Judge Sets Hearing on Bayit Dispute : Housing: Jewish groups turn to a religious court to determine who owns a house being shared by 5 UCLA students and 15 homeless men.

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin remembers the days when he and other young men from the Chabad sect of Hasidic Jews would beat up muggers on the streets of Crown Heights, their home neighborhood in Brooklyn.

“We used to brush powder in our beards to look old and say, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ Then we’d pull out our lignum vitae nightsticks (made of a South American hardwood) and break their legs,” he recalls.

With a laugh at the memory, Cunin is spoiling for another fight now that opponents of Chabad have won a court order slowing his plans to turn an independent Jewish students’ housing cooperative on UCLA’s Fraternity Row into a residence and counseling center for homeless men.

Fifteen of Chabad’s clients in a program for homeless people were living there Wednesday, in tense proximity with five students who complain that the newcomers have ruined their kosher kitchen and violated the Sabbath by smoking and watching TV.

Chabad has been locked in a dispute with a 20-member committee of prominent local Jews, which once served as the governing board of the student residence--and which claims to still be legally in charge of the facility--over who actually owns the property.

In a temporary restraining order issued late last week, Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs barred Chabad from moving any more of its homeless clients into the Westwood Bayit (Hebrew for home) until a hearing can be held Aug. 1. But she turned down a request to order Chabad’s current clientele out of the house, where painters are busy daubing a coat of bright beige over the once-dingy walls.

Meanwhile, efforts are under way to resolve the underlying ownership dispute in a religious court called a Beit Din , using a form of arbitration provided by Jewish law. But despite a flurry of letters faxing back and forth in Hebrew and English, there seems little likelihood of any agreement soon.

The standoff illustrates Chabad’s unique position within the Los Angeles Jewish community, where its yearly telethon and aggressive evangelizing activities have made it both visible and controversial. The movement has an operating budget of $15 million, a staff of 106 rabbis and 50,000 contributing families in California, most of whom live in the Los Angeles area, Cunin said.

Earlier fights have focused on who should be underwriting the cost of kosher meals for senior citizens, and on Chabad’s right to a multimillion-dollar inheritance.

In the latest set-to, Chabad has named its representative to the proposed three-judge Beit Din --Moshe Bogumilski, a legal expert from Chabad’s Brooklyn headquarters.

Supporters of the Bayit students, meanwhile, have picked Schmuel Fried, a rabbi from the Satmar Hasids, also Brooklyn-based, whose decades-old rivalry with Chabad has gone so far as to see zealots from one side cut off the beard of a rival.

The two charismatic movements trace back to a religious revival that took the masses of Eastern European Jewry by storm in the late 18th Century. But their styles differ radically. Chabad, (also known as the Lubavitch sect, after the town of its origin in Byelorussia), is noted for its outreach to less observant Jews in America and in Israel, while Satmar denounces Zionism and virtually turns its back on the modern world.

“Since they (Satmar) have violated every commandment in the books, they cut off a man’s beard . . . we don’t accept their procedures as kosher. . . . We cannot give them credibility as a rabbi or a judge,” Cunin said.

Bogumilski and Fried are supposed to pick a third, neutral arbiter, but Cunin said that Chabad may exercise its right to challenge the nomination of Fried, while the other side may object to his nomination of Bogumilski.

“It’s a coincidence that he (Fried) is a Satmar,” said Rob Martin, an attorney representing the Bayit Project, whose 20-odd members support the students’ right to live in the house. The members once served as a board of governors for the Westwood, Santa Barbara and Berkeley houses and several other locations that have since been shut down.

Although some of the board members belong to Orthodox Jewish congregations, the majority are not affiliated with the most strictly observant wing of Judaism, making the choice of a Satmar advocate a surprise.

“We didn’t select someone on the basis of how much our selection would bother Chabad,” Martin said, explaining that Fried was recommended by advisers who are familiar with the intricacies of religious jurisprudence.

“In a way it’s regrettable, but it would be difficult to find a Lubavitcher (Chabad rabbi) to take our case,” he said.

Martin’s clients are challenging Chabad’s claim to the properties, arguing that they were signed over without their knowledge last year in a series of invalid transactions.

Martin said that he expected the matter to go before a local Beit Din run by the Agudath Israel organization of Orthodox rabbis, who are strictly observant but are historical rivals of all brands of Hasidism. But Chabad proposed the name-your-own-judge method instead, as it is entitled to do under Jewish law.

Martin said that his clients had been hesitant to go to a secular court, hoping to keep the nastiness contained until a solution could be found within the Jewish community.

“But things kept happening,” including the tripling of the original complement of five formerly homeless men in the house, he said.

The papers filed Friday in Superior Court included the first public statements on the case by Michael Goland, the San Fernando Valley businessman who almost single-handedly financed the Bayit Project from 1980 until 1988.

Goland bought the Westwood, Berkeley and Santa Barbara houses and donated them to the Bayit Project. He also spent more than $3 million to run the Bayit Project, he said. (Once a major supporter of pro-Israel political candidates for U.S. House and Senate races, Goland was convicted in May of making an illegal contribution to the 1986 Senate campaign of Sen. Alan Cranston, and was sentenced on Monday to three months in a “jail-like facility.”)

In his statement concerning the Bayit Project, Goland said that the board of governors was a legitimate board of directors. He said that Lyle Weisman, a business associate, misled him through “fraud and deceit” into signing documents that reduced the body to three: himself, Weisman and Mendel Itkin, a Chabad staff rabbi, in the summer of 1989.

“I was never consulted about a sale or transfer of all the real property owned by the Bayit Project Inc., to Chabad,” Goland said.

Other statements from prominent board members, including Jacob Pressman, rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Am, a major Conservative synagogue, and Dorothy Goren, a director of the Jewish Federation Council, also said that they had no idea of the impending transfer of the three houses, and that they would have voted against it.

Pressman’s wife, Marjorie, also a Bayit Project board member, is a director of Beverly Hills-based Unity Savings, which holds a $290,000 deed of trust on the Westwood Bayit. The note was due to have been paid in full May 1, and Unity has rejected requests by Chabad to refinance.

Another statement filed with the court was from Ivan W. Halperin, a Westside attorney who is an alumni leader for the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He said that Chabad offered to sell the Westwood and Berkeley houses to his organization at the beginning of the year, but that the talks fell through.

His deposition shed doubt on Chabad’s long-range plans to use the Westwood house as a homeless shelter, but spokesmen for Chabad have said that they merely contacted Alpha Epsilon Pi to learn the market value of the properties.

For its part, Chabad says its opponents are little more than covetous interlopers with designs of their own on the Westwood Bayit.

They had several opportunities to save the Bayit before Chabad stepped in, but failed to act, said Jeffrey Kichaven, an attorney for the religious order.

The true focus of the debate, he said, is “sour grapes over the change in use of the property from that of a failed student housing project to that of a viable, caring program for the homeless.”

Cunin chuckled with glee as he contemplated the list of opposing depositions.

He said it reminded him of the story of a Hasid of a previous century who was riding in a horse-drawn wagon to Lubavitch.

The Hasid was thinking of the wisdom he would receive at the feet of his rabbi, the driver was thinking of the vodka in the inn, and the horse was thinking of hay and a warm stable.

“These people have 50 different agendas,” said Cunin, an ebullient bear of a man who is familiar to television viewers as the dancing host of Chabad’s yearly telethon.

“Now we’re going forward with the depositions to find out who’s the Hasid, who’s the balagole (Yiddish for driver) and who’s the horse,” he said.