Seven months after the New York City Department of Transportation installed a protected bike lane on Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue, Rabbi Moishe Indig, a prominent member of Williamsburg’s Satmar Hasidic community, wanted the portion of it running through his neighborhood gone—and had summoned the mayor of New York City to hear out the case against it. 

At a May 2025 town hall meeting in his neighborhood, Indig shared his concerns about the bike lane: that cyclists were endangering Hasidic children, and thus the portion of the lane running between Willoughby Avenue and Flushing Avenue needed to be destroyed. Data collected by the DOT found that the bike lane was working as intended—injuries for bikers and pedestrians decreased along the entire protected bike lane. In fact, between Dekalb Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Flushing Avenue in South Williamsburg, they dropped a whopping 47 percent from the previous year. 

But for Mayor Adams, the data wasn’t what mattered. “Give the proposal to the [DOT] commissioner,” Mayor Adams told another Hasidic community leader at the meeting. “Because if I see you and Moishe here, something must be concerning.” On June 19, around a month later, Adams released a video advocating for the section’s removal. “We saw some of the horrific video of children almost being hit in this bike lane, and if we find in government that something is done that needs to be corrected, we need to be bold enough to correct it,” Adams told the camera. For most of the clip, which is just over a minute long, the mayor was surrounded on all sides by preteen boys with shaved heads, yarmulkes, and peyot—but for a second, at the very beginning, the camera captures Indig off to his right. Three blocks of the lane were unceremoniously ripped up two months later, despite a legal challenge to the Adams administration’s decision. (Streetsblog reported that conditions on those blocks for bikers quickly deteriorated to previous levels of danger.) 

“This has nothing to do with public safety—and everything to do with the mayor choosing to ally himself with an extreme, ‘fringe’ ultra-Orthodox view that banned bicycles over a century ago because [a child] got his tzitzis [religious garb] caught in bicycle spokes,” 13-year-old Rafael Herzfeld, one of the plaintiffs on the lawsuit to save the bike lane, told Streetsblog. “The decision to remove the bike lane is an abomination — for cyclists, for Hasidic children, and for pedestrians. It’s a colossal waste of public resources that panders to a tiny minority opinion.” 

Herzfeld was right—Adams chose to align himself with Indig based on history. But the pertinent history here was likely Indig’s track record of power and electoral influence in the Satmar community, whose support the incumbent mayor was desperately courting for his now-aborted 2025 mayoral run. 

Leaders in New York City’s Hasidic community have spent decades fostering relationships with politicians and positioning themselves as the arbiters of a critical voting bloc in order to preserve their autonomy as a highly segregated and insular community in a city of millions. Indig is a rabbi and community leader in that tradition: He’s a leading member of the Orthodox interest group Jewish Community Council of Williamsburg (not to be confused with the JCC that does kids summer camps), a member of Brooklyn Community Board 1’s public safety and human services committee, and the publisher of Der Blatt, a Yiddish language, print-only newspaper that came under fire in November 2020 for deliberately burying news of a Satmar leader’s grandson’s wedding, an indoor gathering of thousands of attendees in blatant violation of COVID-19 distancing and gathering restrictions.

Indig also previously appeared on the Village Voice’s 2010 list of “New York’s Ten Worst Landlords” over the conditions in an apartment building that he owned in Williamsburg, 684 Flushing Avenue. Tenants reported pest infestations, flooding, sagging floors, abandoned units, and more neglect in the four-story apartment—and when reached for comment, Indig copped to the above and promised to do better (even though he was suing his tenants for withholding rent over the numerous issues). “By next year, we hope you will be able to put the building back on the best-landlords list, instead of the worst!” Indig told the Voice. 

In 2012, the Observer published a press release in which the rabbi claimed credit for Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s successful reelection, after her opponent was endorsed by (then pre-disgraced) Brooklyn Democratic leader Vito Lopez and a rival sect of the Satmar community, in which Indig described his Ahronim sect’s surge “in power” as the beginning of “a new era in Brooklyn.” 

The next year, Indig seems to have played mayoral kingmaker for the first time by endorsing Bill de Blasio, introducing him at a 2013 rally as the only candidate who supported the controversial, ultra-Orthodox practice of metzitzah b’peh. “We know it’s a very busy time, right in the middle of the high holidays, but if Bill de Blasio made his time to come to us 48 hours before the election, we all must make time to go out and vote for him,” Indig said. “I want to thank my friend, Rabbi Moishe Indig, for his leadership,” de Blasio said as he took the podium. “I have known him for many years, we developed a friendship and a trust, and his support, his friendship, means so much to me personally—let’s thank him for all he does for the community.”

In an interview with The Forward about his get out the vote strategy, Indig described sending Satmar children home from yeshiva with fliers in order to influence their parents. “We’re telling the kids to tell the parents that this is the candidate we endorse.” Indig reportedly said. “Tell your mother, tell your father, to go out and vote for Bill de Blasio.” It was apparently a winning strategy: In 2014, the Observer named Indig as one of two “Orthodox Delegates” on its list of powerful Brooklynites, thanks to his “record of reliably delivering thousands of votes” to “chosen candidates.” 

By late 2016, Indig found himself wrapped up in the federal investigation into de Blasio’s campaign fundraising. He was reportedly questioned by the FBI, and even had one of his cell phones seized by federal agents in December of that year. (Unlike the case against Adams, this federal investigation eventually petered out,) A “political operative” described Indig as a kind of unlicensed lobbyist to the New York Post: “If you have a problem with government, you go to Moishe. He is not a bad guy. It’s just the cost of doing business.” Another anonymous source told Politico in 2017 that the rabbi was “the Bill Clinton of the Hasidic community.” “Everyone calls him Indig—has a good heart, and his heart is always in the right place. His enthusiasm sometimes gets ahead of procedural niceties,” the source said.

Like any New York City power broker worth his salt, Indig didn’t let a little federal scrutiny knock him out of the game, and publicly allied himself with Eric Adams in the 2021 mayoral race, dodging Andrew Yang’s attempts at courting the Hasidic community in the Democratic primary. “I told [Yang] he might be a very nice person, but I don’t know him,” Indig recounted to the New York Times. “I said we have a good history with someone who is here for years,” referring to Adams, adding, “we know that he cares for the community. It’s not nice to take an old friend and throw him under the bus.”

Indig’s friendship with Adams apparently earned him some access to the most elite corners of the new administration: Indig was one of dozens of supporters onstage with Adams on Election Night in November 2021. He appeared side by side with top NYPD officers, including then-Commissioner Keechant Sewell and future commissioner Edward Caban, at a press conference railing against bail reform in the first year of the Adams administration, and was invited to a closed-door breakfast with other Hasidic community leaders in September to discuss “crime, antisemitism and education,” according to another attendee. Then, in June 2023, Indig was appointed to the City’s first-ever Jewish Advisory Council, which the mayor described as having been assembled to “ensure that Jewish New Yorkers in every community have a seat at the table and have access to the support and resources the city offers” in a press release. (City and state politicians quickly noted in a letter to Adams that the 37-person committee had just nine women and zero queer or non-white members.)

In February 2025, when the mayor needed his support, Indig was there—at least, as a signatory to a letter urging Governor Kathy Hochul not to remove the mayor from office in the wake of his quid pro quo pardon fiasco. And although Indig ended up endorsing Cuomo in the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary in June—”[Adams] is going around to people to ask for support for the general election…I know what he wants, I know what he feels, but we have a good relationship with Cuomo when he was still governor,” the rabbi told the Times—he vocalized his support for the mayor during a Dr. Phil TV special on antisemitism in New York City the same month. “In November, you’ll see .. with God’s help,” Indig said into a microphone, while Dr. Phil and Adams listened attentively. “We will come out and show our great support for our great mayor and brother, Eric Adams.”

Adams announced the impending destruction of the contested blocks of the Bedford Avenue bike lane four days before the special aired.

Baruch Herzfeld, the father of 13-year-old cycling activist Rafael and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that attempted to save Bedford Avenue’s protected bike lane, said he’s met Indig multiple times and visited the rabbi’s home, and despite the fact that they found themselves on opposite sides of the bike lane issue, his impression of the rabbi remains positive. “Some of this stuff about being a ‘fixer’ is more like smoke and mirrors,” Herzfeld said. “But I do get the sense from talking to him that he’s what they call, in the Jewish community, an ‘askan.'” 

Herzfeld continued, “If somebody needs, like, a hospital bed, or somebody gives birth or  somebody’s having trouble getting, what’s the word, like, benefits that they’re entitled to, he helps arrange that.” Herzfeld said that over the course of a single car ride with Indig, he watched the rabbi field multiple calls from concerned Satmar community members. In Herzfeld’s estimate, the rabbi’s push to remove the offending portion of the Bedford Avenue bike lane was just another case of Indig’s problem-solving prowess. “He spends his time actively trying to help people—he’s spending all day, from early in the morning to late at night, helping his community through reaching out to different social service organizations,” Herzfeld concluded. “And because of that, he has power.”

As of this writing, Indig’s X feed consists almost entirely of photos of himself rubbing shoulders with some of New York’s most powerful people, occasionally in his own home. Snapshots of Indig with Governor Kathy Hochul, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, Comptroller Brad Lander, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, Congressman Mike Lawler, Kings County Democrats Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, and, of course, Mayor Adams all grace the rabbi’s feed; so do photos of Indig with NYPD officials, like Deputy Chief of the Community Affairs Bureau Richie Taylor, the department’s highest-ranked Orthodox Jewish officer. What’s a bigger flex than getting some of the city’s busiest people to come to your house, eat at your dinner table, and then pose for a shitload of pictures with you? (Indig did take a brief break from posting pictures of himself in June to thank Adams for showing “real leadership” in killing the Bedford Avenue bike lane.) 

But these snapshots are more than just standard social media braggadocio—they’re photographic proof that Adams needed Indig far more than Indig ever needed Adams. Case in point: Indig found himself at another Table in October, seated across from Comptroller Brad Lander and directly beside Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani at a Sukkah held by another Ahronim rabbi. In a video from the dinner, another rabbi spoke for Indig, apparently outlining the leader’s thoughts about Mamdani, while Indig smiled, reserved, next to the assemblymember. “I want to tell you about Rabbi Indig,” the other rabbi said. “Not when your numbers were up, when Adams dropped out, the first day, he called me up and told me ‘I like this guy, and I’m gonna meet him, no matter what the consequences are.’ After he met you, he told me, ‘This guy is a friend of the Jewish people, he’s real, he’s sincere, and I believe he’s gonna be the best mayor of New York City, and I’m with him all the way’… so, congratulations—why do I have to waste a few weeks?—on becoming the next mayor of New York City.” And on November 2, 2025, just two days before the general election, Indig officially endorsed Mamdani for mayor (although, based on the final vote tally in Indig’s district, which Cuomo won, the rabbi’s endorsement doesn’t seem to have delivered for the mayor-elect). 

Who knows how long the convivial vibes will last, though—after all, Mamdani promised voters back in August that, if elected, he would reinstall that pesky unfinished portion of the Bedford Avenue bike lane. 

In a response to a message from Hell Gate asking Indig about the nature of his relationship with Adams, and where he sees the soon-to-be former mayor heading next, Indig wrote the following:

The mayoral election is over. Zohran Mamdani is now Mayor‑elect. The Jewish community wishes him the best as he assembles his administration to lead our city. We met him several times before the election and were impressed by his vision, including free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, building more affordable housing, lowering costs of living, standing up to antisemitism, and ensuring our community’s safety and security. I’m confident he will be a strong ally for our community and all New Yorkers. We pray for his success, as his success will be our success.