THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 15 Friday, October 26, 1984 • 1. 4010 t, • Ro l) Mc Keown Nms Looking east across Greenfield Road at the freeway route. vored the positions of Southfield, Oak Park and Pleasant Ridge. The act which established the arbitration board was challenged but was upheld by the Oakland County Circuit Court and the Michigan Supreme Court. The matter might have ended there peacefully enough were it not for the fact that someone overlooked an important legal loophole: federal law always takes precedence over state law. Although this alignment had been upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court, it was not binding upon the fed- eral government, and after all, it was federal money that would be paying for the expressway. In August 1968, the arbitration board convened and took 3,000 pages of testimony to enable it to decide upon the proposed alignment in the three hotly-disputed areas: Lathrup Village-Southfield; Oak Park- Huntington Woods; and Pleasant Ridge-Royal Oak. From that point on, the issue boiled down to one of impact upon existing land use, environmental con- siderations and public reaction areas. In March 1972, a draft of an environmental impact statement was submitted to the Council on Environmental Quality. For the next few years, the public focus was upon the battle between the Highway Department and the City of Detroit over loss of land at the city- owned Detroit Zoo in Royal Oak, but no mention was made of the vibrant Orthodox Jewish community that would be affected further down Ten Mile Road. Although an accompanying document showed a route that would have • removed three synagogues and the mikvah (ritualariam) on Ten Mile near Greenfield, a report dated Aug. 23, 1977 makes only the following reference to the Jewish community: "alternate B would propose the removal _of the Dexter-Davison Market which caters to the needs of the Jewish popu- lation, of which there is a large number in the immediate surrounding area." It wasn't until Dec. 20, 1977 that any mention was made in official Highway Department reports about the synagogues, and even then, not a word appears about the residents. Realizing that the community — which consisted of 18 synagogues (15 of them Orthodox), ten kosher butcher shops, ten bakeries, religious schools, rabbinical schools, the Jimmy Prentis Morris Branch of the Jewish Commu- nity Center, the Federation Apart- ments, Jewish Vocational Service and the mikvah — apparently lacked de- fenders even from within their own community, Rabbis Freedman and Wagner began, in 1978, to hold a series of meetings to alert members of the community to what was happening and to marshal support for a move- ment to try and halt the freeway. They began by writing letters but it wasn't until 1979 that they first realized they had the power to fight both the state and federal highway planners. Rabbi Freedman recalls the Moment of truth as dawning upon him the evening he watched limousine after limousine pull up in front of Young Israel of Greenfield and deposit high-level state and federal bureauc- rats the coalition had invited to attend a presentation outlining their opposi- tion to the expressway route. By 1980, the coalition was using every option available to them, includ- ing a number of sympathetic govern- ment officials who were covertly sup- plying the coalition with advice and even leaked documents to further their cause. The coalition effectively discovered the bargaining tactic of withdrawal and substitution, in which federal funds pulled from an aborted project (such as a freeway) could still be allocated for development of exist- ing highways in the area (like the Mile Roads paralleling the alignment. The coalition's first victory came in March 1980 when the state issued a 32-page document titled 1-696 Social Impact Study: The Orthodox Jewish Community. The detailed report was prepared by Michigan State Univer- sity sociologist Dr. Harry Perlstadt Continued on next page The 1-696 Freeway: The bathes over it began two decades ago.