Wedding of Grand Rabbi’s Great-Granddaughter Highlights Spat in Brooklyn Chasidic Sect

Every 10 seconds or so, a call comes in to one of the three mobile phones hooked to Moshe Indig’s belt.It’s been that way for five days, all the time Mr. Indig and his small army of 300 workers have had to take an abandoned warehouse at north Williamsburg and transform its cold concrete into a shimmering wedding hall worthy of a king.Tonight, the first great-grandchild of the grand rabbi of the world’s largest chasidic sect, Raiza Bluma, 18, is getting married. The event, which involves various sites across Williamsburg, is attracting more than 20,000 dancing and dining guests. (Think of the crowd stuffed into a sold-out Madison Square Garden, and then add a few revelers.)And redecoration hasn’t been Mr. Indig’s only task: He’s also had to keep conflict in his ultra-Orthodox Satmar neighborhood from escalating even further.Bzzzz. There goes his phone again.“You know what is the monkey in the middle? I’m the monkey in the middle,” Mr. Indig said the other day at the site of tonight’s ceremony, at North 4th Street and Bedford Avenue, while he gave orders to yeshiva-students-turned carpenters to build makeshift bathrooms and kosher kitchens and wooden bleachers, and juggled another phone call, and then, talking in his tranquil Yiddish, yet another.In the secular and secluded and feuding world of Satmar, arguably the most influential and most insular of Brooklyn’s various Orthodox sects, Mr. Indig, a 33-year-old, pear-shaped construction manager, has been a pivotal and unseen figure.He is a primary police liaison to the fractured Satmar community, which, in a tale worthy of the Bible, has been split between warring brothers who seek to assume the title of grand rabbi from their father, Moses Teitelbaum, who is 90 and said to be ailing.The split of kin happened five years ago. What happened? Who started it? Depends whom you ask.One theory is that the grand rabbi has already tapped his younger son, Zalmen, 53, to help lead the 10,000-strong congregation at the main Satmar synagogue at Rodney Street, and that Aaron, the eldest at 57, worried that Zalmen and the grand rabbi’s top advisers were conspiring against him to usurp power.The battle spilled into rabbinic court. No settlement could be reached. Next came a highly complex legal spat in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, where the case is currently pending – and where the presiding judge, Melvin Barasch, has been under federal investigation for a year for allegedly taking a bribe to rule in favor of those allied with Zalmen, according to an October 1. report in the Daily News. Judge Barasch, 76, denied taking a bribe.At stake are the reigns of a global anti-Zionist religious movement, a movement with vast property holdings, considerable political influence, its own system of schools, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grants to boot.The feud has been particularly bitter of late.In separate incidents last week, on Wednesday night and Friday morning as Jews celebrated Simchat Torah, the holiday marking the end of the yearlong reading of the Torah, riots erupted in the main synagogue, and injuries, including broken bones, were reported. Police were aware of the incidents, but no criminal charges have been filed.“The punches were in the hundreds and the pushes were in the thousands and the breaking glasses and the bruises were in the tens,” one witness allied with Aaron said.The eldest Teitelbaum brother was said to be traveling from his upstate home today to oversee the wedding ceremonies. It was not clear whether his father will show up: Will the grand rabbi break ranks with Zalmen and those close to him, finally embrace his firstborn, and come to see off his first great-grandchild?“My only hope,” Mr. Indig, an ally of Aaron’s, said. “Unfortunately, there is a fight. It is very bad. If he comes … well, it will be a pleasant surprise.”Still, Mr. Indig plans. The guests will arrive from Australia and Belgium and London. The chuppah ceremony – which features a wedding canopy and the breaking of glass – will stretch six city blocks on Lee Avenue, between Taylor and Rutledge streets. Permits have been granted for a big-top tent, said to cost more than $40,000 to rent and $25,000 to heat. Catered dinner – a sit-down meal of marinated salmon and roasted chicken, for an estimated 15,000 or more men, with thousands more women feasting at a different location – has been in preparation for two months. Banners have been tacked to lampposts. Custom-made, opera sized binoculars, to spot the wedding party, are being sold at convenience stores for $3.50 a pair.Local politicians and mayoral hopefuls such as William Thompson Jr. have the event listed on their schedules. Although organizers said they expected Gifford Miller, the council speaker, who sparked controversy in July by awarding a $35,000 contract to a civic group allied with Aaron, is not scheduled to attend, a spokesman for Mr. Miller said.Mr. Indig said he doesn’t know the list of politicians and hasn’t seen the VIP invitations. He knows only that he has a wedding the size of a small village to build, and he knows that his religious movement is fractured.Besides, his phone is ringing again.“You see?” he said. “Monkey in the middle.”

Wedding of Grand Rabbi’s Great-Granddaughter Highlights Spat in Brooklyn Chasidic Sect

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