Incumbents Reinstated in Bitter Crown Heights Community Elections

After a bitter campaign, the seven incumbents have been re-elected to the Crown heights Jewish Community Council by a wide margin.

Only about half the estimated 3,850 eligible voters turned out for the election, held Sunday.

The Crown Heights Jewish Community Council is charged with developing housing for the community, administering food programs and helping local eligible residents register for government aid, including Social Security and Medicaid.

Representative of the Honest Ballot Association, a neutral agency brought in to run the election, had no comment on the results.

“The community spoke as to who they believe to be the leaders” of the Lubavitch in Crown Heights, said Rabbi Yosef katzman, a member of the winning slate’s campaign committee.

The campaign, which was marked by charges of intimidation and claims by the incumbents that a vote against them was a vote against the rebbe, was really about more than the community council.

It was about who would speak for the Lubavitch community. Some of the seven incumbents are central players advocating the aggressive marketing of the rebbe as Moshiach, or the Messiah.

Their opponents advocated a more moderate approach to the late rebbe.

According to Katzman, losers are “the so-called leaders of Lubavitch like (Rabbi Yehuda) Krinsky, and the Hechts and some other people who have the title rabbi who live in the community who went against the bais din.”

Krinsky was the spokesman for and one of the chief aides to the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died last June. He also runs the network of emissaries who represent Lubavitch all over the globe.

The Hecht family is involved in the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education, which does charitable work for the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights.

Two out of the three rabbis on the influential bais din, or rabbinical court, endorsed the incumbents.

The challengers had forced the elections through a lawsuit brought on the grounds that the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council had not held elections in eight years, although its bylaws require that they be held every two years.

After a campaign in which one candidate dropped out of the race because he said his life was threatened, and in which those opposing the incumbents said that their car tires were regularly slashed, the challengers said shortly before the election that they would contest the results in court.

Rabbi Josef Spielman, who was re-elected as chairman of the community council, denied the allegations of threats and violence.

Fayge Rubenfeld, who was involved with the lawsuit forcing the elections and opposing the slate of seven, said that bringing the community’s rabbis into the election determined the outcome. “If the slate says that the rabbonim say people must vote, and must vote a certain way, they will. Of course they will,” she said.

Katzman said that if the challengers took the issue back to court they would face problems in Crown heights. “The community will have to find ways of letting them know if they don’t like the community let them go someplace else. How it will be manifested I don’t know,” he said. “If they go to court there will be some kind of backlash.”