Three days before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, the ultra-Orthodox news site Williamsburg 365 reported that Moishe Indig, a rabbi and leader in the Brooklyn Satmar sect, was going to endorse him.
“How could you?” one commenter asked.
“This is Capo [sic] behavior and an embarrassment,” said another.
After the election, in an interview in the Haredi magazine Mishpacha, Indig was pressed to justify endorsing someone whose statements had been interpreted by many American Jews as virulently antisemitic. “I’m not here to defend any of his objectionable positions or public statements,” Indig said. “I’m here to establish the access to the halls of power so critically needed by our many communities. This was the time and address at which to do it—not after the election, coming like an esrog after Succos.”
The interview was titled “The Kingmaker from Williamsburg,” but the word repeatedly applied to Indig was “askan.” It’s a common term among the Haredim (aka ultra-Orthodox), particularly in Hasidic sects, and refers to a community leader who is variously seen as an advocate, an influential intermediary and a fixer.
“It comes from Hebrew, but through Yiddish into Jewish English,” says Sarah Bunin Benor, a professor at Hebrew Union College and director of the Jewish Language Project. Askan, she says, is related to the Hebrew word osek, which means to occupy oneself. More specifically, she points to the use of osek in a blessing from the siddur for those who concern themselves with the needs of the public. “An askan is someone who oseks,” she says, adding that in modern Hebrew, askan translates to “a go-getter, a politico, a wheeler-dealer.” Askanim is the plural form and askanus is what they do.
“There is always some way we can help,” Indig told Mishpacha when asked about the practice. “There are connections, people, someone in the Rolodex, chavrach chavra isa lei—we know a guy who knows a guy…That’s the definition of askanus.”
Nathaniel Deutsch directs Jewish studies at UC Santa Cruz and is the coauthor, with Michael Casper, of A Fortress in Brooklyn, which details the making of Hasidic Williamsburg. For most of the history of askanim in the United States, he says they have tended to work behind the scenes. “In more recent years, there have been a few who have sought some kind of office.”
Case in point: Yakov Yosef Kaufman. He made news this past November, first when he pulled an upset victory as a write-in candidate to win a seat on the Board of Trustees of Spring Valley, a village located in Rockland County, NY, which has a large concentration of Hasidic Jews. “Everybody knows me,” he said of his decision to run for the seat, adding that in his new capacity, he “can help everybody.” Several weeks later, a story appeared at the online news site Monsey Scoop under the headline: “Askan and Spring Valley Trustee-Elect Yakov Yosef Kaufman Saves Passenger During Mid-Air Emergency.” Asked about his heroics on a flight from Budapest to Frankfurt on the day before Thanksgiving, Kaufman, who is a certified EMT and member of Hatzalah (the Jewish volunteer emergency medical service), is reticent to give details out of respect for the passenger’s privacy. “A different guy on the airplane who happens to know me, he’s the one who let out the story.”
Importantly, askan is not a title one gives oneself; it’s earned through a combination of humility and effectiveness. According to Deutsch, the typical self-narrative is that the role is just something that happened or was thrust upon an askan because other people thought they had the right skills.
“In every context that I’ve heard the title used, there’s a respect attached to it, which is a testament to the person. They’re an askan, not a macher,” says Chaya Nove, a linguist whose research focuses on New York Hasidic Yiddish and who grew up in the Satmar enclave of Kieras Joel in the Hudson Valley. “People who can move things because they have the financial resources—that’s a machar,” she says. “An askan doesn’t necessarily need to have money; they get where they are because they’ve done good work, they’ve made the right connections.”
Those connections are often political but extend to all manner of situations where community members might find themselves in need of help. For example, an askan could offer legal help or act as a medical liaison—someone well connected to the ins and outs of different hospitals, who has access to various specialists and can get you an appointment with the best person.
In her linguistic research, Nove often mines the online forum iVelt, which she says is a great resource for conversational data. “It’s where Hasidic men talk about everything in the world.” One user there (in a translation from Yiddish) described an askan as representing a specific organization or Hasidic group. In the same thread, another disputed a reference to a specific individual: “I believe he’s not an askan, he works as a lobbyist for a living.”
And while not all askanim are EMTs or rabbis or heads of organizations, those who carry the title are all men. “The word itself is a masculine term,” says Nove. She says there are definitely women who do askan-like advocacy, often related to health care. “But nobody calls them askanim.”
Deutsch theorizes that the askan emerged when Haredi communities started living in liberal democracies in the 20th century, in which voting was possible and a range of social welfare programs were provided by the government. Askanim were “typically very savvy business people or community activists who knew the language of the land” and could act as intermediaries. He describes a combination of practicality and inflexibility that is characteristic of contemporary Hasidic communities and, more broadly, Haredi ones. “It’s a tension that acts as a kind of engine. On the one hand, they are very adamant about maintaining tradition and about adhering to certain ideological and religious views. And at the same time, they will be very pragmatic in certain contexts.” For example, Moishe Indig’s Mamdani endorsement.
Askanim do find themselves collaborating with one another depending on their specific expertise or network, however Deutsch notes that competition can arise between them, in the sense that the Hasidic communities might compete with each other. “Satmar, most famously, split into two, each with its own rebbe, so each will have its own askanim. And then even within a community, there might be some competition just because they are trying to bring in resources to the community and there may be disagreements about how those resources should be used or what approach to take.”
And while an askan’s success stems from their devotion to the community, Deutsch says, “At times it can be a thankless task. In fact, they end up being lightning rods for criticism doing all this work.”
“You can’t please all the people all of the time,” says Kaufman. “You work so hard to make a person happy, and when you finish, somebody else is upset that you did it.” As Moishe Indig put it to Mispacha: “Anyone who knows what a kapo is can see that I am the exact opposite—a kapo beats you up to save himself. I’m taking beatings to save you.”
Noting that he’s “blessed with skin thick as a turkey,” Indig indeed took some beatings over the mayoral issue: “One of the rich people who called to yell at me for endorsing Mamdani said it ‘makes the Satmar vote appear to be transactional.’ I said, ‘You’re making a mistake. It doesn’t appear transactional, it is transactional.’”
The only option to deal with critics, Kaufman says, is to negotiate. “I say, let’s argue. Let’s see how we can make something in between so I can help everybody.” In the Hasidic community, he notes, you’re born into that imperative. “My mom always used to say, you can’t go to sleep before you help another person. It’s part of the duty.”