Who gets to decide when a home is considered a synagogue?

A question fit for Talmudic scholars or, in this case, U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

The nation’s High Court effectively agreed to consider that question last month, after an Ohio city told an Orthodox Jewish man he needed a permit to host Shabbat prayers in his home.

The dispute began in 2021, when the plaintiff, Daniel Grand, invited 15 friends to his home in University Heights, Ohio, to mark the Sabbath. Neighbors — including some Jewish residents — complained to the city that the proposed gathering would turn Grand’s home into a synagogue, violating residential zoning laws.

The city quickly escalated the matter, sending Grand a cease-and-desist letter and telling him to apply for a special-use permit, according to court documents.

Outraged by the idea that he would need the government’s permission to pray in his own home, Grand sued the city in federal court. The lower court declined to hear Grand’s case, saying he first had to exhaust the city’s permit process before asking the courts to intervene. An appellate court upheld that ruling, with the Supreme Court now set to hear his case in its next term.

“This is not a Jewish issue. This is an American issue,” Grand told the Forward. “Next thing they’ll tell you is eight people sitting at a dining room table makes you an illegal restaurant.”

The case’s origins

When Grand moved into his home in 2019, he faced a recurring inconvenience: The nearest Orthodox synagogue was nearly a mile away.

In keeping with Jewish law, Grand doesn’t drive on Shabbat. With prayers held in the morning, afternoon and evening, that meant a six-mile round trip on foot if he went back and forth from his home to the shul for each service. In bad weather, the schlep could be taxing, he said, especially since Orthodox Jews do not open umbrellas on Shabbat.

In 2021, Grand, who lives with his wife and five children, began to explore another option: Could he gather a minyan — the quorum of 10 Jewish men required for certain prayers — in his home?

He emailed 15 of his friends.

“You are cordially invited to join us this Shabbos for the inauguration of the

Shomayah Tefillah Beis Hakeneset,” Grand wrote, using Hebrew that translates to “house of prayer and assembly.”

“You will see the shul entrance — keep a look out for the orange windows,” Grand continued. “And please spread the word to whomever you feel might be interested in coming.”

Grand noted a rabbi would be in attendance and wrote that “the shul” would be a place “where people come to really, seriously daven to Hashem.”

But before Grand had the chance to host, a neighbor thwarted his plans.

Ben Feldman, who identified himself as “a supporter of the Jewish community in town” and “a member of one of the official zoned synagogues,” forwarded the invite via Facebook Messenger to then-University Heights Mayor Michael Brennan.

Feldman expressed concern that “non-zoned makeshift synagogues” like Grand’s could harm “official synagogues.” It being 2021, he also alleged “they are not practicing any Covid protocols.”

“If there is anything you could do to put a stop to this, it would be greatly appreciated,” Feldman wrote to Brennan. Feldman did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.

That same day, Brennan personally called Grand and told him the city would be sending a cease-and-desist letter, court documents allege. Grand said he was shocked that the mayor would intervene in what seemed like a private matter, and he pushed back on the idea that his residence had become a house of worship.

“I said, ‘You mean to tell me if 10 Jews come to my house, you classify that as a synagogue?’ And he says, ‘Essentially, yes,’” Grand said. “So I was taken aback.”

Brennan, who decided not to run for re-election after completing his second term in office last year, referred all questions to a lawyer who did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.

The fallout

At first, Grand was willing to go through with the city’s permit process. He submitted an application seeking permission to use his soundproof music room, where he played drums during the week, for “periodic religious gatherings.”

A public hearing over the permit application followed, during which neighbors raised concerns about traffic and noise. Grand countered that those fears reflected a misunderstanding of Orthodox Jewish practice: Prohibited from driving on Shabbat, worshippers would walk to his home, so parking couldn’t possibly be an issue. And the Sabbath prohibits music and amplified sound.

But some neighbors like Adrienne Yelsky, who had lived in her house across the street from Grand’s for 46 years at the time of the hearing, expressed their concerns about changing the residential character of the neighborhood.

“We don’t want a bank on this block; we don’t want a car wash on this block,” Yelsky testified at the hearing. “We don’t want a grocery store on this block; we don’t want a church.”

Some comments turned ugly. One neighbor sent a letter to the University Heights Planning Commission with the following statement: “I am not Jewish and I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.”

“I felt very offended, and I felt very hurt,” Grand said. “I look at this as bigotry to me.”

But Yelsky, who is Jewish, rejected the characterization of the dispute as antisemitic across the board. Suspicious of renovations at Grand’s home that made room for extra parking, Yelsky said she didn’t buy that Grand only planned to hold services on Shabbat.

“Believe me, for us as Jews, it was very difficult to even participate in this, because you don’t want to look like you’re against your own people,” Yelsky told the Forward. “On the other hand, what’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong.”

After the hearing, Grand said he discovered another problem: The special-use permit prohibited “sleeping or residential use” on any property covered by the permit. In other words, if Grand wanted to convert his home into a house of worship, he could no longer live there.

Unwilling to move out of his home, Grand withdrew his application.

But the matter was far from resolved. The city Planning Commission held another meeting, during which then-Mayor Brennan issued a warning.

“To the community members who are here, let there be no question. There is no permission granted here to operate a house of assembly or conduct activities consistent with one,” he told the crowd on Zoom. “If you observe such activities — and I hope you do not — but if you do, you may report them to the city, and the city will enforce its laws, which exist for the benefit of the entire community, and we will seek all appropriate remedies in court.”

Grand said the mayor’s directive kicked off a campaign of surveillance and harassment.

According to the lawsuit, Grand’s neighbor installed surveillance cameras pointed at his house, and a police lieutenant instructed officers to “make frequent drive-bys” past Grand’s home and issue citations for any parking violations.

The complaint also alleges police twice approached a driver wearing a yarmulke sitting in a parked car outside Grand’s home and asked, “Are you here for the shul?”

“It was like all hell broke loose,” Grand said. “It was nightmarish. It was terrible.”

The legal issues

According to Michael Helfand, a professor at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law who studies the intersection of law and religion, this isn’t the first time zoning laws have clashed with religious practice. For instance, Chabad houses have run into trouble with local municipalities who have alleged that the centers of Jewish life are synagogues, not homes.

In 2000, Congress responded to concerns that local governments were using zoning laws to restrict religious activities by passing the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act., known as RLIUPA.

The federal law prohibits zoning laws that substantially burden religious exercise. It also requires religious assemblies to be treated on equal terms with comparable secular ones. As Helfand put it, a city cannot prohibit 10 people from gathering for a minyan if it allows 10 people to gather for a yoga class.

But in Grand’s case, Helfand said, the Supreme Court will not directly decide whether the city’s zoning code violated federal law.

Instead, the justices will answer a procedural question: Did Grand have to exhaust the city’s permit process and receive a denial before he could bring his challenge to court? Or did the procedural hoops themselves constitute a violation of Grand’s religious liberty?

“You can see how procedure in these circumstances can really undermine somebody’s religious rights,” Helfand said. “Being stuck in the Kafkaesque process of a zoning board that goes on for years and years before you can ever walk into court.”

A lawyer for the City of University Heights did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment. In legal filings, the city has argued it never actually took an enforcement action against Grand because he abandoned his permit application before the city reached a final decision.

But Grand’s lawyers argue the cease-and-desist letter and subsequent surveillance of Grand’s home created a chilling effect, deterring Grand from hosting the Shabbat gatherings and thus violating his religious liberty.

Grand said he has been unable to observe Shabbat on several occasions since receiving the cease-and-desist letter. Even if he prevails at the Supreme Court, he said, he’s unsure whether he will resume inviting people over to pray because his friends are now “afraid of retaliation.”

Five years later, Grand said he’s stunned that an invitation to Shabbat has turned into a case before the Supreme Court.

“What was the city doing in my life at all? What did I ever do that they showed up at my door?” Grand said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The post He was barred from hosting a home minyan. Now the Supreme Court will hear his case. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Until recently, this city located near the Arctic Circle was one of the few places in Europe where organized Jewish life did not exist — no synagogue, no ritual bath, no communal building. That changed this week, as the Jewish community in Iceland opened the Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland, the country’s first-ever Jewish center.

The center is housed in a renovated, roughly 9,000-square-foot building in downtown Reykjavik that once operated as a bar and, before that, as the headquarters of a political party. It sits just minutes from where the husband-and-wife team of Rabbi Avraham and Mushky Feldman have lived and worked since arriving on the island in 2018. The project has been funded largely through community donations.

The center includes a synagogue, a seminar room seating nearly 80 people, a kosher shop, a community kitchen, a youth center, a library lounge and a security center, amenities the community has never had access to in one place.

There is also a mikvah, or ritual bath, that is heated geothermally, using the abundant underground volcanic heat that provides much of the country’s power.

“Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community,” Avraham Feldman said of the years before the couple’s arrival, “and it has been amazing to fill that need.”

Community members agree.

“Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here,” said Michael Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland since 2020.

“The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish center that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation,” added Klein.

Jewish life in Iceland has always been sparse and intermittent. Jewish traders are known to have passed through as early as the 1600s. Still, the organized Jewish presence dates to the late 1800s, and the first practicing Jew believed to have settled permanently was Fritz Natan, a businessman who, in 1917, built Iceland’s first five-story building.

For decades afterward, Jewish life in Iceland survived on the efforts of a handful of dedicated volunteers who coordinated informal gatherings, often meeting in rented spaces or in the basement of Hallgrímskirkja, the country’s most recognizable church. The U.S. Navy base in the town of Keflavík, near the international airport, occasionally provided Jewish chaplains until it closed in 2006. But there was still no permanent institution, no resident rabbi, and no dedicated building, a gap that led some to call Reykjavik the only European capital without a synagogue.

That began to change in 2018, when the Feldmans relocated from the United States to Reykjavik to establish a Chabad-Lubavitch presence, becoming Iceland’s first permanently stationed rabbi and his wife in the country’s documented history of a thousand years. The couple started small, hosting Shabbat dinners and holiday services out of their living room. Estimates of the community’s size hover around 300 self-identified Jews, out of Iceland’s total population of about 400,000.

Momentum built quickly. In 2020, the Jewish community celebrated its first native Torah scroll, commissioned by a donor in Switzerland and completed with the help of the Icelandic congregation. A year later, the Icelandic government formally recognized Judaism as an official religion, opening the door to officially recognized Jewish weddings and allowing residents to direct part of their religious tax to the community. How many have done so is not public information.

By 2024, the community had outgrown its rented rooms and church basements and purchased the building that became the new Jewish center, roughly tying one in Fairbanks, Alaska, as the northernmost Chabad houses in the world. The building sits in Reykjavik’s compact downtown, just blocks from the iconic Rainbow Street and Harpa Opera House that make the city one of the most Instagram-friendly sites in the world.

In a city that caters to tourists, and for a community built largely from immigrants, longtime Icelandic Jewish families, and people who married into Icelandic life, the new center represents something rare: a shared physical home.

“It’s been clear for a long time that we need a home for our community,” said one Jewish resident in Iceland, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all of his colleagues know he is Jewish. (Iceland’s relatively small number of Jews means that there is little record of antisemitism; anti-Israel sentiment is strong, with the country one of five to boycott the Eurovision song contest this year over Israel’s participation.)

“It’s not like we’ve been hiding or aren’t a strong community; we celebrate holidays together, and there are Shabbat dinners,” he continued. “But I think it’s important that we have this center. Seeing it opened is very moving and important.”

Like many Jewish institutions in Europe, the center will ensure security by being open only to members of the community or visitors who reach out in advance.

Avraham Feldman said the space will hold a display case with three small prayer books donated by early Jewish residents, the only known surviving physical remnants of Jewish life in Iceland before his arrival, a reminder of how recent, and how hard-won, this permanence has been.

“The result of this center is a combination of home, family, and permanence that was unimaginable when I started visiting 14 years ago and was only a mere dream when I moved here in 2020,” Klein said.

The post Europe’s smallest Jewish community gets a home of its own — complete with geothermal mikvah appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — YEREVAN, Armenia — Last Friday night, 13 mostly Russian-speaking Jews and three Arab Muslims gathered under a cherry tree next to the popular Common Grounds coffee shop in Yerevan — capital of the world’s oldest Christian country — to welcome Shabbat.

Samson Karapetyan — the son of an Armenian Christian father and a Jewish mother from Azerbaijan — recited the Hebrew blessing for wine over a glass of Georgian Palavani kosher merlot. Karapetyan, 29, stood at the head of a table piled high with hummus, falafel, pita, stuffed grape leaves, babaganoush and other Middle Eastern delicacies supplied by a local Lebanese caterer.

Then everyone, including the three invited Arabs, joined in a spirited rendition of “Lecha Dodi” — with printed transliterations in English for those not familiar with the traditional Jewish melody.

“I’m so glad we have a community here,” said Ekaterina Goldschmidt, 32, a tattooed landscape architect who showed up to the Shabbat dinner with Teya, her little black Kokoni dog.

The dinner was organized by Yerevan Jewish Home, a social network formed by Russian-born journalist and blogger Nathaniel Trubkin in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That ongoing war spurred a large exodus from both countries and brought as many as  2,000 Jews to Armenia — boosting the ex-Soviet republic’s tiny Jewish population tenfold and injecting new blood into what had been a stagnant, dwindling community of mostly pensioners.

The explosion of Jewish life came against the backdrop of frosty ties between Armenia and Israel, the country that absorbed the most Ukrainian and Russian Jewish emigres since the war’s start. The chill has been a consequence of Armenia’s close relations with neighboring Iran as well as Israel’s unwillingness to offend Turkey by naming as a genocide the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.

Another key obstacle has been resentment over Israel’s extensive weapons sales to neighboring Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has fought several border wars in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Those obstacles may be falling away. Last year in Washington, predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and mostly Christian Armenia signed a peace treaty at the urging of U.S. President Donald Trump — garnering praise from Jewish leaders in both countries.

And on June 29, Israel’s Cabinet unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the 1915 genocide. That declaration now goes to the full Knesset where, despite intense lobbying from both Turkey and Azerbaijan, it will likely be ratified — making Israel the 36th country to take that step.

“The Jewish community here is happy that Israel has finally recognized this genocide,” Trubkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Every self-respecting Jew knows what happened to the Armenians, though of course many Armenians are asking, ‘Why only now?’ It’s all about politics.”

Added Karapetyan: “Everyone understands that our two nations have a similar heritage, with a similar destiny. It is impossible, when you speak about the Shoah, to not also speak about the Armenian genocide. If we study one of them, we need to study the other.”

Both Turkey and its ally, Azerbaijan, immediately condemned the Cabinet vote; the chief rabbi of Azerbaijan’s Ashkenazi congregation in Baku, Shneur Segal, has already urged Israel to reverse it immediately.

The reaction from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was cold. Suggesting that Israel is motivated purely by geopolitics, he told reporters the day the change was announced: “We believe that not entering into the issue of the weaponization of the Armenian genocide is in the interests of the Republic of Armenia. Therefore, we do not see any need for a response.”

Other external factors appear to be drawing Yerevan and Jerusalem closer together.

Late last month, some 350 women representing the Israeli labor federation Histadrut gathered at Yerevan’s Megerian Carpet Restaurant to mark International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The event featured popular songs in Hebrew by prominent Georgian vocalist Kristi Japaridze as well as a performance of traditional Armenian music and dance.

The Histadrut visit — the largest such Israeli delegation to tour Armenia in years — was organized with help from Israeli House, an NGO based in Jerusalem. Founded in 2012 by former Jewish Agency official Itsik Moshe, the network promotes Israeli culture and business, and now operates in 30 countries including both Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Moshe, who is also president of the Israel-Georgia Chamber of Business, said Israeli House will open its next outpost in Armenia sometime in August or September.

Assisting Moshe is Andranik Arakelyan, an educational consultant at Yerevan’s National Polytechnic University, though a specific location has yet to be decided. In its final form, he suggested, Israeli House could include a business center to showcase Israeli tourism as well as innovations in agriculture and medicine.

“I consider Israeli House as a cultural first step for strengthening ties between our two nations. The rest is up to politicians and diplomats,” said Arakelyan, 36, a Christian who spent four years in Glendale, California, a predominantly Armenian suburb of Los Angeles.

“This is the best time for our countries to get closer,” Arakelyan said, while acknowledging that “a small minority” of Armenians hold antisemitic views. “Many parties here question the timing of this [genocide] recognition, calling it a political maneuver. But when the draft becomes resolution in the Knesset, Armenians will see that it wasn’t fake.”

Marina Kozliner, a community activist who has long campaigned for this recognition, said reaction among the 10,000 or so Armenian Jews and Christian living in Israel has been mixed.

“On one hand, there is real happiness. Our community has waited for this for decades,” said Kozliner, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Armenian atheist mother who is based in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “On the other, many people feel it came at the wrong political moment. Because of that, something that should have been a moral decision has become a political tool, and that has taken away part of the joy.”

She added: “Still, I prefer to look ahead. Armenia is making real efforts to move toward peace and to normalize relations with its neighbors, including Azerbaijan. That gives many of us hope for a more stable future in the region.”

In fact, the same day Trubkin and his friends were celebrating their Shabbat dinner in Yerevan, Narek Mkrtchyan, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, received prominent pro-Israel philanthropist and Trump supporter Miriam Adelson in Washington, D.C.

“We had an interesting and substantive conversation regarding the Armenia-U.S. agenda, investment opportunities in Armenia, and the country’s rich historical and cultural heritage,” Mkrtchyan posted on Facebook, adding, “Mrs. Adelson expressed great interest in considering a visit to Armenia.”

Eric Hacopian, a political analyst who made his career advising Democratic candidates in southern California, suggested that such a meeting “could not have happened a few months ago.”

But when it comes to Armenian-Israeli relations, he said, it’s important to take a long-term view of the genocide declaration from Jerusalem..

“I think something like this five to 10 years ago would have meant a lot more. It means a lot less now,” he said. “One reason is that [Prime Minister Pashinyan] is particularly anti-nationalist and more focused on normalization of ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan, so they won’t engage directly with Israel.”

He predicted a long-term shift. “I’m very confident that over the next 10 or 15 years, we’re going to see a switcheroo, in which Israel will have much better relations with Armenia, and more problematic relations with Azerbaijan,” Hacopian said. “I see relations improving, mostly because Turkish-Israeli relations are going downhill, and Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan are entirely transactional — oil for weapons and access to Iran.”

And if and when the Islamist regime in Iran collapses, Azerbaijan’s strategic importance to Israel declines as well, and Armenia’s increases. For one thing, Hacopian noted, Armenia’s economy is booming. In 2018, per-capita GDP was around $4,500; this year, it’ll likely surpass $10,000 — helped along by the presence of information technology giants including AMD, Synopsis and Invidia.

“The one ‘X factor’ no one notices is that the IT business is booming. Israeli IT firms are already here, and data centers are being built,” he said. “You cannot be in the IT business in this region if you don’t have relations with Israel.”

Meanwhile, Jewish life is taking root in Armenia, thanks largely to the efforts of Trubkin and his friends in the Yerevan Jewish Home network.

Goldschmidt, the tattooed landscape artist with the dog, was born and raised in Saratov — a major city southeast of Moscow. She left Russia in 2023, about a year after it attacked Ukraine.

“When everything started, I shared my opinions and told everyone what I thought. Eventually, I had to leave; otherwise I’d have ended up in jail,” said the young woman, who moved to Berlin and then spent four years in Limassol and Nicosia with her Cypriot ex-boyfriend. She’s now been in Armenia for the past six months — where she proudly wears a Star of David necklace — and wants to open an art gallery here.

Karapetyan, who recently spent a semester at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, sees a future for liberal Judaism among the newcomers to Armenia.

“Jews here cannot relate to the Orthodox way of life. They like their freedom, and they’re not used to having separate seating for men and women,” he said. Karapetyan said that he has discussed joint projects with Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, who has led Yerevan’s only synagogue — the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of Armenia — since 1996.

Trubkin says his Telegram chat has around 600 people.

“Every week, I meet several new people asking about Jewish life in Armenia — people from Russia, from Israel, from Moldova. For some of them, it’s their second round of emigration,” he said, adding that he’s looking to establish a physical presence for Yerevan Jewish Home. “And we’re also establishing a new Armenian-Israeli organization for business and culture.”

The sense of optimism is palpable, even with an undercurrent of concern about the influence that Turkey plays in the region. But if Israel fails — for whatever reason — to formally recognize the Armenian genocide after raising expectations, all bets are off.

“I sincerely hope that the Israeli government will complete this process and that the Knesset will adopt an official resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide,” said former Knesset member Alexander Tsinker, co-chair of the Armenia-Israel Public Forum. “Otherwise, it would be, to put it mildly, unacceptable.”

The post Armenia’s Jews hope Israeli recognition of 1915 Ottoman genocide will jumpstart bilateral ties appeared first on The Forward.