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He/him, they/them, or ey/em, 31, Jewish, genderqueer, bisexual, and engaged to the hottest lady imaginable (junebug93). Our tentative marriage date is summer, 2027.
Currently getting my master's degree. I post about comics, social justice, bugs, animals, whatever strikes my fancy. On a personal quest to follow every jumblr blog.
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Orthodox Jewish groups urged the Supreme Court to take up the case of an Orthodox Jewish man ordered by officials in University Heights, Ohio, to stop hosting prayer services in his home without a permit.
The amicus brief, which was filed Friday by the National Jewish Advocacy Center alongside the Orthodox Union and the National Council of Young Israel, comes years after Daniel Grand, a resident of the suburb of Cleveland, invited a group of Jewish men to his home for Shabbat services starting in January 2021.
At the time, University Heights, citing zoning laws, issued a cease-and-desist order blocking Grand from using his home for prayer.
Grand initially applied for a special use permit to use his home as “a place of religious assembly” in 2021, but later withdrew the application, saying he did not “wish to operate a house of worship as is defined under the zoning ordinance.”
According to the NJAC, the former mayor of University Heights, Michael Dylan Brennan, then encouraged Grand’s “neighbors to watch his home and report any sign of Jewish worship to the authorities.”
“What happened to Daniel Grand is not an isolated incident,” Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, the CEO of NJAC, said in a statement. “It is the latest chapter in a long and documented history of municipalities using zoning laws to suppress Orthodox Jewish religious practice.”
The city’s current mayor, Michele Weiss, who was elected last fall, told JTA that there was currently one residence in the city that had obtained a special permit to host worship gatherings and that another was currently in the middle of applying for one.
“My perspective is that everyone has a right to worship in their home with a small group of people (a minyan) without city involvement, just like a book club might do,” Weiss, who is the first female Orthodox Jewish mayor in the United States, wrote in an email to JTA. “If a congregation wants to worship in a residence with a proper congregation then each city should have a way forward through their planning commission.”
In September 2022, Grand filed a lawsuit against the city and Brennan, alleging that the former mayor was motivated by “animus against Orthodox Jews.” He maintained that the actions blocking him from conducting services in his home were part of a “systematic campaign” to prevent the Orthodox community from growing in University Heights, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.
In January, Weiss told JTA that University Heights’ Jewish community had grown a “tremendous amount” in recent years, and was the “largest Orthodox contingency of residents in the state of Ohio.”
In October 2024, the U.S. District Court of Northern Ohio ruled in favor of University Heights, and the Ohio 6th District Court of Appeals later upheld the ruling in November 2025.
A petition for Supreme Court review is currently pending, and a decision on whether it will be heard is expected in the coming months, according to NJAC.
“This case deserves Supreme Court review because, across the country, Jewish religious practice has repeatedly been constrained through the neutral application of rules in ways that disproportionately burden visible Jewish life,” David Benger, the litigation counsel at NJAC, said in a statement.
I… what? I grew up in University Heights. My family still lives there. There were informal minyans in private homes all the time (sometimes to absurd and/or dangerous degrees). How is this the first time I’m hearing about this?
So I just talked to my sister, who is living in the neighboring suburb, and she pointed out that things have changed a lot since I moved out; there are a lot–a LOT–of former NYC Orthodox who have moved there in search of affordable housing (compared to NYC pricing, at least), and the culture of the neighborhood has changed to suit, with multiple synagogues under construction.
I knew about some of that boom–the “absurd and/or dangerous” example that I was referencing in my first reblog was from a house down the street from my parents whose resident had been running a shul out of his house, and kept expanding it… by cutting into the walls and adding illegal additions. The housing inspector who looked it over condemned the house because he’d removed load-bearing walls and rendered it “unfit for human habitation”! They ended up knocking it down (before he could have it collapse on their heads on his own), and he rebuilt it as a synagogue properly a few years ago. That example I knew about, and at first, I thought that this was that case.
It isn’t.
This is a different case, and it’s hard not to argue that this is targeted harassment of Jewish religious observance. Are there are lot of synagogues in my old neighborhood? Oh yes. Even before I left, well…
Here, this isn’t doxxing, because the name of the neighborhood is listed on the article and I used incognito so it doesn’t accidentally show my family’s addresses:
This is University Heights (named because John Carroll University is there at the lower left corner) and Beachwood. You can see just how many synagogues there are on the map–and this isn’t even all of them. I know of several–including the one I mentioned above–that aren’t listed for whatever reason (check out Synagogue Row on Green Road there in the middle).
So, sure, there are already a lot of synagogues in the area. But I would argue that this isn’t any more dense in terms of synagogues than your average American city has churches, and this area has one of the highest population densities of Jews outside of Israel. But you wouldn’t see them saying, “You can’t have a Christian prayer meeting in your house”.
There’s also accessibility issues and the like at hand as well; while I doubt that it’s the situation for this particular case, I’ve been to minyans in houses where the resident had limited mobility and wanted to say kaddish, not to mention Shiva calls. Is it against zoning to have a group prayer in the house of someone grieving the loss of a close relative?
I don’t see how this isn’t a violation of the First Amendment. (Not to mention that University Heights has a history of harassing Jews, including my own family when I was growing up). So… I Am Suspicious.
It gets worse (reporting from the local Cleveland Jewish paper, the Cleveland Jewish News)
pro tip: if your “encourage[ment]” could also be from the authorities in the Spanish Inquisition, you may want to reconsider
Important note: Weiss is the first frum female mayor in the US
Brennan he was trying to make a minyan!
Brennan get your story straight!
Also in 2022 the guy (tried to?) sell his house:
Not creepy behavior at all:
Brennan is apparently trying to up his antisemite cred:
Holy fuck.
At least some of this has to be actively criminal.
In fairness, it is technically possible Grand is lying, for some reason. But I doubt it, considering the following other events of Brennan’s mayorship:
The Aleksander Shul is the one I mentioned that was the house that needed to be torn down because the house had been rendered structurally unsound. So that was probably their rationale for why they did the observation–“make sure that nobody goes into the condemned house that has the exterior peeling away from the brick structure.” Still creepy as shit, and the situation with Grand is something I’m reaching out for more context on from my family. (This is not me defending the former mayor at all, it’s me giving more context).
Umm Places of worship are automatically allowed in parts of the city zoned for single-family housing. Can you see if he’s in a U1 zone or not? That’s a bit more specific than just the neighborhood in the article. If he is, he should be allowed to full on turn his house into a ship if he wants without even needing a permit.
Yeah not a lawyer but I don’t see how this ends in any way other than the city losing unless the supreme court decides to rule that the zone only allows churches and not other houses of worship which now that I’ve written it out I’m actually worried about
