Bloomingburg will not dissolve – but it will likely be taken over by Satmar hasidim and renamed Kiryas Yated Lev.
Bloomingburg Votes Against Dissolution Paving Way For Satmar Takeover Of Tiny Village
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Bloomingburg will not dissolve – but it will likely be taken over by Satmar hasidim and renamed Kiryas Yated Lev.
It took three months, but New York State Supreme Court Justice Stephen Schick has finally certified the tiny 420-person village’s dissolution vote Friday. 107 voted no to dissolution; 85 voted yes, the Mid-Hudson News reported.
190 voter registrations were challenged with many eventually being tossed out, including older registrations of a number of former residents who had moved away or died, and the registrations of a large number of hasidim who did not appear to have an actual residence in the tiny village and were instead using one of Modern Orthodox developer Shalom Lamm’s local properties as little more than a mail drop.
Even so, the Bloomingburg Jewish Community Council continued to ridicule opponents of the development and accuse them anti-Semitism, even though a number of opponents of the development are Jewish.
“Justice has been served; the people have spoken, and Bloomingburg has been saved. Counting the votes took almost three months. The many residents of Bloomingburg, whose votes were challenged by the [Rural Community Coalition], solely because of their ethnicity and religion, were ultimately permitted to vote,” the Bloomingburg Jewish Community Council reportedly said.
Last fall, Bloomingburg had no known hasidic or Orthodox residents. The Bloomingburg Jewish Community Council was formed earlier this year, in large part as a public relations tool for Lamm and Satmar.
Dissolution would have folded the tiny village into the adjoining town of Mamakating, and would have made the Satmar takeover much more difficult while allowing for proper building inspections and code enforcement for all of the new Satmar-linked construction there.
Approximately 2,000 Satmar hasidim are moving to the tiny village where a 396-unit high-density townhouse development for them is being completed – a development that was originally deceptively pitched to the village. located on the edge of the Catskill Mountains, as a low-density vacation and retirement complex complete with a golf course.
But despite that deception, repeated violations of stop-work orders, attempts to throw two elections and an FBI raid of the developer Lamm’s Bloomingburg office and local properties in March, Schick has repeatedly failed to issue rulings that would stop the development from being completed.
The development was advertised last year in a 16-page supplement to a major Satmar Yiddish newspaper as a new Satmar “shtetl” (village) called “Kiryas Yated Lev.” The paper also ran an accompanying front page story on the new “shtetl.”
That ad was likely a violation of US Fair Housing law.
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