Boro Park Divided 60/40 in New Redistricting

By Yehudit Garmaise

New York has finally settled on its new congressional districts, but how do they affect Boro Parkers?

Responding to a Republican-led lawsuit that argued the new districts unfairly favored Democrats, on March 31, NY Supreme Court Justice Patrick McAllister overturned those maps and ordered redistricting specialist Jonathan Cervas to create new ones.

When Cervas released his first maps on May 17, Judge McAllister told interested parties that they had one day to submit any objections.

First, the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) objected to the many different types of neighborhoods Cervas first included in the heavily Jewish District 10. 

In a letter to Judge McCallister, the JCRC wrote “Boro Park’s interests are distinct from the Jews of Lower Manhattan, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and Brownstone Brooklyn.” 

Not only were many neighborhoods with widely varying political interests mashed together into District 10, Jewish leaders said, but Boro Park, Midwood, and Flatbush, which previously mostly stood in the 10th District, had been chopped up to be distributed among the 9th and 10th Districts.

In response, Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein (D-44), Councilman Kalman Yeger (D-44), and other Jewish leaders wrote their own letter that said that dividing Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods diminished the voting power of the community.

“We are requesting the 10th Congressional District as proposed by the Court and Special Master be expanded slightly to include the remaining parts of the Boro Park, Midwood, and Flatbush neighborhoods,” Eichenstein and Yeger wrote. 

Responding in kind to Boro Park’s concerns that the Orthodox community would be unfairly divided as a “community of interest,” Cervas went back to the drawing boards, and by last Shabbos, released the final maps that put roughly 60% of Boro Park in the 9th District, with Midwood, Flatbush, and Crown Heights, and leaving approximately 40% of BP in the 10th District.

The large field of New York politicians who have expressed interest in running in the Aug. 23 primary to represent the 10th District in the US House of Representatives include: US Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-17), former Mayor Bill de Blasio, state Sen. Simcha Felder, Lower Manhattan Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, state Senator Brad Hoylman (27th District), former city Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Assemblyman Robert Carroll (D-Park Slope, and Yan Xiong, a former US Army chaplain, who fought Communists in the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

In the 9th District, Steven Green is challenging Yvette Clark, the incumbent who has represented the district since 2013.