Students’ Dispute With Chabad Sect Goes Public : Ownership: UCLA housing cooperative residents contend they are being ousted from building. Hasidic Jews’ organization says it took title to property.

In an unusual public display of rancor within Los Angeles’ Jewish community, residents of a student housing cooperative at UCLA staged a demonstration outside the Westwood headquarters of the Chabad sect Monday to protest what they see as an attempt to oust them.

Attorneys for both sides had been exchanging testy letters for more than a month, but the dispute erupted on Sunday when officials of Chabad cleaned out two rooms on the ground level of the 20-bed residence on Landfair Avenue and moved in two clients of its homeless rehabilitation program.

Representatives of Chabad, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based organization of Hasidic Jews, defended their claim to the bayit (Hebrew for house), saying that they took title to the property last December.

But attorneys for the students said the transfer was invalid, arguing that the two men who signed over ownership of the house on Fraternity Row to Chabad had no authority to do so.

At Monday’s rally, about 40 residents and supporters met outside the house, chanting “Save our Bayit “ and “Hell no, we won’t go.”

They marched to the Chabad building two blocks away, where they picketed for half an hour, largely for the benefit of TV cameras. There were few passers-by on the sunny holiday afternoon and the windows of the Chabad house on Gayley Avenue were closed.

Although the demonstration passed without incident, tempers had flared on Sunday, when Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, West Coast director of Chabad, appeared at the Landfair Avenue house with a van-full of helpers to supervise the removal of furniture and rugs from the ground-level rooms. Students streamed downstairs to protest, and police were summoned to prevent a shoving match, witnesses said.

Founded in the early 1970s by students seeking kosher food and a Jewish environment near the UCLA campus, the Bayit suffered financial hardships until it was taken over by Michael Goland, a San Fernando Valley businessman who has helped finance the election bids of pro-Israel candidates to Congress.

Goland was convicted this month on one count of making an illegal campaign donation, but acquitted on four other counts of conspiracy and making false statements in connection with his support for the 1986 reelection campaign of U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.)

After he bought the property in 1981, Goland underwrote its losses and went on to build the Bayit Project, a nationwide chain of 24 such houses.

But as he reduced his financial support in recent years, the number shrank to three: the original in Westwood, another in Berkeley and a now-empty house near the UC Santa Barbara campus.

By the time that Lyle Weisman, a former Goland associate, offered the Bayit to Chabad late in 1989, several other Jewish organizations had turned down offers to take it over, fearing a financial drain.

Records on file at the Los Angeles County recorder’s office show that Weisman, along with Mendl Itkin, a Chabad staff rabbi who was identified as a member of the board of the Bayit Project, signed the Westwood house over to Chabad last December.

Attorneys for the students argue that Itkin was ineligible to act because of a possible conflict of interest, and that in any case, a board of directors made up of more than 20 prominent members of the Jewish community was responsible for the property even though it had not met in more than a year.

Chabad’s attorneys said that Itkin’s role was appropriate because he received no direct benefit from the transaction. They also cited corporate records showing that the larger board had been replaced by a three-member group last year.

Goland, the third member of the small board, was not available for comment Monday.