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After area residents decided against appealing a New Jersey Superior Court decision -- ending a yearlong legal battle -- the Summit Jewish Community Center hopes to begin construction on its 4,000-square-foot addition this summer.

The synagogue's new building at the corner of Morris Avenue and Kent Place Boulevard will include a new sanctuary with seating for 294 congregants, three additional classrooms, and a multi-purpose room to serve as a social hall. The SJCC's neighbors, who originally filed a civil complaint seeking "to preserve the integrity of the existing single-family residential areas by maintaining existing development intensity and population density," had 45 days to appeal Judge Karen Cassidy's November decision to uphold the Summit Zoning Board of Adjustment's approval of the project.

On the 45th day, the neighbors' attorney, Jay DeLaney, informed SJCC attorney Roger Mehner that they would not appeal, bringing to a close a "contentious" legal process dating back to the zoning board's initial approval in December 2008, said Richard Barron, past president of the SJCC and co-chair of the expansion committee.

"It's really a relief, because we were fully convinced that this [legal process] was going to drag on for another year," Barron said.

The synagogue intends to break ground this summer, with construction extending for between a year and a year-and-a-half, Barron said. The SJCC won't do any work on its existing 7,000-square-foot building until new one is up, he said.

"We did not want the congregation displaced during construction," Barron said.

Once the new building is up, Barron said, the synagogue will combine its old social hall and sanctuary into a new social hall which can host bar and bat mitzvah and wedding parties, something the old social hall didn't have the capacity for. The two buildings will be connected through a common lobby to serve as a lounge area, he said.

For now, the synagogue needs to be obtain a building permit and make sure its construction plan reflects several zoning conditions, including additional landscaping in the parking lot, moving some outside lighting fixtures so as not to disturb neighbors, and screening its dumpsters, Barron said. The SJCC has already started to bid the job to contractors, he said; the projected cost is $2.5-3 million.

In their complaint, the neighbors described the area near the synagogue as a "fragile neighborhood" that is "part of a proposed historic district." Any construction plan should maintain "a compatible relationship between the new or expanded houses and traditional neighborhood houses that reflect the best of neighborhood character, particularly in terms of scale, siting, design features and orientation," the complaint stated.

In 2003, the SJCC purchased two lots adjacent to its current building, one of them empty and one with a Victorian house in disrepair. In the existing synagogue, weekday morning adult education courses are held off-site because the SJCC's nursery school occupies the whole building.

If the neighbors chose to pursue the case in New Jersey Appellate Division, Barron said the synagogue was confident it would have prevailed because Summit's zoning review was thorough, but avoiding an appeal meant avoiding what could have been another year of delay for the expansion.

"We are just happy," Barron said of having closure in the legal process. "It has been the dream of several generations of congregants to expand the synagogue."