KIRYAS JOEL — The establishment preserved its lock on secular power in this divided Hasidic community Wednesday with a victory in an election for two Village Board seats.

It was the latest attempt by a large minority faction within Kiryas Joel to break one-party rule of its government, a challenge that had never happened in the village until 2001.

Trustee Jacob Freund and running mate Moses Goldstein beat Israel Holtzer and Salomon Feder, the candidates of the Kiryas Joel Alliance. The unofficial vote totals were: Freund, 3,121; Goldstein, 3,129; Holtzer, 2,251; and Feder, 2,259.

There was a new venue for the voting Wednesday.

Voters streamed into a new banquet hall on Forest Road to cast ballots on two floors of the building, monitored by a platoon of poll watchers, attorneys for both factions and officers from the village's public safety department.

Monitoring of elections is intense in Kiryas Joel because of contentions by the minority faction that the establishment has orchestrated voting fraud to hold onto power — claims the other side dismisses as paranoia.

One new wrinkle Wednesday was that a Woodbury citizens' group called OCEAN fielded its own squad of poll watchers to accompany the Kiryas Joel women at tables where voters sign in before entering the voting booths.

They were hard to miss.

A single OCEAN recruit, clad in white lab coat and white baseball cap, sat beside three or four Hasidic women at each of the 15 voting stations.

Their main task was to make sure the signatures that voters scrawled looked the same as the ones the Board of Elections provided.

"We're not pushing one side or another," said OCEAN leader Jonathan Swiller, a supporter of the Kiryas Joel Alliance, the opposition movement.

"We just want as fair an election as possible."

Manhattan attorney Andrew Fisher, who represented the village government, was one of several lawyers intervening in conflicts as they cropped up.

He said by afternoon that the process had been "virtually flawless."

cmckenna@th-record.com