Mayor Lindsay Seen Losing Jewish Voting Support for Possible Reelection Bid

John V. Lindsay, who was elected Mayor of New York City four years ago with the help of Jewish voters who rejected Abraham Beame, his Democratic Jewish opponent, appeared today to have lost much Jewish support for a reelection bid because of his handling of such problems as those stemming from public school decentralization proposals.

The Mayor has not formally announced plans to seek another four-year term, but has made several moves toward reelection. Officials of the Liberal party, which claims its votes provided Mr. Lindsay with his margin of victory in 1965, said yesterday that disenchantment of many Jewish middle-class voters with the Mayor was a factor in the Liberal party’s current stance of non-commitment to support a Lindsay second term bid.

David Dubinsky, Liberal party vice-chairman, said he had “mixed feelings” about Mr. Lindsay’s record as Mayor. Dr. Donald S. Harrington, Liberal party chairman, predicted that the party would “do a lot of soul-searching” on the next mayoral election. Ben Davidson, the party’s executive director, noted that no one knew yet who the Democratic candidate would be and added that his party “has no commitment.” But Deputy Mayor Timothy W. Costello, former Liberal party chairman, said he expected the party to support Mr. Lindsay “if he runs in 1969.”

A party official asserted that the chief concern of the party leadership was to hold its votes, which are 85 percent Jewish middle-class liberal, many of them public school teachers or voters with school teachers in their families. Jewish hostility toward the Mayor developed during the recent strike by the United Federation of Teachers, which is heavily Jewish in membership, because the Mayor has backed thorough decentralization. However, Dr. Harrington argued that the middle-class Jewish group might be “out of sympathy” with some aspects of Mayor Lindsay’s policies but that it was “too early” to say that the teachers strike had permanently damaged Mr. Lindsay with Jewish voters. Mr. Lindsay in recent months, apparently concerned about his declining popularity with Jewish voters, had made a series of visits to synagogues and walking tours of Jewish neighborhoods.

The issue also was raised yesterday in the first statement of opposition by a Jewish group to community control of New York city schools. David A. Schulte, chairman of the New York Board of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, declared the ADL’s support for school decentralization but said the agency was opposed to “community control that would place the whims and wishes of a locality” over the authority of the city and state. Mr. Schulte testified at a hearing of the city’s Human Rights Commission that “the whole point is to try to keep the schools from being controlled by extremist groups — white, black or Jewish.”

Mr. Schulte said that “a distinction must be made between decentralization as an administrative vehicle for the improvement of the educational process and community control — under the guise of decentralization — as a political, economic and social action instrument.” He urged retention of a city Board of Education under any decentralization program and added that the ADL favored “more meaningful participation” of parents and other citizens in the school affairs of local communities, provided “all delegations of power and authority” were subject to city and state standards and controls.

In another development, the United Parents Association urged the Board of Education to change the times it has scheduled for public hearings in the five boroughs on its decentralization proposal. The UPA gave as one reason the fact that it considered it an “affront” to the Jewish community in Brooklyn that the hearing in that borough was scheduled for after 4 p.m. on a Friday.