Seated at the center of a horseshoe-shaped set of conference tables in the downtown Newark law office of Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross on March 26, Booker responded positively to an offer by leaders of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ to jumpstart such a liaison.

“I would like to find ways to have a dialogue with you about specific projects this community can take on as a community and leverage a lot of change,” said Booker.

Booker addressed key UJC MetroWest leaders and representatives of area Jewish agencies and synagogues at the invitation of the Newark Advisory Council of the MetroWest Community Relations Committee. Many Jewish community leaders have retained business and cultural ties to Newark, despite the exodus of Jews to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s.

UJC MetroWest executive vice president Max Kleinman drew a grateful smile from Booker as he offered to help establish a liaison committee between Newark and the suburban Jewish community whose roots are in the city.

“There are a lot of people in this room who have tremendous resources and contacts,” Kleinman told the mayor. “It makes sense for us to have a liaison committee to work with you to talk about some areas in which we can do the greatest possible good for the city of Newark, the Jewish community, and Essex County.”

Prior to Kleinman’s proposal, UJC MetroWest president Kenneth R. Heyman of Short Hills told the mayor that “given the many challenges facing you and your administration, we want to make ourselves available to you and your administration in whatever capacities we can, to advance a strong city of Newark.”

A day later, Heyman told NJ Jewish News the cooperation would be more in terms of networking than in outside funding for city programs.

“We can form a liaison group to say, ‘How can we use the Jewish community to get value for what is going on in Newark?’ and ‘Is there anything we can do on specific projects, like working with the Newark Historical Society on a program about the city after the riots 40 years ago?’”

Another program in the planning stages will be a celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary at Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

“We want to use our social services in ways that can be of assistance,” said Jeffrey Greenbaum of Livingston, chair of the advisory council. “To the extent our community can fund projects, that is something we will be looking at.”

To Kleinman, Jewish community aid would come “as a function of our expertise, from our foundations, from our businesses and law firms. We really want to maximize the potential of Newark. Our roots are in Newark; our institutions, our sense of community, our memories of growing up in Newark are central to our Jewish community.”

Booker, who developed an affinity for Jewish culture during his student days at Oxford and Yale universities, responded by using and then translating a Hebrew term.

“I am humbled and awed every day that we have partners coming forward,” he said. “Hesed is alive and well in Newark, and I think we are seeing that loving-kindness proliferate. This is a people I feel a natural kinship with.”

But even as he noted that Newark has “still a glorious Jewish history and still a glorious Jewish presence,” the mayor said his city was “at a crossroads” with “a very difficult path ahead.”

Speaking extemporaneously for some 40 minutes, Booker ran through a litany of “unconscionable” urban problems far more staggering than what he had anticipated before becoming mayor last July.

Booker said the $150 million budget deficit he inherited from former Mayor Sharpe James was one of many symptoms of official corruption and neglect.

“When we walked into city hall, we found almost comical areas in which the city was running in a perverse manner,” he said. Those conditions ranged from an undercount of the number of city-owned buildings and municipal employees to hundreds of unauthorized cell phones, whose users made personal calls to places ranging from Washington state to Belize.

Booker said he is resisting consultants’ advice to lighten a bloated city payroll.

“We have between 700 and 1,000 more employees than we actually need, but with Newark’s very high unemployment rate, the thought of laying off 1,000 employees is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever looked at.”

The mayor said he was “shocked” to discover the decrepit condition of the city’s police precinct headquarters and that more than 60 percent of the police force was working on the day shift. “In big cities like Newark, crime doesn’t happen in the daytime,” he said.

A strong proponent of charter schools, Booker said the public school system is currently spending $17,000 per child and “paying a big price for failure.”

He told his audience some major foundations are interested in investing in Newark’s charter schools, “and I think that’s a great thing.” He noted that “a majority of our workforce very soon will be minority, and in a knowledge-based global economy, America will continue to fall behind.”

Merle Kalishman, the Livingston resident who chairs the UJC MetroWest CRC, said she was shocked by Booker’s portrait of his troubled city.

It was “horrific to know how people were being mistreated and how others were benefiting on the backs of those who were being mistreated,” she told NJJN. “It has created a culture that is going to take time to change.”

Linda Kohl, president of the American Jewish Committee’s Metro New Jersey Area, said her organization “needs to be in partnership with the black community in Newark, particularly in the field of health care. That is part of our agenda.”

Robert Steinbaum, editor of the New Jersey Law Journal and vice president of Ahavas Sholom, the only operational Conservative synagogue in Newark, praised Booker for his “inspirational” tone.

“I’ve heard the mayor speak inspirationally about spiritual life,” he said. “Today he spoke inspirationally about government reform and galvanized everyone in the room to see that good government is possible here. What he values resonated in the Jewish community.”

Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, whose synagogue was once a major force in Newark Jewish life, said he was awed by the mayor’s “charisma.”

“He knows how to talk to Jews with Jewish language,” said Gewirtz. “I would do anything I could to push my community to bring the Newark community back to what it was once upon a time.”