With the Milwaukee Jewish Federation taking legal action, beginning this week, against the Whitefish Bay village government to defend “religious and property rights” on the Karl Jewish Community Campus, the MJF this week launched a “legal defense fund” to help defray the probable costs of that effort.
According to an MJF release, the fund — to be called Friends of the Karl Jewish Community Campus in Whitefish Bay-Legal Defense Fund — “comes in response to the significant number of community members who wish to be part of a tangible effort.”
Bruce Arbit, the chair of the fund, said in a telephone interview Monday that even this early in the effort “people’s responses have been incredible.”
In fact, said MJF executive vice president Richard H. Meyer, “So many people have approached us to express their concern and outrage, asking what they can do to help.” Meyer added that the fund has already raised “close to $50,000 in unsolicited contributions before going out to the community.”
Plans call for this fund-raising effort to be time-limited, and no specific monetary goal has been set. Arbit said the fund’s organizers will strive “not to let this get in the way” of MJF’s annual community campaign. At the moment, the fund’s organizers are not planning any events and are relying on “one-on-one solicitations and requests,” Arbit said.
Arbit and others emphasized the necessity of the effort. “The Jewish community needs to stand toe-to-toe and shoulder-to-shoulder when its rights are being attacked, whether diminishing our freedom of assembly or our property rights,” Arbit said.
At issue are plans the MJF proposed more than two years ago for expansion and renovation of the buildings and parking lots on the Karl Campus. Federation officials and representatives have insisted throughout the process that the changes are “a necessity, not a luxury” to update and improve the facilities and enable the seven community institutions housed there to serve better the Jewish and general communities.
In the course of Whitefish Bay plan commission hearings and board meetings, the MJF changed its plans and accepted many proposed modifications. According to Stephen Chernof, chair of the MJF’s development committee for the campus, the MJF has “gone the extra mile to find a compromise that would allow us to appropriately improve our property while being sensitive to the concerns of neighboring homeowners.”
On May 5, after a new member of the seven-member board elected in April who opposed the expansion had joined the board, the board both rejected a compromise proposal that the MJF had accepted in March, and approved further reductions in the plans. It did so on its own initiative and without any input from officials of the MJF and the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, the largest agency housed on the campus. The MJF called the board’s plan “impractical, unworkable and unacceptable,” and its executive committee authorized litigation on May 7.
The MJF on June 16 filed a “notice of claim” with the Bay village government, charging that the village board’s rejection of the MJF’s plans was “arbitrary and capricious” under state law and violated the MJF’s due process rights under federal law. This notice, the necessary prerequisite to a lawsuit under state law, gave the village 120 days to respond.
While that deadline will not be reached until October, the MJF has decided to exercise its right to file under federal law, which does not require the village to respond to the notice of claim, according to S. Todd Farris, an attoney with the firm of Friebert Finerty & St. John and a member of the legal team filing the suit.
“We could wait the 120 days, but time is money and the more time we wait delays the remodeling of the facilities, which is greatly needed,” Farris said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
This suit was filed Wednesday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. Farris said that if the Bay government does not respond or rejects the MJF’s claim, state law complaints will be added to the suit later.
For more information, contact the federation at 414-390-5700 or www.milwaukeejewish.org.
