were to inhabit the residences” and not by considerations of zoning or planning.
George E. Dakis, Mayor of Mount Olive and one of the three members of the committee, called the suit a surprise and the charges “false, the furthest thing from the truth.”
Most of the members of the sect live in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and about 1,200 of them plan to move to the proposed self-contained Orthodox community because of urban renewal projects in the Williamsburg section. They formed a corporation, the Satmar Association, Inc., which jointly filed the suit with the Glen Rob Associates of Fair Lawn, N.J.
The Satmar Association bought a 500-acre tract for a reported $850,000. A projected $20,000,000 development was to include 368 homes, a shopping center, a synagogue, a day school and ritual bathing establishments. The congregation lived for more than 100 years in Satmar, Rumania until Hitler seized the country and the members were scattered through concentration camps.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
