Orthodox men dominate Mayor Adams’ new Jewish advisory council

If there is an archetypal Jewish New Yorker, that person could be found on the Upper West Side, somewhere between Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass.

But when Mayor Eric Adams recently announced the formation of New York City’s first-ever Jewish Advisory Council, that type of Jewish New Yorker was in short supply. Instead, at least 23 members of the 37-member council are Orthodox, and only nine are women — a composition that has drawn criticism from a number of prominent Jewish leaders and groups.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the oldest Jewish member of the House, slammed Mr. Adams, the mayor of the nation’s most Jewish city, for failing to “adequately reflect the demographic diversity of Jewish New Yorkers.”

“I encourage the mayor to work to better account for that diversity with changes in council membership so that it can be appropriately balanced to properly reflect the full range of community views and needs, Mr. Nadler said in a statement to The New York Times.

Mr. Nadler’s views were echoed by rabbis from Congregation Beth Elohim, a Brooklyn Reform congregation where Senate Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer worships, and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a homosexual local authority in Manhattan. Mr. Nadler was also supported by Ruth Messinger, global ambassador for the American Jewish World Service and former Manhattan borough president; and David Saperstein, a prominent Reform rabbi and former ambassador for international religious freedom. Mr Schumer declined to comment.

The dispute comes just a week after Mr Adams got into a verbal altercation with a Jewish housing activist whose family fled the Holocaust who compared Mr Adams to a plantation owner.

While Mr. Adams is the first mayor in decades to have no Jewish deputy mayors, he does have several Jewish commissioners and, like mayors before him, has cultivated close ties with the politically powerful Hasidic community, which tends to voting blocks. Many of the Jewish leaders who now criticize him are progressive, and Mr. Adams is not popular with progressives.

A City Hall spokeswoman noted that there is a lot of diversity within the Orthodox ranks – for example, there are both Modern Orthodox and Jews with ties to the Lubavitch movement.

“This esteemed council is made up of a diverse assembly of Jewish men and women of various religious and cultural backgrounds, including Chabad, Conservative, Hasidic, non-denominational, Modern Orthodox, Reformist, Sephardi and Yeshiva Orthodox affiliations,” said the spokeswoman for the major. “Collectively, they bring a wealth of experience and expertise as they address the diverse issues impacting New York City’s Jewish community.”

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, a conservative rabbi and a councilman who has the mayor called “an old friend and advisor,” said Wednesday afternoon that he planned to meet Thursday with the mayor’s senior advisor, Joel Eisdorfer, who is Hasidic, to discuss possible expansion of the council’s membership.

“We will not be fully effective if we are not fully representative,” said Mr Potasnik, who described the council as “very diverse”. “And we’re working with the mayor’s office to make sure that’s the outcome.”

The council also relies on New York Jews who have expressed support for the mayor, including Mr. Potasnik; Moishe Indig, a Hasidic leader who joined Mr. Adams on stage the night of his election victory; and David Greenfield, the Orthodox leader of Met Council on Jewish Poverty, a Brooklyn-based Jewish charity.

Any preponderance of Adams supporters would not in itself be representative of New York’s Jewish Democrats, according to John Mollenkopf, the director of CUNY’s Center for Urban Research. In his survey, only 12 percent of those Democratic primary voters named Mr. Adams as their first choice in the 2021 primary.

“So if a supporter of Adams is a criterion for service on this council, it will necessarily not be representative of the diversity of the Jewish electorate,” Mr Mollenkopf said.

Last MayMr. Adams met with 55 female rabbis and cantors at City Hall, a meeting that stemmed from concerns by female rabbis that he was watching the community too closely.

After Rabbi Rachel Timoner, of Congregation Beth Elohim, said this to the Jewish press, an aide to the mayor contacted her and said the mayor was interested in inviting female rabbis to City Hall, she said.

That meeting went well in all respects.

“He remarked several times how dazzling it was for him to meet us,” Rabbi Timoner recalled.

A year later, Rabbi Timoner joined Sharon Kleinbaum, the senior rabbi of Beit Simchat Torah, in protesting the composition of the mayor’s Jewish Council.

“The Advisory Council is so heavily focused on one segment of the community that it reflects a very skewed view of New York’s Jewish demographic and has the potential to leave the majority of New York’s Jews feeling underrepresented and unheard of. they wrote in a letter to the mayor.

In interviews, several members of the council, including Rachel Ain, a conservative female rabbi, and Devorah Halberstam, the Orthodox external affairs director of the Jewish Children’s Museum, said they were pleased with its composition.

“There will always be people who will say, ‘If they weren’t there, why didn’t they bring them in,'” Ms Halberstam said.