CAMDEN
A Superior Court judge on Thursday postponed for five weeks a hearing on a defense request that the murder trial of Rabbi Fred Neulander be heard by jurors from outside Camden County.

Later Thursday, defense attorney Dennis Wixted said the rabbi's defense team will prepare a request by the end of the year to have Neulander released on bail.

The rabbi has been held without bail in Camden County Jail since a grand jury added a count of capital murder to an indictment against him on June 21.

Neulander, once a prominent South Jersey religious leader, is accused of ordering his wife's murder on Nov. 1, 1994.

The defense contends extensive publicity has made it impossible for Neulander to receive a fair trial from Camden County jurors.

If Superior Court Criminal Presiding Judge Linda G. Rosenzweig agrees, she can either move the trial to another county or select jurors from another county to be brought to Camden for the trial.

The prosecution has opposed a change in venue.

The rabbi's attorneys sought the postponement after Rosenzweig said she could not decipher documents prepared by the defense team to support its request.

Rosenzweig said the documents, summaries of broadcast news accounts about the Neulander case, were `as incomprehensible to me as trying to read a court reporter's notes.'

Attorneys Jeffrey Zucker and Wixted said they would provide the court with transcripts of the broadcast news accounts, as well as newspaper stories, by the Dec. 15 hearing.

The defense team wants to move the trial to Middlesex County or farther north.

Neulander initially was charged in September 1998 with arranging his wife's murder at their Cherry Hill home.

The capital murder charge, which brings a potential death penalty, was added after an associate of the rabbi, Leonard Jenoff, a former private investigator from Collingswood, confessed to the killing.

Jenoff said he and another man, Paul Daniels of Pennsauken, fatally beat Carol Neulander at her husband's request.

Both Jenoff and Daniels have pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter. Jenoff is expected to be a key witness at the rabbi's trial.