Jul 10, 2023 3:25 PM
Updated:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s Jewish advisory council has been drawing criticism for underrepresentation of women and non-Orthodox Jewish leaders. The council, launched in the last week of June, is now adding two members who are both leaders of Orthodox organizations, though one of them is a woman, a spokesperson told Shtetl.
Rabbi David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of the Haredi advocacy group Agudath Israel of America, and Sydney Altfield, the executive director of the Orthodox advocacy group Teach NYS, will join the council, said Kayla Mamelak, the mayor’s Deputy Press Secretary, in a phone interview.
The advisory council has 37 members, not counting Zwiebel and Altfield. Nine of the members are women, and more than 20 are Orthodox.
Both Zwiebel and Altfield attended the council’s first meeting in June, but hadn’t been named to the panel because they were still being vetted, according to Mamelak. “When we named the members, they were still going through the vetting process, and still are,” Mamelak said.
In addition to his role at the Agudah, Zwiebel also helps lead PEARLS, an organization that advocates for Haredi yeshivas to dictate their own curricula. Teach NYS, a project of the Orthodox Union, advocates for private Jewish schools to receive more government funding. Zwiebel and Altfield did not provide comments to Shtetl.
Progressive Jewish leaders, including male and female Reform rabbis, said the council was unrepresentative of New York’s Jewish community, according to a New York Times report last week.
Mamelak responded to the criticisms of the council’s makeup by pointing to the variety among Orthodox communities as requiring greater representation.
When speaking of the Orthodox members of the council, Mamelak said, “I don't think it's fair to just say Orthodox; I think that that's painting with too broad of a stroke.” She went on to explain that, “on an advisory council, if you have a Modern Orthodox Jew speaking on behalf of his or her congregation, they might have far different priorities than someone who's Hasidic.”
Mamelak declined to share which organizations and individuals the mayor’s office reached out to about joining the council. But she said anyone who’d like to is “more than welcome to reach out to the New York City community affairs unit“ in order to apply.
Mamelak declined to explain how the city will decide which applicants to accept.
A spokesperson for U.S. congress member Jerry Nadler, who criticized the mayor in last week’s Times report for failing to accurately represent New York’s Jewish communities, told Shtetl the council should be more diverse, not just bigger.
“If true, the addition of these new members, without other more diverse additions, would strongly underscore the urgency and necessity for the Jewish Advisory Council’s makeup to more closely match the actual demography of the Jewish community,” wrote the Nadler spokesperson, Dan Rubin, in an email to Shtetl.
“Unless the Administration announces affirmatively that they will aim to create a more balanced, diverse entity—not just a bigger one—they appear to be headed in the wrong direction, further drowning out the voices of the majority of New York’s Jewish community: Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and unaffiliated/secular,” he added.
Haredim on the council include Ruth Lichtenstein, who is Ger Hasidic and the publisher of the Haredi newspaper Hamodia, Rabbi Chanina Sperlin, a leader at the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, and Rabbi Moishe Indig, a leader of Williamsburg’s Satmar community.
Rabbi Yechiel Kalish, who worked at Agudah for over 10 years and now leads the volunteer ambulance corps Hatzolah, and Rabbi Efraim Fink, who has also advocated with Agudah, are also members. The council also includes Met Council CEO David Greenfield, who represented Boro Park in the City Council from 2010 to 2017.
Richie Taylor, Commanding Officer of Community Affairs at the New York Police Department, who is Orthodox, is not an official member of the council, but he was present at its June meeting.
“He’s very busy,” Mamelak said of Taylor. “Richie Taylor will serve as a liaison to the Jewish Advisory Council and attend meetings whenever possible.”
Taylor did not immediately respond to Shtetl’s request for comment.
Richard Altabe, an Orthodox leader from Far Rockaway who endorsed Adams for mayor, questioned the timing of the announcement of the council’s formation, which was made a few days prior to the release of the city’s investigation into Haredi yeshivas. The investigation found that 18 yeshivas were violating the law by providing inadequate secular education.
“In a brilliant move right before releasing the damaging report about Yeshivas to the NYT, this group is formed which silenced all official opposition to the terrible damage dive to Yeshivas,” wrote Altabe on Twitter. His tweet was deleted on Monday.
Altabe seemed to pull back on the sentiments expressed in his tweet when Shtetl reached him by phone. He called his own tweet “nonsensical,” adding, “I don’t even know how smart that tweet was, because I really don’t know what the advisory council is doing or what its relationship to the mayor is.”
One Haredi member of the council told Shtetl that the proximity of the two events wasn’t meaningful. “I think [the timing] was just a coincidence,” Devorah Halberstam, who hails from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community, said in a phone call. “It was many months ago that I was invited to participate in this. I think it has absolutely nothing to do with this, at all.”
The employer of one of the new advisory council members, Teach NYS, hosted Adams for an event in May at which the mayor gave a speech focused on education. Adams suggested that yeshiva students are better off than public school students, and that religion should be in schools “anywhere possible.”
“You were there for me when I ran for mayor,” Adams said at the event. “I’m going to be there for you as your mayor.”
Read more: In speech, Mayor Eric Adams says public schools should "duplicate" yeshiva achievements
