According to the Times, Mr. Hidary has recruited known political heavyweights from all over the planet. For example, Mr. Hidary hired Joe Trippi, who oversaw Howard Dean’s Democratic run for the White House, as his top adviser; Kenneth A. Gross, the campaign finance lawyer for Michael R. Bloomberg, as his general counsel; Richard Strauss, a media guru in the Clinton White House, as a media consultant; and Campaign Grid, a firm that advised Chris Christie on his run for New Jersey governor, to perform outreach to voters as an independent candidate for mayor.

Trippi, the campaign adviser, returned again and again to the idea that New Yorkers were unimpressed by their choices for mayor this year, and would be willing to give Mr. Hidary a chance. “Nobody is running away with this thing,” Mr. Trippi said. “People look at the candidates that are running and say, ‘This is it? We can’t do better than this?’ ”

“There is a clear message from the voters: they are not satisfied with the current set of choices,” Mr. Hidary said.

Mr. Hidary insists that he can draw on his ties to Jewish voters, especially the Sephardic community in Flatbush, Brooklyn where he grew up, and to the city’s new army of technology workers to drum up enough votes in November.

“The Jewish community is one of the strongest voting blocks in New York, with about 400,000 expected to turn out, and most of those in Brooklyn,” the Algemeiner notes. “The Sephardic community there brings a solid 70,000 votes.”

Hence, in a series of conversations YWN had conducted with informed and active voters within the Sephardic community, Mr. Hidary’s candidacy, as a member of the tribe, didn’t draw up the expected support he would likely need to make a compelling Orthodox argument.

Moshe, a registered Democratic voter, who now supports Eric Salgado’s candidacy, told YWN he would not even consider voting for Mr. Hidary in the general election, based on his progressive stance of traditional marriage and support for same gender marriage. “Even as a member of my congregation, I could not support his candidacy,” said Moshe G.

“No, I cannot support any candidate that supports gay marriage, said Joseph L, a well informed political activist, when reached by YWN.

However, another member of the Sephardic community who wished to remain anonymous, said he doesn’t know much of Jack Hidary to form an opinion and would consider backing his candidacy, unless moral values would match Hidary’s stances on issues that matter, once he reaches his final determination.

Joseph Hayon, an active political member of the community and Republican city council candidate challenging Councilman David Greenfield, views Mr. Hidary as an outsider in the community based on his political affiliations. “Jack Hidary donated thousands of dollars to each of the mayoral campaigns of Christine Quinn and Anthony Weiner. That puts him in the same category as David Greenfield,” Mr. Hayon, who is also Erick Salgado’s Jewish Liaison, told YWN.

According to insiders, Syrian-Sephardic Jews are very unforgiving to members of the tribe who do not practice the accepted tenets of their branch of orthodoxy.

In the early twentieth century the Syrian Jewish communities of New York and Buenos Aires adopted rulings designed to discourage intermarriage. “The communities would not carry out conversions to Judaism; they would not recognize the conversions of other communities or admit converts to join Syrian synagogues; marriages between Syrian Jews and converts would not be recognized, and the children of such marriages would not be allowed to join the Syrian community,” according to a detailed explanation written in 1994.

“If the Sephardic community took upon themselves to amend a Mitzvah the Torah permits and embraces, in order to preserve marriage, how much more severe is the embrace of same-gender marriage that the Torah forbids classifying it as a to’eivah (something abhorred or detested) that can be subject to capital punishment under Jewish law),” One of the Sephardic Rabbis, who was asked a hypothetical question about supporting a Jewish – Social Progressive -‘ candidate for public office, ruled.

Nonetheless, regardless of the support he ma be getting or not from his fellow Orthodox Jews, Mr. Hidary still he faces daunting electoral roadblocks, the NY Times notes. “He will have no support from city unions, a potent force in Election Day politics. There are two fellow businessmen in the race, Joseph J. Lhota and John A. Catsimatidis. And he will be hampered by his decision to participate in the city’s voluntary campaign finance system, which will allow him to lend money to his campaign but will cap his spending at around $7 million, in exchange for eligibility for public matching funds. “

The idea of a Hidary independent run could also raise the aspects of the Jewish electorate in NYC. If polls prove to be accurate, and Anthony Weiner and Joe Lhota both emerge victorious in their party’s primary’s, we might be looking at a 3-way race where the candidates for mayor are all Jewish (of course according to Jewish law). Not to mention the woken up Comptroller race, which regardless of outcome will have a Jewish candidate on the November ballot.

We are still awaiting a response by the Hidary campaign, and will update the readers as soon as we get it.

(Jacob Kornbluh – YWN)