Jewish Groups’ Turf War Goes Public : Westwood: Jewish students are refusing to leave their Bayit--housing that the Chabad sect says it now owns.

The Chabad sect of Hasidic Jews hopes to complete by mid-June its controversial planned takeover of the Westwood Bayit, an independent Jewish student housing cooperative on UCLA’s Fraternity Row.

But, if successful, it will be a hostile takeover.

The Bayit (Hebrew for house or home) has been in the middle of a tug-of-war since December and the fight has become an unusually bitter and public dispute within the Los Angeles Jewish community, where turf wars usually are thrashed out in private.

It pits Chabad, a charismatic movement that mixes mystic revivalism with meticulous observance of ancient laws and traditions, against a mixed bag of students and their sympathizers, whose Jewish affiliation ranges from uncommitted to deeply religious.

Chabad, which took title to the house in a disputed transaction late last year, plans to move its homeless men’s rehabilitation program into the house on Landfair Avenue as soon as its 18 residents can be persuaded to leave.

The residents dispute the building’s transfer and have refused to leave.

Groups including the Jewish Student Union and Hillel, the campus Jewish ministry, have taken the side of the Bayit residents. So have several Jewish community leaders, most of whom were once listed as members of the Bayit’s Board of Governors.

“Our hope is that the property will be returned to its rightful owners and we’re working to that end,” said Dorothy Goren, one of the former Bayit board members and a director of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. The 20-member board was cut to three last year.

In a series of meetings and letters, the Bayit’s volunteer attorneys called on Chabad to return the Westwood house and two others in Santa Barbara and Berkeley to the Bayit Project, a nonprofit corporation that controlled them.

But Chabad seems unlikely to budge.

“This (the Bayit) was offered to other organizations and they turned it down,” said Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, West Coast director of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based religious group, which assumed half a million dollars of debt but did not put down any money as part of the deal.

“At this point we’re saying . . . if you think it’s a slam-dunk case, use the legal remedies,” Cunin said.

The homeless program is only one of Chabad’s broad range of activities, many of which are intended to satisfy the biblical exhortation to “repair the world” while spreading the word about its own brand of old-time religion.

Cunin offered to take in the Bayit’s 11 men residents at Chabad’s West Coast headquarters two blocks away, which would also be open to 30 other UCLA students, while the women would be put up at nearby apartments.

But the students, who pride themselves on the variety of religious beliefs and activities at their run-down residence, are having none of it.

“We consider ourselves a very open place,” said Bayit resident Adina Jaffe, a junior in history. “If we were forced to move to Chabad, a lot of that would be eliminated because they have their set ways and they would pretty much mold us into their form of practice.”

Alarmed by Chabad’s move into two basement rooms at the Landfair Avenue house last month, the students put up a banner reading “Save Our Bayit” next to the Hebrew letters that mark it as a Jewish house on a street that is largely Greek.

They have also taken to dead-bolting the door to their living quarters and demanding that visitors show identification.

“It’s a military installation,” said Omid Zareh, a spokesman for the residents.

Previously the site of the Tau Delta Phi frat house, the financially troubled Bayit has been a sort of urban kibbutz since 1974, when the founders put in a kosher kitchen, shared the rent and chores and committed themselves to observing the Sabbath and religious holidays.

“It was my first encounter with people who kept the Sabbath. It had a very strong effect on people’s lives,” said Nadine Kaplan-Wildman, a Bayit board member who met her husband at the house.

While the Westwood Bayit is more than 15 years old, the latest entanglement has its roots in 1982, when Michael Goland, an enigmatic San Fernando Valley businessman, stepped in to save the house after a previous owner put it on the market. Goland is best known as the person who is credited with financing almost single-handedly the 1984 election defeat of Sen. Charles H. Percy (R-Ill.).

Goland was an unhappy former frat pledge at USC when he was drawn to the warm environment at the house on Landfair Avenue, associates said. It inspired him to found the Bayit Project, a network of 24 Jewish student houses around the country.

The 20-member Board of Governors was appointed in 1985, and Goland deeded the Westwood House to the Bayit Project in 1987. But Goland suffered financial and legal reverses--he was convicted last month (May) of making an illegal campaign contribution--and the Bayit Project virtually collapsed.

Only three houses were left last year, when Goland signed a document reducing the size of the board to three members: himself, long-time business associate Lyle Weisman, and Mendel Itkin.

The latest crisis started last summer, when Weisman and Itkin signed over the houses to Chabad, according to real estate records on file in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Oakland.

One of them, Itkin, is a salaried fund-raiser for Chabad, Cunin acknowledged.

The Chabad leader said that his lawyers have told him there is nothing improper about the transaction.

But Gregory R. Smith, a volunteer attorney for the 20-member Board of Governors, said that the two men were not authorized to act for the Bayit Project, and that Itkin’s role at Chabad made him ineligible to vote in any case.

“If you’re the employee of another organization to which you’re transferring all the properties, it sounds like a possible conflict of interest,” Smith said. “My guess is, if this cannot be amicably resolved, then it will end up in court, and that’s not the way to go among Jewish organizations.”

Chabad attorney Marshall B. Grossman said that there was no conflict, however, because Itkin did not profit directly from the transaction.

“If there’s any validity to any of these positions we’ll act accordingly, but thus far I haven’t seen any activity that would amount to a violation of the California Corporations Code,” said Grossman, who is also donating his services.

“I’m also waiting to see if anyone steps forward with a check sufficient to cover the mortgages or repairs necessary at the facility. That line is remarkably short,” Grossman said.

An internal memo prepared for the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles concluded in 1988 that the Bayit Project was without staff, without programs and in need of at least $350,000 in repairs.

Offered a chance to take over the operation, Hillel turned it down, as did several other Jewish organizations.

Hillel’s decision was made because the houses came burdened with several hundred thousand dollars of debt and a possibility that ownership could revert to Goland, said Chaim Seidler-Feller, the rabbi at UCLA Hillel.

Still, Hillel would like to see the Bayit survive, he said.

“The Bayit is a critical component of Jewish life at UCLA,” Seidler-Feller said. “It has been responsible for nurturing the Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) of countless numbers of Jewish students who looked to the Bayit to provide a total Jewish environment that sustains and supports their Jewishness at a very vulnerable time in their lives.”

Goland was unavailable for comment. He is now in Israel, hoping to get “spiritually renourished,” according to his attorney, Robert M. Mayman.

Mayman said that Weisman and Itkin transferred the properties to Chabad without his client’s knowledge, and that Goland would like to see them returned to the Bayit Project.

“We wanted to give Chabad the opportunity to be gracious and to recognize its error in thinking that the batim (Hebrew plural for houses) were insolvent institutions, with no life left in them, but in fact had a board and a committed membership and a wish to continue, “ Mayman said.

“We had hoped that when Chabad realized that, they would restore everything to the status quo,” he said.

But Cunin was not swayed. “At this point, the ball, I believe, is in their court,” he said. “Could it be we made a mistake? I doubt it very much.”

For his part, Weisman said that there was no other choice but to get rid of the houses last year.

“Basically the problem that led to our giving away the assets and winding down the corporation was the fact of a negative cash flow,” Weisman said. “We were actually in foreclosure on one property in Berkeley, we were pending foreclosure in Santa Barbara and we were facing a $300,000 balloon payment in Westwood.”

He also said that Goland knew of his intentions to transfer the houses to Chabad even though the two were not on good terms.

“If these other people had been involved and cared (about the Bayit), where were they when we went to them for money and help?” Weisman asked. “They’re interested on an anti-Chabad basis, and I was shocked. I didn’t believe in today’s world that people acted this way in the Jewish community.”

Although Goland has not spoken up on behalf of the Bayit residents, his presence at a recent meeting of the Board of Governors was seen as a show of support.

He also filed documents of his own in February of this year, including a $2.5 million claim against the Westwood property, that effectively block Chabad from disposing of the properties, attorneys for both sides said.

“It’s a three-ring circus, to say the least,” Cunin commented.

The rabbi, who was quoted in the Jewish Journal as calling himself “a street fighter from the Bronx,” defended Chabad against suggestions of impropriety by denouncing the co-ed nature of the Bayit as immoral.

He also noted that Greg Smith, who is representing the Bayit’s old Board of Governors, is a leader in the Westwood Kehilla, an Orthodox congregation with close links to Hillel’s Seidler-Feller.

The Kehilla, which was formed five years ago, has no building of its own, meeting instead for Sabbath prayers at Hillel House.

“They had designs themselves on the Bayit, to make a synagogue out of it,” Cunin said. “So there are no clean hands here.”

Smith denied that his congregation coveted the Bayit.

Cunin also said that the rent has not been paid since April, while Chabad has been pouring in “a fortune in mortgage payments.” But the students said they have left their monthly checks for $5,650 in the usual place, a mailbox in their dining room.