JTS Tenants Keep Up the Fight for Housing Justice
By Vajra Kilgour

Fifty Jewish Theological Seminary tenants and their supporters turned out at a demonstration March 22 to protest the seminary’s continuing campaign to evict tenants from two buildings on West 122 St.

The occasion was the first day of a conference honoring the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a much-loved and revered scholar, mystic, and onetime professor at the seminary, who was also a civil-rights activist and friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “We believe that the seminary’s relentless pursuit of its neighbors desecrates the memory of Rabbi Heschel every single day,” said the flyer announcing the demonstration.

People who attended the conference were sympathetic, but one noted that “the seminary didn’t pay much attention to Heschel when he was alive.” At the conference, short shrift was given to Rabbi Heschel’s devotion to social justice, but attendees applauded a tenant who spoke out against the evictions.

The seminary has been trying to oust tenants from 515 and 521 West 122nd St. since 1995, claiming that it needs their apartments for its students and faculty, and that as a nonprofit organization it is exempt from the usual restrictions on evictions.

The tenants’ situation has become all the more urgent since the Appellate Term overturned last year’s decision by Judge Joan Madden, which threw out 15 cases based on defective notices issued by the seminary. According to the tenants’ lawyer, Catharine Grad, the appellate decision not only puts some of the JTS tenants at risk of losing their homes in the near future, but also “undermines the rights of all tenants in New York State to have adequate notice of the facts that they will have to contest in court in order to defend themselves against eviction attempts.”

A tenant who chose to fight the seminary on his own and hired a separate lawyer lost his case in Housing Court in what Grad described as “a bad decision, which not only mischaracterizes the facts but also misinterprets the law.” That tenant’s eviction date was set for the end of June.

Meanwhile, the tenants are continuing to fight on other fronts, most recently challenging the city’s plan to give land to Columbia University for a dormitory and public library without any linkage to the housing crisis on Morningside Heights. The tenants have been attending meetings of Community Board 9 to demand that the plan not be approved unless Columbia will agree to provide some of the apartments it warehouses to help meet the Jewish Theological Seminary’s needs without any displacement of rent-regulated tenants.