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New York Time - July 22, 2006
Plans for Muslim centers stir concerns from neighbors
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
YORKTOWN, N.Y. - A long-abandoned Roman Catholic high school in this northern Westchester town still bears a few markers of its past. There is the metal cross near the main entrance and the small, granite placard that offers a simple mission statement: “For God and Country.”
But the old Franciscan High School is in the midst of a conversion, both physical and spiritual. A new religious institution, the Hudson Valley Islamic Community Center, is taking shape there. “It’s really the coming of age of a community,” said Zead Ramadan, spokesman for the center, which closed on the $3 million property in May.
After some minor renovations, Mr. Ramadan said, the center will combine a mosque, meeting space and a weekend school in the first large-scale Muslim institution in the northern half of the county. The Westchester Muslim Center in Mount Vernon is the largest mosque in the county, and many Muslims from northern Westchester are among the 700 people who attend Friday prayers there.
The Yorktown center and a similar one planned for nearby New Castle are, in a sense, simple statements of arrival: a small Muslim population, growing in numbers, is staking claim to this land of well-kempt lawns and quaint Main Streets just as Protestants, Catholics and Jews did before them.
But almost five years after 9/11, making those statements has proved difficult.
In Yorktown, the welcoming words of town officials, church leaders and several neighbors have found a counterpoint in a series of anti-Muslim statements at public meetings of the Planning Board and angry letters to town hall, some expressing fears about the spread of terrorism in suburbia, but most voicing concerns about traffic.
While many parents at George Washington Elementary School next door have greeted the center’s arrival with a shrug, some said they were uncomfortable. “I’m scared,” said Beka Brucaj, 48, who has two children in the school. “It’s a stupid thing to put the mosque next to the school,” added Mr. Brucaj, who said he fears recruitment of children for extremist ends….
In New Castle, where 35 families organized as the Upper Westchester Muslim Society have filed plans with the Zoning Board of Appeals to build a 25,000-square-foot Islamic center in a residential neighborhood, the debate has focused on parking, traffic and other typical development concerns. The society hopes to open the center in mid-2007.
Critics like Anthony Rakis said speaking up about traffic was awkward when the complaint was against a religious institution.
“We’d like the Muslim community of Westchester to have a great home and to expand their community, but it just doesn’t fit,” he said. “I would be making the same argument if it was a Greek Orthodox church, and I’m Greek Orthodox.”….
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/23wemosque.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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