New York’s mayoral campaign teams are beginning to take shape. The former head of external affairs for the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, Kalman Yeger, has joined Fernando Ferrer’s campaign, making the announcement yesterday in an e-mail to friends, while other campaigns are on the brink of making key personnel decisions.

Mr. Yeger, a longtime Brooklyn political insider and Ferrer staff member, will become executive director of New Yorkers for Ferrer, the campaign committee supporting the former Bronx borough president’s bid to unseat Mayor Bloomberg. The Ferrer campaign declined to make Mr. Yeger available for an interview, saying he prefers to work behind the scenes.

“This could provide Freddie with avenues of access for conversations and money from the Jewish community,” a Baruch College political scientist, Douglas Muzzio, said. “It suggests that Freddie is putting together a diverse and open team and it institutionalizes, in a sense, his access to Jewish leaders.”

Mr. Ferrer, in an interview last week with The New York Sun, said he had a short list of potential campaign managers in his head but declined to provide details. Senator Clinton’s political guru, the key Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson, is considered to be at the top of that list.

Mr. Yeger is joining an already crowded field of political operatives surrounding the 2005 mayoral race. Potential mayoral candidates on the Democratic side include the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller; the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields; a Brooklyn council member, Charles Barron, and a congressman who represents Queens and Brooklyn, Anthony Weiner.

While he has yet to formerly announce his entrance into the race, Mr. Miller has already tapped Democratic presidential campaign stalwarts for his team. He chose a 34-year-old veteran of Joe Lieberman’s presidential campaign, Brian Hardwick, as campaign manager. Mr. Hardwick, a Texan, was the political director for the former Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle. He also worked on Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign.

“I’ll be directing the staff, the strategy, and the day-to-day operations of the campaign and setting the priorities for the candidate,” Mr. Hardwick said in an interview with the Sun. “My first day on the job is Thursday.”

Mr. Hardwick was introduced to Mr. Miller by a media consultant, Mandy Grunwald, who likewise is working for the speaker. Mr. Hardwick said he and Ms. Grunwald worked together in the past on national campaigns.

Ms. Fields is expected to announce her formal intention to run next month. She is holding a fund-raising event tonight at an Upper East Side restaurant to try to add to her war chest. Her team, so far, is fairly thin. She doesn’t have an executive director or campaign manager, though her finance director, Kimberly Peeler-Allen, told the Sun those appointments will be made in the next couple of weeks.

Ms. Peeler-Allen is a longtime Democratic fund-raiser and was, among other things, the deputy finance director for the campaign of the 2002 gubernatorial nominee, Carl McCall. She has joined political strategist Joseph Mercurio at the Field campaign.

Mr. Mercurio said he was talking to “two national media guys to do electronic media,” was pulling together Ms. Field’s media plan, and has been helping with personnel decisions.

“She was an early supporter of Kerry’s and spent a lot of last year on the presidential campaign, so we’re a little behind,” Mr. Mercurio said. He also is writing Ms. Fields’s State of the Borough speech, scheduled for later this month.

Mr. Barron, who has said he will drop out of the race if he can’t raise money enough to sustain a run, announced his intention to challenge Mr. Bloomberg months ago. He doesn’t have a campaign director per se and told the Sun his race is “being managed by committee.”

“We’re more of a collective decision-making organization,” he said when asked for an organizational breakdown of his team. “People don’t really have titles so I don’t have an executive director. The closest thing we have, I guess, is Hazel Beckles. She doesn’t have that title, but she does convene our meetings.”

Ms. Beckles has been a longtime community activist with, among other organizations, the Community Service Society of New York.

Officials with the Weiner campaign said the closest they have to an executive director at this point is consultant Tom Friedman, 41, who was a senior adviser in the Clinton White House working with strategist Dick Morris and a member of the Kerry presidential campaign. He was legislative director for Charles Schumer when the senator was in the House.

“Anthony knows what he wants to do and he’s really running this campaign,” Mr. Friedman said in an interview. “We’re going to be staffing up pretty soon. We’re an outsider campaign and we’re trying to save our pennies for later in the campaign.”

In the most recent filing with the city’s Campaign Finance Board, in July, Mr. Miller reported raising $3.3 million. The city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., who has since decided to run for re-election rather than seek this year’s mayoral nomination, had raised $2.7 million. Mr. Ferrer had $1.3 million in his war chest. Ms. Fields had a little less than $1 million in her campaign coffers, and Mr. Barron had raised about $10,000. The deadline for filing campaign contribution results for the second half of the year is January 18.