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Geoffrey Alderman

By

Geoffrey Alderman,

Geoffrey Alderman

Opinion

Shul that barred its minister

February 28, 2011 12:30
3 min read

Over the past four months, I have been asked to interest myself in no less than three disputes between ministers and their congregations. Legal considerations prevent me from writing about two of them. But in neither case have I encountered anything approaching the venom that characterises events at the Croydon outpost of the Federation of Synagogues.

I accept that, whatever harmony may have existed in the relationship between the Reverend David Gilinsky and his Croydon congregants when he began his ministry there has largely evaporated. On January 25, Rev Gilinsky gave notice, as required by his contract, that he intended to relinquish his Croydon appointment on August 29 next.

In so doing, he accepted that, together with his wife and young family, he would have to vacate the apartment provided for him within the building complex that incorporates the synagogue.

So the Gilinskys were on their way out - if not of the London Borough of Croydon then certainly out of any contractual relationship with the synagogue. Come August 29, they would be gone. But evidently this was not soon enough for some of the Croydon worthies. They lodged with the Beth Din of the Federation - as they were entitled to - a claim (or rather two claims, but that against Mrs Gilinsky appears to have been abandoned) to the effect that Gilinksy's "presence" was "detrimental to the ongoing existence" of the synagogue.