A little storefront synagogue west of Boca Raton has received a big bequest after battling with national Jewish organizations over the legacy of a South Carolina philanthropist.
Congregation Shaarei Kodesh, a Conservative synagogue at 19785 Hampton Drive, will get $2.1 million from the estate of Nathaniel Rosenfeld, who died in 1997. The money was not to be distributed until the death of his wife, Hannah, who died in 2012.
“We are over the moon, elated, grateful beyond words,” Shaarei Kodesh co-president Amy Pessah said Wednesday. “It feels like a big hug from God.”
Pessah said the disagreement had discomfited members of the congregation, since many are donors to the well-known organizations that were suing the synagogue, including Hadassah, which raises money for a hospital in Israel, and ORT, which offers education and job skills to the needy.
Rosenfeld, of Florence, S.C., allowed his sisters, who lived in Boca Raton until their deaths in 1999 and 2001, to choose which charities benefited from his millions. His sisters were among the founders of Temple Beth Tikvah, which merged with Shaarei Kodesh in 2007.
The siblings’ family had been establishing synagogues for several generations. Their parents were among the founders of Temple Beth Israel in Florence in 1912, according to the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina.
The sisters decided Beth Tikvah should get 89 percent of their brother’s bequest, with the Blumenthal Home for the Aged in North Carolina, Hadassah, ORT America and Americans For Peace Now getting the remainder.
The national groups challenged this distribution of the money, saying Shaarei Kodesh was not the legal successor to Beth Tikvah because the synagogue had not filed articles of merger with the state.
The legal sparring became especially bitter when Shaarei Kodesh asked a South Carolina court for sanctions against the national groups, including attorneys’ fees and a contempt citation, for not complying with a judge’s order to confer on the facts of the case.
Still, the parties decided to settle, with $1.9 million shared among the four groups: Americans For Peace Now gets about 13 percent, 21 percent to the Blumenthal home, 28 percent to Hadassah and 38 percent to ORT.
As part of the settlement, neither the synagogue nor the national groups are allowed to make negative comments about each other.
“I’m happy to say that there were disputes between the charities, but they have now been resolved,” Billy Newsome, ORT America attorney, said in an email.
When the synagogues merged in 2007, Shaarei Kodesh had 56 member-families and lacked a full-time rabbi. Now the congregation has 180 families, a rabbi and possibilities for growth with its new windfall.
Pessah said members are writing a strategic plan to determine how to proceed. She said congregants hoped to name a sanctuary in honor of Rosenfeld but are unsure whether a new building is in their future.
“If we do have a new space, we will be happy to name it for him,” she said.
