Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Developer Shalom Lamm Sues New York Village Over Rejection of Hasidic School

A Jewish developer is suing the village planning board of a small upstate New York town, arguing that their decision to vote down a proposed all-girls Hasidic private school was motivated by anti-Semitic bigotry.

The lawsuit comes at the peak of a tangled and bitter battle between the school’s developer, Shalom Lamm, and local Bloomingburg residents who fear that Lamm’s 396-home project that the school would serve will change the dynamics and character of the quiet, one-stoplight village.

The housing development and school in the 420-person village, about 80 miles north of New York City, is believed to cater towards the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect and would likely more than double the village of Bloomingburg’s population.

Opponents of the development plans directed their fight against the school after learning last summer that it could cause their taxes to skyrocket due to spending on school busing and other services. Those revelations further enraged residents already angered by the housing plan.

“The idea that there would be [government] funding to a school that might not be open to everyone is very problematic to me,” Holly Roche, president of the Rural Community Coalition, an organization founded to combat the development plans, told The Forward.

Lamm’s development company maintains, however, that his plans would in fact generate about $3 million in additional tax revenues, generating about $1.4 million annually in new net revenue for the school district.

In a meeting last month, the board voted down the proposal 3 – 1, as a crowd of about 150 opponents to the school and housing development cheered on the decision, according to the Times Herald-Record.

Lamm, the son of former Yeshiva University President Norman Lamm, argues that the move was influenced by prejudice.

“With no legal rationale or explanation, the Village Planning Board bowed to pressure from some residents motivated by blatant and ugly religious bigotry,” Lamm wrote in a statement about the suit, published in The Times Herald-Record. “The vote went far beyond the scope of the Board’s review authority, which should have been a simple pro-forma affair, and left us no choice but to seek relief from the courts.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.