In 1989, the village forbade any property owner from selling or renting an apartment without its permission. Teitelbaum elaborated that “anyone that rents without this permission has to be dealt with like a real murderer ... and he should be torn out from the roots”.[40] In the early 1990s, the New York State Police responded many times to the village, which has a generally low crime rate otherwise, when self-described dissidents reported harassment such as broken windows and graffiti containing profanity on their property. In one incident, troopers rode a school bus undercover to catch teenage boys stoning it; the boys later stoned a back-up police cruiser when it arrived. One of Weider’s nephews was among those arrested. He admitted that some of the village’s young men took it upon themselves to act violently against dissidents because they could not bear to hear the grand rebbe criticized, although he said most of them were provoked to do so by dissidents.[39] “Someone not following breaks down the whole system of being able to educate and being able to bring up our children with strong family values”, Weider told The New York Times in 1992. “Why do you think we have no drugs? If we lost respect for the Grand Rabbi, we lose the whole thing.”[39] In January 1990, the village held its first, and, for a decade, only, school board election. “It’s like this”, Teitelbaum explained when he announced the names of seven hand-picked candidates. “With the power of the Torah, I am here the authority in the rabbinical leadership ... As you know, I want to nominate seven people, and I want these people to be the people.”[40] One dissident, Joseph Waldman, decided nevertheless to run on his own. He was made unwelcome at the synagogue, his children were expelled from yeshiva, his car’s tires slashed, and his windows broken. Several hundred residents marched in the streets in front of his house chanting, “Death to Joseph Waldman!”, after posters calling for that fate were posted in the synagogue. After the election, in which Waldman finished last, but still won 673 votes, 60 families who were known to have voted for him were barred from visiting their fathers’ graves in the village cemetery that was owned by the rabbi, and banned from the synagogue (also, at the time, the village’s only polling place). Waldman compared Teitelbaum to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.[40] After the election, a state court ruled that Waldman’s children had to be reinstated at the yeshiva, an action that was only taken after the judge held Teitelbaum in contempt and fined him personally.