Chaptzem Blog!      

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was getting an earful. “He created this crisis so that he can take credit for fixing it and get our votes in exchange,” one commenter wrote on a Brooklyn blog, Vos Iz Neias, Yiddish for “What is News.” Someone else remarked, “I got to my store I got 2 tickets from the Sanitation police. I sure deserved it Bloomie. I will NOT vote for you.”

The writers were reacting to the news late last month that Mr. Bloomberg would restore money for an after-school voucher program that is popular among Orthodox Jewish families. But some scorned the move as blatant political expediency days before the election.

Without question, Mr. Bloomberg was eager to woo the city’s Hasidic Jewish voters. He met behind closed doors with influential rabbis, courted their congregations, and gave an eight-page interview to an Orthodox magazine, describing the challenge of growing up Jewish in an Irish and Italian neighborhood.

Still, his share of the vote fell sharply in Brooklyn’s largest Hasidic enclaves on Nov. 3, and the decline was one of the sharpest among any group of voters.

“We didn’t vote as Hasidim. We voted as New Yorkers,” said Mendy Hecht, 36, a Lubavitcher in Crown Heights, who pulled the lever for the mayor’s Democratic opponent, Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. “My vote was a vote of protest against Bloomberg.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/nyregion/16orthodox.html