By KEITH GRANT
Several homes owned by the Long Beach Mesivta have been placed on city tax rolls, at least while officials further investigate their former tax-exempt status.
According to tax assessor Mary Cammarato, five previously exempt residences were placed on city tax rolls Jan. 1 after a review of their exemption applications. The homes were among 16 properties owned by the Mesivta whose tax-exempt status had been questioned by some residents last summer, which led to a bitter and public feud and charges of anti-Semitism.
Cammarato said that after looking into the applications, "there are some issues about the exemptions that I'm questioning." She said the homes may still be placed back on the exemption list if they prove to meet the necessary criteria. In the meantime, Cammarato figured the revenue for the city from the placement of these homes on the tax rolls would amount to just under $20,000.
Getting them there was a very hostile public battle, however. At the forefront of the exemption fight was local activist Mark Jackson, who was labeled by some an anti-Semite after a letter was made public in which he referred to the Mesivta families as "parasites." Several full-page ads ran in the Herald attacking and defending Jackson. The situation grew out of an ongoing fight between some residents and the Orthodox Jewish school's dormitory-expansion plans along Riverside Boulevard, a project now mired in an Article 78 citizen's lawsuit seeking to block any demolition or construction.
Jackson said that a review he carried out last summer of the tax exemption applications for the yeshiva's 16 local properties showed 10 of them to be in violation of state law, he believed. According to New York State's Exemption Administration Manual, exempt properties are those "owned by a nonprofit corporation or association organized or conducted exclusively for one or more specific purposes (religious, educational, charitable, hospital, or moral or mental improvement of men, women or children) and used exclusively for carrying out one or more of these purposes."
Jackson said that many of the Mesivta homes, though occupied by instructors, did not meet that stated criteria. He brought his argument to Cammarato, but not before a storm of conflict engulfed his work. Jackson said he sent a letter in June to local attorney and Chamber of Commerce president Lawrence Elovich seeking legal opinion on the Mesivta homes' tax-exempt status. In the letter, Jackson wrote the "Mesivta are parasites -- they only take!"
Elovich insisted he did not share the letter with anyone, but copies of it were later distributed to numerous homes in the center of town, within the area of the Mesivta and its properties. The letter sparked several full-page ads in the Herald defending the Mesivta and attacking Jackson's use of the word "parasites," calling it a clear case of anti-Semitism. While Jackson stood behind his use of the word, he stressed he was targeting neither the Orthodox Jewish community nor the students of Mesivta, calling them innocent victims of the school's policies.
Jackson is now pleased that his work has, at least temporarily, met success.
"It's a great sense of satisfaction to know that the rule of law has been observed," he said. "I'm elated it worked out the way it did for the people of Long Beach ... It's wrong for taxpayers to subsidize anyone who abuses the system."
Mesivta executive vice president Rabbi Shlomo Lesin, executive vice president of the Mesivta, did not return a call seeking comment.
