In a jammed media sphere littered with the crumbling shells of failed news sites, it’s hard to imagine a new one whose mission could really set it apart. Nevertheless, when Naftuli Moster, a former Hasid known for his tireless advocacy for improved secular education in the ultra-Orthodox community, asked me to help launch his new project, I jumped at the chance; I saw that contrary to King Solomon’s famous pronouncement, this was, after all, something new under the sun:
Shtetl.org, focused on New York’s rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox community, will be the first such news outlet not under the control of an established rabbinical leader or sect from within that community. With aspirations to meet the highest standards of traditional journalism, this new English-language publication’s aim is to report “without fear or favor” — a mission that promises to at once shake up, inform and illuminate an insular civic sector whose growing presence and clout reverberate far beyond its redoubts in Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Borough Park and Williamsburg, and upstate New York towns such as Monsey and Kiryas Joel.
Still, unlike Moster, I am myself a secular Jew; one who spent many years as news and investigations editor at The Forward, a well-known liberal media outlet steeped in secular Jewish identity, and as an investigative reporter for the Daily News. What could I possibly bring to the table?
For this, there is a backstory. It informs my own motivations and my hopes about what this new outlet can be.
By the time I turned 25, I had lived with Tibetan Buddhists in the Himalayas; an underground cell of Christian missionaries in Afghanistan, and with Sufis in Shiraz, Iran — but until I knocked on a stranger’s door in the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood of East Jerusalem, I had never met a Haredi Jew.
It was there, in 1978, that I met and befriended a chozer b’teshuva, or returnee to faith, as formerly secular Jews are known — the son of prominent Israeli academics I knew. A former left-wing activist, my new friend now lived in a Jerusalem community that sought to maintain the lifeways of the Eastern European ghetto. Taking me through his neighborhood of narrow streets with bearded men in black coats and women in sheitels and long skirts, he brought me to his class at Yeshiva Ohr Somayach, a still new institution at the time, funded by wealthy North American Jews and housed in a block-long building of gleaming white Jerusalem stone.
I was entranced — enough, it turned out, to spend a good portion of my 10 months in Israel studying there and living in a community wholly foreign to anything I’d previously encountered.
It was through Ohr Somayach’s approach to teaching Scripture that I learned for the first time what close reading really meant — a mode of critical engagement with texts quite unlike anything I’d learned in high school or college. It was also my encounter with a formidable system of thought whose sexism and ethnic chauvinism shook me deeply. I ultimately turned in a different direction. But paradoxically, I owe to this confrontation in my mid-20s a sharpened mind and a greatly deepened sense of Jewish identity.
During this sojourn, I lived in a community whose ethos of mutual support and solidarity taught me lessons that have stayed with me to this day. It has helped inform my faith in everything from the redistribution of wealth in programs like Social Security and Medicare, to my belief in the centrality of decency and compassion as the existential cornerstones of a viable polity.
At the same time, I was astonished at some of the conversations I’d find myself in with brilliant men — the yeshivas were all male — who’d grown up in this world. Amid complex legal discussions, they would simply stare at me blankly when I’d make references in passing to: Chairman Mao; feudalism; antibodies; Neanderthals; Tahiti; Fidel Castro; the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, and Charles Darwin, to name but a few.
It wasn’t until decades later that I understood why. Working as a reporter for prominent Jewish newspapers, I learned, to my surprise, that many ultra-Orthodox Jews never looked at those papers, much less non-Jewish news outlets. Nor was television permitted in their homes. Haredi rabbis condemn these “outside” news sources, instead authorizing only news sources they or their factions control, directly or indirectly.
These publications offer a strictly authorized version of reality, with results that can range from comic to cruel. In one instance, the Brooklyn Yiddish weekly Di Tzeitung was forced to apologize to the Obama White House in 2011 for airbrushing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton out of an historic Situation Room gathering, a move in line with its policy of banning female images to maintain sexual modesty. The iconic photograph, whose usage agreement banned such airbrushing, captured President Barack Obama and key members of his national security team gathered around a monitor watching as Navy SEALs in Pakistan closed in on 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.
More disturbingly, and much closer to home, one Hasidic newspaper’s recent campaign on behalf of a convicted child sex abuser laid the ground for the grand rebbe of one of the largest Hasidic sects to honor him with a highly-publicized pilgrimage to visit the abuser in prison. The campaign and the November visit took place against the backdrop of a continuing effort by Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum’s Satmar sect to win commutation of the 50-year sentence being served by Nechemya Weberman. Not coincidentally, Vochenshrift, the Yiddish newspaper that conducted the campaign, is loyal to Teitelbaum’s faction.
Weberman, now 64, was convicted in 2012 on 59 counts for repeated sexual assault, including rape, of a teen member of the sect whom he was treating as an unlicensed therapist starting from when she was 12. (Two counts were later reversed on appeal.) A Daily News article identified 10 other young women who claimed that Weberman had sexually assaulted them but reported that they were too afraid to come forward and face the shunning and intimidation that sect members inflicted on the accuser.
Vochenshrift’s series on Weberman, which started in August, lionized him as “a tremendous Hasid” and victim of “mesira,” a grave sin wherein one Jew informs on another in contravention of Jewish law. The articles inspired a parade of solidarity visits to Weberman by other Hasidim, climaxed by the grand rebbe’s journey.
“They say he’s wrongfully accused,” Shulim Leifer, a member of the Hasidic community, told JTA. “It’s written in a sense that it’s a foregone conclusion, that it’s a lynching that he went through.”
Given the media environment in which they live, it’s little wonder that many Hasidim would look at the case this way. Moreover, these tightly controlled media outlets inspire reactions with real-world political consequences. During the trial, the young woman suffered widespread condemnation as “a zona,” or whore, and threats from other Satmar Hasidim for daring to report her abuse to secular law enforcement authorities.
Prior to the trial, more than 1,000 Hasidic men flocked to a banquet that raised an estimated $500,000 for Weberman’s defense. Brooklyn’s then-district attorney, Charles Hynes, prosecuted Weberman — his first ever high-profile case against a member of the borough’s Satmar community — only after sustained criticism that he had for many years shrunk from pursuing such trials. Hynes denied the charge. But as Leon Goldenberg, an Orthodox political activist noted at the time, “The fact is that [Orthodox Jews] make up 10 to 15% of the electorate.”
More recently, Hynes’ successor, Eric Gonzalez, called on the governor to commute Weberman’s sentence — the only instance of such an appeal by Gonzalez on behalf of a convicted sex abuser, according to The City. Gonzalez’s August 2021 letter to the governor, which went unanswered, may have been ill-timed. It arrived on Andrew Cuomo’s last day in office, following his resignation in a scandal.
Mobilized by their distorted media bubble, this voting bloc intimidates city and state leaders from enforcing laws on everything from fire codes to education.
In 2011, the chief of the fire department responsible for New Square, a Hasidic enclave of almost 10,000 in Rockland County, told The Forward that “at least 60%” of its structures had “serious code violations.” Rockland County lawmaker Joe Meyers was blunt about why. “New Square has a lot of power to deliver votes in elections,” he said. “Officials who otherwise do their jobs fall down when it comes to New Square.”
As mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio was no less mindful of this bloc’s power. In an official 2019 report, city investigators cited “political horse-trading” between his representatives and state legislators as the reason for a one-year delay in the city’s release of a report finding Hasidic yeshivas were failing to give their students an adequate, legally required secular education.
We can counterbalance the hold that rabbinically controlled media outlets maintain on their readers, many of whom are actually hungry for news that directly impacts their lives. Quietly ignoring the rabbinical ban on the internet, they seek news out on anonymized laptops or second mobile phones in the privacy of their own homes. Shtetl will focus on this audience’s concerns. This holds the potential to cultivate a cohort whose information horizons will extend beyond the narrow limits dictated by their leaders. Shtetl’s reports and investigations will also inform political leaders, journalists, civic leaders and taxpayers outside the ultra-Orthodox community about the many issues whose ramifications affect everyone.
For me, it even dangles the promise, eventually, of being able, after so many decades, to hold discussions about topics ranging from Darwin to democracy with some of the best trained minds I have ever encountered. That’s why I agreed to join Shtetl’s board and hope to contribute to its success.
Cohler-Esses, a former Daily News investigative reporter, is a board member of Shtetl-Haredi Free Press.
