Chabad Struggle over Rebbe’s Shul Finds Its Way to New York’s
High Court  The messianist controversy that has been tearing
apart the Crown Heights Lubavitch community for more than a
decade is now before the New York state Supreme Court. The case
pits the leadership of the international Chabad-Lubavitch
movement against a handful of young messianists and the trustees
of Congregation Lubavitch Inc., the group that controls the
movement’s main synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn,
N.Y.  The case ostensibly turns on the wording of a
commemorative plaque on the outside wall of the shul.  But what
really is at stake is who controls the synagogue where the late
Chabad rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, used to pray. It is
the shul where he would hold his farbrengens — mass celebrations
where he would discourse to thousands of his disciples, men and
women who hung on his every word.  For the better part of the
decade since Schneerson’s death in 1994, the 770 synagogue has
been considered a stronghold of the