Sunday, December 11, 2016

Brooklyn ISKCON Temple Sale (Update)

[PADA: This is quite a strange situation:

(A) The Dallas Windle Turley lawsuit found the GBC was guilty of child negligence etc. -- and the court ordered them to pay $400,000,000 to their many, many victims.

(B) Then the GBC's leaders tried to get out of their obligation to help their victims by declaring ISKCON Bankrupted, and they began to make a series of "new charities" to transfer ISKCON's assets over to, to avoid paying the victims.

(C) Except now, ooops, the new charity was no longer part of ISKCON and was thus not legally liable to be under control of the legal powers of the GBC.

(D) Thus, voila, the people in charge of the "new charity" could sell the buildings or other assets without consulting the GBC. Which is what happened in Brooklyn apparently. Now the GBC complains that the New York temple does not listen to the GBC, after breaking the temple off legally from control of the GBC?

(E) Anyway, what we thought would happen when the Turley case started is that the devotees would then rise up and demand the GBC to remove all of the people who created the deviant infrastructure program that caused the lawsuit, ok like Jayapataka, but instead there was pretty much silence, the sound of crickets.

(F) Instead, many people began to blame me for even thinking the molester empire had to be dismantled, including some of the so-called ritviks?    

(G) Which brings me to a letter from an ex-kuli who asked me recently, why are so many people going to protest the Standing Rock Indian reservation oil pipeline, but the devotees never seem to organize any protest of anything?

(H) And how did you guess, Jayadvaita swami has been one of the main exponents of the bogus gurus program all along -- which generated this mess, and now he is making pretend he is alarmed by his own Frankenstein creation? Heh heh heh. Well this is getting interesting. Lets see how the GBC's master wizards pull another rabbit out of their hat to fix this mess, of their own doing. ys pd]  

Identity of Buyer Discovered in Pending Sale of Brooklyn Radha-Govinda Temple

BY: H.H. JAYADVAITA SWAMI

For immediate release
December 8, 2016
Contact: Jayadvaita Swami
jaswami+rgbrooklyn@gmail.com

Members of the ISKCON Radha-Govinda temple congregation in Brooklyn have uncovered the identity of the prospective buyer with whom the temple officials signed a deal last year to sell the temple. The deal has still not gone through, because it cannot be completed without judicial consent.
There is no need for the buyer's identity to be kept secret, and so I am disclosing it here.

Erik Ekstein

Usually when an offer to purchase a religious building is under serious consideration, the officers in charge of the church, mosque, or temple inform the congregation and tell them the essential details, such as the price, the terms of the contract, and the identity of the buyer.

For the pending sale of the Radha-Govinda temple, however, the temple officials kept everything secret, even after they signed the deal. To this day, Romapada Swami (the local member of ISKCON's Governing Body Commission), Ramabhadra Dasa (the temple president), and the other members of their temple board have tried to keep such basic facts about the deal from getting out to the temple community.

But now, with some research, the identity of the buyer has come to light. It is a company headed by Erik Ekstein, a New York niche-market property developer and entrepreneur. Mr. Ekstein's main company is the Ekstein Development Group (http://www.edgre.com).

Mr. Ekstein is not among New York's largest property developers. But he has done well for himself particularly in Long Island City, a portion of Queens, the New York borough to which Romapada Swami and Ramabhadra Dasa planned to move the temple. Apart from property deals, Mr. Ekstein's companies have also developed rehearsal studios, self-storage facilities, and two ice-skating rinks.

As far as we've seen, Mr. Ekstein's dealings with the temple have been fair and ethical. He is a businessman, and so he is doing business. The ISKCON legal entity that holds the title for the temple building is officially known as the Bharati Center, Inc. Romapada Swami is the chairman of the board. As far as we know, the other board members are Ramabhadra Dasa, Satya Devi Dasi (Ramabhadra's wife), Adi Deva Dasa (a New York devotee, not the artist), and Damodara Svarupa Dasa (Adi Deva's son-in-law). If any changes to the board have been made since we last checked, they haven't been publicly announced.

NOTE: The sale of the temple has not been completed. It cannot be completed without permission from New York State's Attorney General or a Court. So far, such permission hasn't been obtained. And members of the temple congregation, aided by their attorneys, are continuing their efforts to save the temple from being sold.

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