Q: I live in a condo in Long Branch, N.J., that wants to change its building policies to support Jewish customs. The board wants to make the condo’s restaurant kosher and install an eruv, a ropelike ritual enclosure that surrounds the building to allow more freedom of movement during Sabbath. Not all residents in the building follow these religious customs. Can the board impose the customs of a portion of the residents on everyone?
A: A condo can’t discriminate against residents, but changing the menu at a restaurant or erecting a ceremonial rope doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s ability to live freely.
The board could decide to make the restaurant vegetarian. Meat eaters might be disappointed, but so long as they’re not denied entry, they’re not being harmed.
The same goes for a kosher restaurant — you don’t have to be Jewish to eat kosher food. “The fact that the restaurant is kosher is not an imposition of a religious obligation on anybody, it’s just that’s the kind of food you can get there,” said J. David Ramsey, a real estate lawyer in the Morristown, N.J., office of the law firm Becker.
An eruv should not restrict your access to the condo, either. The physical boundary, usually made from string, allows observant Jews to carry objects, children or push strollers outside their homes during the Sabbath.
“An eruv does not impede other residents at all, Jew or non-Jew,” said Rebecca Phillips who oversees the educational website My Jewish Learning for 70 Faces Media. “It is most often string attached to telephone poles, so it is not on a level where people would be walking into it or even noticing it.”
There have been cases in which the religious customs of some building residents have infringed on the rights of their neighbors, including one that was decided by a federal appeals court in April. A condo in Lakewood, N.J., with a large Orthodox Jewish population had separate hours for when men and women could swim in the pool. The Third Circuit court of appeals ruled that even though men and women of any faith could swim in the pool so long as they adhered to the gender restrictions, the policy nevertheless discriminated against women because the schedule was unequal, giving men far more access to the pool in the late afternoon and evening.
But in this case, the rules do not keep you from moving about the condo freely. Instead, they make it easier for observant Jewish residents to do so.
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