By: Hellen Zaboulani
As the June 22 Democratic Primary for the next New York City Mayor inches closer, candidate Andrew Yang has secured backing from nine leading Hasidic sects in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
As reported by Forward, as of Monday night, the groups, including the two large Satmar sects, have decided to endorse Yang as their top choice for mayor. The endorsement means that Yang, who is already one of the leading candidates, has locked up the Orthodox voting bloc.
NYC is now utilizing the new ranked-choice voting system, so the historically influential Orthodox voting blocs, are currently expected to rank Yang first, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams as their second choice, and City Comptroller Scott Stringer as third. Recent public polls have indicated that overall Yang and Adams are neck and neck for first place, with Stringer coming in third.
Yang has aggressively pursued the endorsement of the Orthodox communities in Borough Park, and has succeeded in getting an impressive number of large congregations to publicly back him. This is the first time the two Satmar factions have agreed to endorse the same mayoral candidate since the sect split in 2006. In 2013, they had differed, one side endorsing Bill de Blasio, as the other favored candidate Bill Thompson.
Yang defended the yeshiva education system, became one of the few who called out the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement as anti-Semitic, and he even hired a Hasid as his campaign’s Jewish outreach director. The “consensus among the community leaders was to support the candidacy of Mr. Yang because of this refreshing approach to the Yeshiva education issue – seeing through the baseless attacks to appreciate the exemplary outcomes of Yeshiva alumni – and his commitment to allow yeshiva education to continue without interference,” said Rabbi Moshe David Niederman, a political leader representing the faction led by Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum.
Adams and Stringer, who already have longstanding relationships with the community, also pursued the backing of the Orthodox leaders and neighborhoods. Some suggest that rank-choice voting gives groups of voters an advantage, by allowing the groups to endorse more than one candidate and avoid ruining ties with other potential victors. Rank choice gave us a chance to endorse “additional friends with whom we worked closely for so many years” and “look forward to work with the ultimate victor and all our friends to defend our religious and parental choices of education,” said Niederman, in a statement on Monday.
