Outlawing Shuls

It didn’t have to be this way. By all appearances, Linden, New Jersey, seems like an idyllic place to raise a chassidic family. It’s outside New York’s prohibitively expensive real estate market, with greener grass, and still within commuting distance of Brooklyn’s big kehillos and schools.

In 2017, after extensive research, and with the location for a beis medrash already identified, the Rebbe of Kosson moved to Linden with a community of followers.

Over the ensuing seven and a half years, the Orthodox Jewish community in Linden and surrounding Union County has grown quickly. Today, it numbers approximately 700 families, mostly chassidim affiliated with kehillos such as Kosson, Bobov, Rachmistrivka, Skulen, Satmar, Belz, and others.

“As with all young kehillos in New Jersey, in an effort to ensure peaceful living arrangements for all, the nascent settlement went far out of its way to develop cordial, friendly relationships with the local population, local community, and town and county elected officials,” reports Zalmen Katz, gabbai of the Kossoner Rebbe in Linden, Bonei Olam regional director, and community askan.

Sadly, it has become increasingly apparent that those efforts are not being reciprocated. The city began waging lawfare in the form of ordinances and restrictions on ordinary social interactions. It set out to make life intolerable for families adhering to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.

“At first, the legislation was unpleasant, but survivable,” Katz says.

Typically, when a municipality aims to prevent a particular population from thriving within its borders, it targets community centers. The nearby cities of Clifton, Jackson, and Toms River used this playbook, restricting houses of worship to ten-acre lots. At first, Linden seemed to follow the same script.

When the Kosson kehillah moved to Linden in 2017, local zoning law required houses of worship to be situated on lots of 25,000 square feet, at a minimum. The community’s application was approved without a hitch.

All too quickly, however, the zoning was changed to require a minimum of 75,000 square feet, limiting options to a handful of sites. It was then revised upward again to 90,000 feet, of which there are no lots in Linden. Combining smaller lots was outlawed. This made it impossible to get a shul approved within the city, forcing Jews to meet for prayer gatherings in homes.

This situation made Jewish life difficult, but not impossible. It meant organizing prayer meetings in taxed properties, forgoing shuls, and following onerous residential zoning rules, but life could go on.

But Linden wasn’t stopping there. The city council, which had not changed its zoning for decades, suddenly started fiddling with the rules like a bored teenager, pushing five changes in four years, manufacturing myriad minutiae designed to squeeze shuls and large families out of all available lots. These included shrinking setbacks three times, limiting buildable lot percentage from 40% to 30%, changing the footage needed on each side, and varying what could be put in setbacks.

Harassment Campaign

Over the next several years, the municipality intensified its campaign.

“Officials appeared to study Orthodox Jewish life carefully, identifying many features of living that apply uniquely to the demographic,” says another community leader, who declined to be named for fear of retribution from township officials. “They then systematically set out to outlaw each of these features of our lives.”

To squeeze large chassidic families, ordinances were passed to shrink the allowable living space in a home ever smaller. When families tried to add extra bedrooms in their basements, the city declared it illegal to sleep in a basement.

“Counterintuitively, the city council decreed that the larger a lot was, the smaller the house allowed on it could be,” says an askan. “How does that make any sense? It only makes sense if you’re trying to ban large families, prayer meetings, or shuls.”

When Jewish families needed to remodel their homes, city officials embarked on a campaign of slow-walking approvals, delaying permits and inspections, throwing up every conceivable roadblock.

The many buses the community uses to send schoolchildren to Brooklyn park overnight in Linden. The city began ticketing buses of Orthodox Jewish schools parked in any lot, while ignoring other vehicles ostensibly covered under the same ordinance.

Linden police began terrorizing school buses loaded with Jewish children, pulling them over to prevent them from circulating on certain streets, on the grounds that “the asphalt was not designed for high-volume traffic.”

Due to kashrus, holidays, and family size, frum families tend to take many more and larger meals at home, producing more trash than their neighbors. The city originally allowed families to purchase additional trash cans, above the minimum two, but rescinded that provision and demanded that all additional cans be returned (with a refund).

When Mayor Derek Armstead was approached by community members about this changes, he brushed off their concern, saying, “We don’t need your vote, anyway.”

The city’s campaign was not targeted solely at the chassidic community, either.

“In another case, the city challenged the compliance of our synagogue’s mikveh piping, part of an approved addition that was completed nearly 14 years ago,” wrote Rabbi Yossi Katz, rabbi of the Modern Orthodox shul in Linden, in a letter to the media. “Despite the passage of time and the fact that all permits were fully in order, the city has raised vague objections and refused to provide anything in writing.”

In the face of all this legislative debris thrown at Jewish residents, community members kept their cool and continued to search for common ground, looking for ways to build bridges. But the city kept to its separate path, both askanim report.

The chassidic community even pulled together for an evening of support for Mayor Armstead — even though he had fired ordinances at them like military ordnance — and raised $25,000 for his reelection campaign in one evening.

The mayor’s response? The very next morning, an array of spurious fines was slapped on community targets.

Lining Up

Over Pesach, the Linden City Council took the effort to another level. It proposed a series of ordinances imposing sweeping new restrictions that make Jewish life impossible.

“Before, we could make it work,” says Reb Zalman Katz. “Now, it was higiu mayim ad nafesh.”

The new ordinances were proposed before Yom Tov, but added to the council meeting agenda during the first days of Yom Tov. After Havdalah, askanim logged on to see that the agenda for the next day’s council meeting included a series of decrees seemingly underlining the message: Hashata avdei.

The city proposed altogether banning all residential uses of basements — a bathroom, bedroom, or Pesach kitchen would be forbidden, and basement ceilings could not be higher than six feet. Homes with four bedrooms had to have three on-premise parking spots at least nine feet wide, and the driveway could only be 16 feet wide — practically mandating a two-car garage, further eating into living space on lots as small as 4,000 square feet. Any home expansion or garage finishing would be illegal. Living space was officially limited, and the useless basements would count toward the calculation. Walkways, porches, air conditioning condensers, and other appliances counted as living space, and could not be placed in setbacks.

Understanding that these rules would shrink living space far below anything a chassidic family could tolerate and were clearly designed to drive them out, and there was no way to absorb these blows, the community mobilized to attend the council meeting — to express, by lawful attendance, their opposition to the proposed rules.

Close to 400 men, women, and children dressed in their Yom Tov finery packed the Linden City Hall. Buses volunteered to transport families, but no one was brought in from other towns.

“The community was very peaceful and cooperative,” Zalman Katz emphasizes. “No one said anything rude or contentious. We just showed up.”

Askanim communicated with the mayor and city councilmembers, asking politely for an explanation to the proposed new rules. Were there police incidents that prompted the change? Crime had gone down over the previous few years. Was there a fire safety hazard that had been identified? The fire chief was not aware of one. No explanation was forthcoming.

The mayor tried to placate the kehillah by telling them that the ordinances had been modified since they were posted to the website, and that a compromise could be reached. But nothing of significance has changed, and another draconian addition has even been added: a hard and fast limit on square footage of living space allowed per floor.

The city’s new offensive belied its claimed desire for compromise.

“Besides, why do we need to compromise?” one community leader asked. “What functional purpose do these rules serve, other than to persecute us? Why should any part of them last? They make no sense.”

Attendance at the meeting quickly swelled past the 181-person capacity of the chamber, but under the Sunshine Law, people could not legally be excluded. It was rescheduled for Friday at 12 p.m. at Linden High School’s 400-person auditorium. Again, it was filled past capacity. This time, officials illegally barred members of the community — even before the auditorium reached capacity — and passed the first reading of the ordinances.

Strong Case

How does Linden explain the rules? City Attorney Daniel Antonelli has ordered council officials to speak to no one about the proposals, and no explanation has been forthcoming. The single statement issued some months ago by Mayor Armstead referred obliquely to “preserving the character of the neighborhood.” But locals note that the mayor has pushed strongly for construction of a high-rise building featuring hundreds of low-income apartments, a land use that sounds… uncharacteristic.

“We really don’t want to have to fight the town,” Katz says. “We are residents of Linden, and we want to live here in peace. But we cannot live like this.”

In the past, Armstead has not struck a conciliatory tone when approached about community issues, and at times has resorted to retaliation. Askanim note, somewhat ominously, that the day after the community attended the postponed meeting, city code enforcement vehicles were seen in front of every home used for prayer gatherings in the neighborhood.

Goodwill notwithstanding, the ordinances follow a clear path of discrimination, and the community will resort to legal action, if it is ultimately forced to do so. An attorney has been retained and is looking into the case.

“We hope to resolve this without litigation,” says Rabbi Shlomo Schorr, New Jersey director of Agudath Israel, noting that multiple lawsuits against Jackson, Clifton, and Toms River dragged on for around eight years before the towns settled. “But the federal Department of Justice, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, and Agudah will sue, if the city refuses to treat its residents fairly. We hope they will realize we have never lost a case like this. Ultimately, the town will spend millions on lawyers, and end up having to cover the plaintiff’s legal fees as well as payout settlement money. It’s just not worth it.”

Would the Jews of Linden have a case? A key feature of the federal and state lawsuits in Jackson and Toms River was the presence of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the town. Unfortunately, Linden has seen similar statements. Mayor Derek Armstead is the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit brought by Paul Oliveira, a 20-year veteran Linden school official.

Oliveira recorded Armstead discussing the need for the Linden school district to hire Hispanics and African-Americans in order to exclude Jews from employment.

“That’s what has to happen in order to keep our community [from] being taken over by guys with big hats and curls,” Armstead says on the recording. “We are really trying to save our community here.”

He then suggested that the ethnicity of applicants could be determined by family names.

In his lawsuit, Oliveira said he was sidelined, harassed, and ultimately forced to resign over his protest. Armstead eventually issued a half-hearted apology and proceeded to attack the whistleblower.

“Some residents have received vile hate mail declaring, ‘Hitler was right,’ ” Rabbi Katz wrote in his letter. “There has been a steady stream of anti-Semitic content circulating in local Facebook groups. Compounding this, the mayor has made remarks —some public, others unrecorded — that many view as insensitive and outright inflammatory.”

All this suggests that a community lawsuit would be successful.

“The case here is even stronger than in Jackson and Toms River,” says Assemblyman Avi Schnall, who represents parts of Monmouth and Ocean Counties in the New Jersey State Assembly. “The ordinances are clearly targeting the Jewish population.

Schorr clarifies that there are grounds for two cases. The ordinance limiting shuls to 90,000-square-foot lots is a clear violation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), the federal law used to force Toms River and Jackson to settle. But the ordinances against residential homes are simply discrimination.

“We are dismayed that another local government is following the route of others in preventing Orthodox Jewish communities from thriving, and hope a swift resolution can be reached for all parties,” Rabbi Schnall said in a statement to Mishpacha. “Most importantly, there was a very strong showing from the community of Linden, united in opposition to this attempt at government discrimination.”

The unity of the community is the central theme that askanim wish to emphasize. “This is the first time the entire community was unified in the approach to this problem,” Zalman Katz says. “It has come full circle, there is now complete achdus as we face this challenge together.”

Let us hope the unity heralds a peaceful resolution, as the community moves past it as one.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1058)