Friday, January 17, 2025
The Chabad of the Beaches, of Long Beach, has rejected a settlement offered by the Village of Atlantic Beach that would have ended a legal dispute over the Chabad’s 2021 purchase of property in the village, and the Jewish organization has filed an amended lawsuit in federal court.
The announcement of the new legal complication was made at a village board meeting on Dec. 9 that erupted in chaos, with residents shouting at Mayor George Pappas and one another about the village’s accruing more legal debt and the ongoing Chabad litigation.
At a hearing in Atlantic Beach in August, the Chabad’s director, Rabbi Eli Goodman, presented plans for a religious community center with an accessory café at 2025 and 2035 Park St., which the Chabad purchased three years ago.
“We realized that there was a need to service the people that liked the Chabad way of education and outreach,” Goodman said at the time, “and that we needed to have a place over here that the people of Atlantic Beach could call home.”
Goodman worked with architects, engineers and the village planning department for a year, but was ultimately denied all but once zoning variance by the Atlantic Beach Board of Zoning Appeals on Oct. 10.
“The biggest permit they denied was the variance to use the property for religious use,” Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, a law firm that is representing the Chabad, said on Dec. 12. “Even if they were able to enter the building right now, they can’t use it for religious purposes,” he added of the empty former Capital One Bank that occupies the property. “That’s a real problem. We tried to prevent having to reopen this lawsuit, but at the end we were left with no option. We had to reopen this lawsuit and name new characters as defendants. We’ll see what happens in court now.”
In November 2023, the village offered to pay the Chabad $400,000 over four years to settle a legal battle that began after the Chabad purchased the Park Street property for $950,000, and the village tried to claim the site by eminent domain in 2022. The Chabad filled suit against the previous village administration in federal court in July 2023, and the court sided with the Chabad.
According to the newly filed complaint, “in private communications produced in this case, Village officials freely and frequently engaged in open anti-Chabad and anti-Orthodox sentiment and trafficked in vile anti-Semitic tropes.”
Dys said that village officials exchanged the offensive communications by text and email.
“What we once suspected is now confirmed: Village leadership has been driven by blatant, openly expressed religious animus against their Jewish neighbors,” he said.
Some residents who attended the Dec. 9 meeting were also outraged that Dominick Minerva, the village attorney, had recused himself from representing the zoning board during the ongoing legal dispute because he is representing Chabad of Valley Stream in another matter.
“We had to replace, in a timely fashion, Dominick as zoning board attorney, and through some research we came up with Harris Beach, which is a Long Island firm,” Pappas said. “They represent a lot of villages in zoning matters. I’d like to recommend the board accept the engagement letter from Harris Beach as counsel to the Board of Zoning Appeals.”
George Cornish, chairman of the zoning board, said he did not want the village board choosing new counsel on the zoning board’s behalf.
“The Board of Zoning Appeals gets to decide who the attorney is,” Cornish said. “Do we have other resumes before we randomly hire the next guy, another lawyer? We got notified Friday about this law firm. I haven’t talked to any of the commissioners about who the attorney is, and I’d like to reserve decision, or at least get other choices, before we get this next lawyer who doesn’t defend us and has conflicts of interest.”
Pappas had not responded to requests for additional comment as the Herald went to press.
“From the evidence we obtained form the beginning of this lawsuit, there was quite a bit of religious bias and animus going on between the mayor, the village trustees and others in the community,” Dys said. “They simply wanted to keep the Chabad out of the village of Atlantic Beach.”
