Jews are known to vote in large numbers, but Salkowitz said Jewish voter turnout has dropped from a historic high of 90 percent to about 80 percent.
“That’s why we launched MitzVOTE,” she said, adding that the Jewish community can “certainly learn some lessons from the Christian Coalition — how they’ve been mobilizing, how they systematically went about organizing this amazing instrument they now have.”
A play on the word “mitzvot” — Hebrew for “commandments” — MitzVOTE is offering voter guides for state and national legislative races in districts in San Francisco, the East Bay and the Peninsula. The North Bay was excluded only because of time and economic limitations, Salkowitz said.
The guides comprise 12 questions on issues such as school prayer, abortion, affirmative action, school vouchers, campaign finance and prison construction. They were sent to all candidates for the California state Senate and Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives.
The guides include no candidate endorsements.
“We really wanted to have something easy and accessible that voters could have in hand when they go to the polls,” said Spencer Freedman, AJCongress regional program director.
Two voter guides produced by other national Jewish groups this year sparked controversy and accusations of bias. But Freedman said staff and volunteers painstakingly tried to avoid any hint of partiality.
“I don’t foresee any problems,” Freedman said.
The advisory committee that created the questions included both Democrats and Republicans. National AJCongress attorneys also reviewed the guides, which were then sent to Bay Area Jewish organizations and synagogues for display or inclusion in newsletters.
In addition to creating the guides, the AJCongress campaign:
*Provided voter registration forms to Jewish groups and congregations.
*Helped register voters at citizenship swearing-in ceremonies.
*Formed coalitions with several child-advocacy and poverty-awareness groups to expand the voting effort beyond the Jewish community, particularly in the East Bay. That voter registration drive reached people in public housing and the homeless.
*Helped plan a Sunday, Oct. 27 education forum on the state ballot initiatives at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center.
*Scheduled get-out-the-vote phone banks for Monday, Oct. 21 and 28 on the Peninsula.
*Created an organizing manual to pass on to other groups and AJCongress regions.
MitzVOTE is not the first AJCongress foray into election issues. Two years ago, the organization fought the anti-immigration Proposition 187. This year, it is working against the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209.
But MitzVOTE is the liberal-leaning group’s first attempt at such a broad-based, nonpartisan voting effort.
Most volunteers, not all of whom are AJCongress members, are involved for purely civic purposes. But a few were spurred by more compelling reasons.
San Mateo resident Vern Drehmel, a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Nazi Germany, recalls his first “fearsome” encounter with voting booths as a child in the early 1930s. Accompanying his mother to the polls, he recalled Nazi troopers on the street corners.
He hasn’t missed a vote since 1952, after he became a U.S. citizen.
“You can’t have freedom if people don’t exercise it,” he said.
The idea for MitzVOTE germinated in the 1994 state and national elections, when Hillsborough resident Esther Harris realized that middle-aged acquaintances were shunning the polls despite the advent of term limits and the rising power of the Christian Coalition.
“I knew some young people weren’t voting. But I was shocked to find some people my age weren’t voting in the off-year election,” said Harris, a co-chair of the Peninsula’s MitzVOTE committee.
Last November, Harris heard Salkowitz speaking in San Francisco at the Bay Area Jewish Women’s Conference and asked AJCongress to get involved.
Harris and others began working on the project in February in San Mateo County. This summer, AJCongress decided to expand the effort to San Francisco and the East Bay.
“It’s a nonsensical thing not to vote,” Freedman said.