Saddle Rock has a synagogue problem. Or rather, it has a lawsuit problem, and they’re not quite the same thing.
Residents opposing the reconstruction of the Saddle Rock Minyan filed a hybrid Article 78 proceeding in Nassau County Supreme Court earlier this month, asking the court to annul the village’s approval of the rebuilding project at 115 Greenleaf Hill. The petitioners, Concerned Citizens of Saddle Rock LLC and resident Sigalit Sanilevich, argue the village Board of Trustees acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it granted a special use permit and site plan approval on Feb. 4.
Attorney Kenneth Allen Brown represents the petitioners. His complaint centers on two claims, both of which carry weight beyond this particular fight.
The first is procedural: the board never conducted a proper traffic impact study as required under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. That’s not a technicality. SEQRA exists because local boards have a documented history of approving things without thinking through the downstream consequences for roads, drainage, and the neighbors who live on them. A 6,000-square-foot house of worship in a residential area draws traffic. People drive to services. That’s not controversial. The question is whether the village bothered to study how much.
The second claim is the one that should make every homeowner in Saddle Rock nervous.
The petitioners allege that a 2014 local law, used as the basis for measuring property setbacks, was never officially filed with the New York Secretary of State. If that’s true, the law is invalid. And if that law is invalid, every building permit the village has issued using it as a standard for the past decade is potentially vulnerable to challenge. A mess, frankly. Mayor Dan Levy and the Board of Trustees had not responded to the lawsuit before publication.
Brown declined to elaborate on any of this, offering “no comment” on both the unfiled law and the specific safety concerns in the petition. That’s his right as counsel. But it leaves a lot of unanswered questions sitting in a Nassau County courthouse.
The Minyan’s attorney, Muhammad Faridi of Linklaters, pushed back hard. In a statement to Great Neck News Record, Faridi called the “unlawful assembly” characterization in the petition “simply detached from reality.” He said the congregation gathered for years with the village’s knowledge and approval, without incident. He characterized the lawsuit as part of a “familiar pattern” of shifting narratives used to oppose religious institutions.
That’s a serious allegation. It’s also one that courts and federal agencies take seriously. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, passed in 2000, was written specifically to prevent local governments from using zoning law as a weapon against congregations. Faridi knows this. Brown knows this. The village board should know it too, assuming anyone there is paying attention.
Still, Faridi’s framing doesn’t resolve the underlying questions about process. A congregation can be entirely within its rights to rebuild and also be the subject of legitimate procedural complaints about how the approval happened. Both things can be true at once.
The backstory matters here. An October 2024 fire destroyed the Minyan, which had reportedly operated out of a residential home without a special use permit for years. The village board approved the reconstruction in February, but the approved footprint nearly doubled the building’s original size, to 6,000 square feet. Neighbors say that scale is incompatible with a residential street. That’s a land-use argument, not necessarily a religious one, and courts have historically been willing to hear land-use arguments as long as they’re applied consistently.
Long Island Press first reported the court filing this week.
The Article 78 proceeding is a workhorse of New York administrative law, the standard mechanism for challenging whether a government agency followed its own rules. Judges don’t substitute their judgment for the board’s. They ask whether the board acted rationally and within its authority. If the 2014 setback law was never properly filed, that’s not a close call.
Saddle Rock is a small incorporated village in Nassau County’s Great Neck area. Small village, real consequences. Whatever the court decides about the Minyan’s permit, the question of that unfiled 2014 law doesn’t go away. It either gets fixed quietly, or it gets litigated loudly, case by case, whenever a neighbor decides a building permit was wrong.
That’s a problem the village board created for itself. The congregation just happened to be standing nearby when it surfaced.