A private campaign launched Friday to fight deportation of Imam Mohammad Qatanani, the prominent North Jersey Islamic spiritual leader, raised nearly $100,000 over the weekend.

Immigration officials, who are declining comment, have refused to grant the imam a green card because they claim he failed to disclose on his green card application that he had been arrested in the West Bank in 1993 and convicted by Israeli authorities, said his lawyer, Claudia Slovinsky.

Slovinsky said the imam did not lie. She said Israeli authorities held him for what amounted to a three-month interrogation that included torture. She said he was let go without being told about charges or a conviction.

Nearly all the money raised in Qatanani's behalf has come from his congregation at the Paterson-based Islamic Center of Passaic County, which has thousands of members.

A petition drive for Qatanani has collected nearly 1,000 signatures, and campaign organizers say they will distribute T-shirts, baseball caps and bumper stickers supporting the imam.

"This shows how much people love him," said Aref Assaf, president of the Paterson-based American Arab Forum. "People came to the mosque to bring donations, they have been calling."

Many leaders of other religions as well as political officials have rallied to the imam's side, writing to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Judge Alberto Riefkohl, who is to hear a trial on the case in May.

Among those who wrote to Riefkohl is Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., who is on the House Homeland Security Committee and stated "I have seen and heard him foster only tolerant, peaceful, interfaith, ecumenical relations."

Qatanani maintains that as an imam and college professor in Jordan, he helped young fellow Palestinians come there to study. He said Israeli authorities suggested during interrogation that the students had ties to Hamas, a militant group that the U.S. and European Union have branded as terrorist. The imam, 44, says the suggestion of Hamas ties was wrong and one commonly directed at Palestinians at the time.

Qatanani, who said last week that he initially resigned himself to leaving the U.S. with his wife and six children -- three of them U.S.-born -- submitted a new application for permanent residency after congregation members urged him not to give up. A three-day trial on the application is set for May in Immigration Court in Newark.

The possible deportation of Qatanani and his wife and children has rocked North Jersey's Muslim and Arab communities, the second largest in the nation after that of Dearborn, Mich. Many see it as part of a post-Sept. 11 backlash against Muslim leaders.

They praise Qatanani for his humanist activism in the Muslim community, counseling troubled families and feuding merchants and pushing congregants to assimilate American cultural norms.

"If it takes $10 million to help him, we'll find it," said Salaheddin Mustafa, president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "You can't imagine the number of women and children who have stayed with him and his family because they were in a home where there was domestic violence and had nowhere to go.

"If he is taken out of this country, our community will be diminished," Mustafa said. "To us, he is everything."