David Gottesman lives in Beachwood, Ohio, a town with a Jewish majority. This demographic fact is largely the result of a 1952 court ruling that ordered Beachwood's leaders to allow the building of a Reform temple. So naturally Gottesman assumed there would be little objection to a plan in 1996 to open two more synagogues, one for his own brand of Orthodox Judaism and another for a Hasidic group. He was mistaken. A majority of Beachwood's Jews, mostly Reform and Conservative, have fought his cause at town meetings, at the polls and in court with an obstinacy outstripping their own tormenters'...
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