Temple fires back

Insists nixed nups would have been safe

The Brooklyn synagogue barred by the state from holding a public wedding over fears it would attract 10,000 people hit back Sunday — saying “unwarranted attacks” forced it to scrap the planned celebration.

The Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar in Williamsburg was slapped with a state order Friday night banning its scheduled public wedding Monday involving a grandson of its grand rabbi, Zalman Leib Teitelbaum.

The house of worship later said it had taken special steps to ensure the public wedding complied with coronavirus guidelines — but that “nobody verified our plans before attacking us.”

“The unwarranted attacks on this event, originated by those besmirching the community, are detached from the facts,” the synagogue’s secretary, Chaim Jacobowitz, said in a statement.

Only a “small circle of close family members” would have been attending the key sections of the wedding, and “the rest of the community would only be able to participate for a short period of time,” Jacobowitz insisted.

“The greeting [line] would have been controlled in accordance with the social distancing regulations. The proper arrangements were in place to achieve that,” the statement added.

Now the wedding “will only [be] attended by close family members.”

Teitelbaum leads the Satmar sect in Williamsburg while his brother, Aaron, who reportedly contracted COVID-19 in March, leads the Satmar in the Kiryas Joel enclave in Orange County.

Previous marriages of Zalman Teitelbaum’s kin have drawn hordes of attendees, whether in the streets of Brooklyn or in Israel.

Gov. Cuomo on Sunday dismissed angst over the banned wedding as “not on the top of list of concerns’’ for the state during the pandemic — and invited himself to a pared-down celebration.

“I understand their point,’’ the governor said. “They had planned a large wedding. And everybody was excited for the wedding. And then the government says you can’t have this large wedding. How terrible. We were all excited about this large wedding.”

But he noted that one of his daughters didn’t have a college-graduation ceremony this year because of the virus and that people have died in nursing homes and hospitals from COVID-19, many without being able to have their loved ones near them for comfort.

“On the scale, I think, ‘I really wanted a big wedding’ isn’t on the top of the list of concerns,’’ the governor said.

“My suggestion: Have a small wedding this year. Next year, have a big wedding. Invite me, I’ll come.”