nothin Judge Upholds Yeshiva Foreclosure Delay | New Haven Independent

Judge Upholds Yeshiva Foreclosure Delay

Thomas Breenphoto

The Edgewood yeshiva at 765 Elm St.

Eliyahu Mirlis won’t be able to gain control of the former yeshiva building at Elm and Norton streets anytime soon, after a state judge ruled that an automatic stay” should remain in place as a nonprofit controlled by imprisoned Rabbi Daniel Greer pursues an appeal in a five-years-and-counting foreclosure case.

State Superior Court Judge John Cirello handed down that decision Friday in the state court case Eliyahu Mirlis v. Yeshiva of New Haven Inc.

In his six-page order, Cirello formally rejected Mirlis’s April 7 motion to terminate the stay, and sided with the yeshiva’s April 20 objection to that motion.

At stake was whether or not Mirlis would be able to take possession of the foreclosed yeshiva building at 765 Elm St. sooner rather than later in his bid to start collecting on some of the largely unpaid $22 million owed him through a separate 2017 civil judgment against Greer and the Yeshiva. 

Greer, meanwhile, remains in prison, where he is serving a 20-year sentence for raping Mirlis while the latter was a student at that very same Edgewood Yeshiva. (Greer has appealed the criminal case.), 

Cirello’s decision on Friday makes clear that the property won’t be transferred to Mirlis’s ownership anytime soon — and that the lower court judge won’t step on the toes of his appellate judicial colleagues as they decide whether or not to grant Greer’s nonprofit’s motion to overturn an earlier ruling in the foreclosure case. 

After weighing the equities, the court finds that the relative harms suffered by yeshiva in terminating the stay outweigh the burdens and harms suffered by Mirlis,” Cirello wrote.

Click here to read the decision in full.

Judge: Potential "Harm" Outweighs "Judicial Economy"

Thomas Breen file photo

Judge Cirello.

Cirello’s ruling comes several days after Mirlis’s and the yeshiva’s attorneys appeared in virtual court on Monday to make their cases for and against the termination of an automatic stay that the judicial system puts in place when a foreclosure is appealed.

Click here to read more about that hearing, and for more background on this case.

At issue is whether or not the court should terminate the appellate stay for the appeal, which was filed on March 10, 2022 and amended on April 12, 2022,” Cirello wrote in his Friday decision.

The appeal challenges several trial court decision, including: (1) the court’s refusal to reopen the judgment to allow the defendant to substitute a bond; (2) the court’s requirement that the defendant have cash on hand before substitution would be permitted, despite evidence showing that such cash would be imminently available upon the court’s approval of a substitution; and (3) the court’s refusal to reach the defendant’s argument that it had a right to substitute as a matter of law, based on earlier rulings in the case by Judge Baio and the Appellate Court.”

Mirlis argued that, pursuant to Connecticut Practice Book Sec. 61 – 11(d) and (e), the appeal is meritless, merely a delay tactic employed by Yeshiva, and the administration of justice requires the lifting of the stay,” Cirello continued. Yeshiva disagrees.”

Why did the judge ultimately side with the Yeshiva, and choose to leave the appeal-induced stay in place?

Because of the irreparability of the injury” that the Yeshiva nonprofit would suffer if the stay were scrapped, Cirello wrote.

The practical result of terminating the appellate stay would be to transfer the property to the plaintiff and make the pending appeal moot,” he wrote. The Yeshiva School is a historic, unique piece of nineteenth-century real estate which cannot be duplicated or replaced. Furthermore, by terminating the appellate stay, the court will be extinguishing Yeshiva’s right to have the trial court’s decision reviewed for any possible errors in judgment or law. The court is hard-pressed to find a more irreparable harm than the transfer of such a unique and historic piece of property to Mirlis out from under Yeshiva. If the Yeshiva School was a fungible commodity with a fixed cash value, Mirlis would have been more inclined to accept the bond in lieu of the property when such an option was presented to him.”

Mirlis, the judge continued, still has his judgment and, if the appellate court finds in his favor, title will transfer to him. Mirlis has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that he will suffer any irreparable harm if the appellate stay is left in place.”

What about the public interest” in not allowing defendants to delay a foreclosure interminably through appeal after appeal?

Mirlis is correct that there is a public interest in not hindering the ability of creditors to enforce and collect their judgments,” Cirello wrote. The court shares Mirlis’s frustration that this case has been pending for five years with no resolution. Moreover, in many ways the court agrees with Mirlis that Yeshiva is to blame for most of these delays. The court also recognizes that the global pandemic had an impact on the speed of all cases moving towards resolution.

Nevertheless, the court cannot let the motivations of judicial efficiency and economy drive it to deprive a party of its appellate rights and inflict irreparable harm. In weighing the public interest of judicial economy with the harm to yeshiva, the court must side with the defendant.”

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