News Brief

Rabbi Joseph Mordcholowitz paces triumphantly today up and down a room in his synagogue at 674 East Second street, Brooklyn, happy in the knowledge that American justice stands solidly behind the right of Jewish orthodoxy to settle wherever it chooses.

For only the day before Justice Peter P. Smith, in Supreme Court, Brooklyn, denied a motion by George H. Miller, 664 East Second street, to restrain Rabbi Mordcholowitz from operation his synagogue.

Miller said he was acting on behalf of himself and his neighbors, who compained that the synagogue was a nuisance; while the rabbi said emphatically, for himself and his friends who prayed with him, that Miller was greatly mistaken.

Justice Smith upheld Rabbi Mordcholowitz.

The trouble started several months ago, Rabbi Mordcholowitz declared yesterday, when he was teaching Hebrew to young men and women at the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center, 490 Ocean parkway, Brooklyn. A reverent man, recently arrived from Palestine, Rabbi Mordcholowitz looked sadly upon the current American scene and discovered that orthodoxy was suffering a severe blow.

OH, THE YOUNGER GENERATION

“In the first place,” he said in Yiddish, “I don’t favor the way many of the young ladies in my classroom were dressed–or undressed. They revealed their limbs. Furthermore, boys and girls prayed together, which is unconstitutional, orthodoxically speaking.”

One thing led to another. Rabbi Mordcholowitz soon said farewell to the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center and, gathering together several men who had views on orthodoxy conforming with his, rented the house at 674 East Second street and proudly displayed a sign without that Hebrew could be learned within according to the precepts laid down by Rabbi Mordcholowitz’s ancestors back more than twenty generations.

That was all well and good until neighbors began to resent the sign outside. They told him the synagogue brought property values on the street down. Miller, who brought the complaint to court, stated that somebody even was ready to rent an apartment in his house, which had been vacant, but had decided against it at the last moment after noticing the synagogue a few doors away.

Last month neighbors took out an injunction against his synagogue on the grounds that East Second street, Brooklyn, was in a restricted neighborhood, and that therefore a synagogue ought not to be allowed to exist there. But the court decided that, what with delicatessen stores, tobacco shops and fish markets in the vicinity, nobody could rightfully object to a synagogue.

So, instead of restricting the rabbi, the court restricted the neighbors from taking out any more injunctions. That was a month ago.

Today and for a long time to come the sounds, resembling a murmuring stream, of young and old people studying Hebrew can be and will be heard in Rabbi Mordcholowitz’s modest synagogue on East Second street.

And the sign outside has just been cleaned and polished.