How the Hasidic community deals with the internet

A reader asked: What are the internet usage restrictions among Hasidim?

Answer:
Intro note: to understand what restrictions there are on the internet for Hasidim, you have to understand how restrictions work in the Hasidic community. Unlike, say, in China, where the government can point-blank block domains, Hasidim who live in New York City cannot simply physically be blocked from using the internet. Instead, customs are enforced among Hasidim through a combination of social “awareness” raising, ie – touching on the community’s deep set of values to make people see the internet as problematic, as well as by enforcing rules that people must abide by, or-else their place in the community can be jeopardized.

Part 1: How the internet entered:

The story of the internet among Hasidim is interesting. The internet crept up on us slowly, almost unnoticed. It didn’t show up one day in full color with pictures of nude models and non-stop hedonistic entertainment the way the television did. It came fumbling, through telephone lines plugged into PCs, beeping and wailing and taking forever to establish a connection to the internet, which was slow and not really user-friendly.

The devices the internet came on – first computers, then phones – were mostly seen as harmless. When I was a kid in the late eighties and nineties, we had a clunky computer of the antique variety in our home. Let me tell you, besides for playing that snake game if you had the floppy disk for it, it did nothing. It ran DOS, had no mouse, and only the most advanced users knew how to use it. Phones too were seen as benign. First, everyone had and loved the corded phones with which you called all your relatives, then the cordless came around (overhearing the neighboring ladies yapping on the phone, what harmless fun!) and then came those big car phones. And in about the 2000s, the chunky mobile telephones.

I was still in my parents’ house when my father’s mobile phone started to have an online word game on it. Oh, I remember that. The moment shabbes was over when we were allowed to touch technology, and when I knew my father would stay in the synagogue for an hour wearing his nice weekend suit, I knew I could sneak out the cellular he kept in his weekday pants pocket. I’d play some word game with ten other online users. I can feel the excitement now as I write this, oh, the memories! I remember myself locked in the bathroom feeling intoxicated by the wild experience of competing with these ten mysterious players from far far away. Everything was in black text and blocky letterings, it was very simple. Still, phones were seen as harmless enough to be without a password.

Then the innocent little phones morphed into qwerty keyboard phones, then full smartphones. The Blackberry had a big screen with icons and a browser, and suddenly every other yokel had it. In 2005, when my son was born, I got one too.

That’s when the more zealous elements of the community really woke up and raised an alarm about this danger. And boy did they start a campaign. The first, and most important thing these grassroots fanatics did was to clump the internet into the same category as television and secular entertainment and other seductive forces of entertainment that lead to assimilation. The Hasidic culture has a very raw spot for this. They have been battling modernity for a hundred to two hundred years (since modernity infiltrated their European communities), and have seen the majority of pious Jews assimilate. It is something people respond to emotionally. Just making people aware of the internet’s capacity to assimilate is a powerful tool to discourage its use.

A lot of this type of awareness-raising can be seen in the street signs in Williamsburg. Here are a few:

Part 2: The zealots wake up:

1. “Every day we hear, sadly, new tragic destruction of Jewish homes through the barbaric smartphone. How many more souls must me the Jewish people sacrifice to recognize that the smartphone is a blood-soaked device?”

2. The below sign brings a quote from Lamentation, the Jewish poem of mourning for the destruction of the temple. It quotes in bold from the poem: “She (Jerusalem) sobbed at night and shed tears on her life.” In the rest, the authors warn that tens of young men have been using these unkosher devices and that “in recent times fifteen of them lost faith entirely, god forbid.” The piece lists in Yiddish the words “smartphone, endroid, eyefone, bleckberry, and so on, they are entirely forbidden.”

3. Here the sign addresses the issue specifically with regards to unmarried boys. It again uses the language of rescuing the boys from the lure of technology and loss of faith. “with [cellphones] one can destroy the whole life, especially with the internet cellphone and smartphones, which is known already ruined numerous Jewish souls….” The piece then suggests that if you see an unmarried boy with a cellphone, you “call and leave a message”. It also suggests you speak to the boy and make him realize that he is playing with fire.

Young unmarried men are seen to be at a greater risk than married men, who already have families and are tied to a wife and children, who are likely to hold them back from pursuing recklessly the hedonistic world.

4. Another target of the cell phone campaign has been the female population. This is supposedly because the women are the ones educating the children, and when women are corrupted are more liable to pass on the “rot”. It says “A woman, a Yiddishe Mamma, who wants to raise pious Jewish daughters, good Jewish children, needs to know that there is no reason AND NO EXCUSE FOR A JEWISH WOMAN TO HAVE A SMARTPHONE. No matter if with a filter, and of course not without a filter.”

5. This is targeted at fathers: It says “The internet is Satan himself!” and shows a man not only drawn in himself, but infecting his kids too.

Here, a boy is told by his father to bring the smartphone, but the child is so repulsed that he wears gloves and holds it at a distance. (euuuw, right?)

Here a graph (not so scientific, I bet) shows why good Jews are disgusted by the smartphone. Sorry, the first is obstructed. But one of the primary reasons listed (at 95) was gossip/immodest-sexual-stuff. Maybe this means pornography? Or celebrity pornography? I don’t know. The other big one is that it causes marital problems. (Who is to argue with that. Especially with all the celebrity pornography! 🙂

Here it is depicted as an addiction. You see a lot of criticism of the smartphone as an addiction.

This deformed guy below is “sadly so addicted that he hardly speaks, hardly sleeps, hardly eats, hardly moves. Hardly lives. Poor thing became a klutz glued to his screen…”

(This might be me, although birds haven’t nested on me yet.)

Part 3: Rules against technologies, enforced through the schools

Creating a culture wary of technology is only one part of the way Hasidim restrict the internet. The other way is through rules that are enforceable.

The rules are, in general:

• Computers are not allowed in the home, even for work.
• Computers are allowed at work, with the approval of rabbinic authority and a proper censor/filtering system.
• Smartphones must be kosher, in other words, modified to limit their use – a typical kosher smartphone would be an Android with Waze, weather, banking, camera, basic texting (no WhatsApp), and no MMS.
• Kosher phones are preferred. Those are the old-school, basic flip phones.

How are these things enforced? The primary way the rules are enforced is through the schools that the children attend. The Hasidic private schools have strict conditions for enrolling pupils, and the gist of it is that they are trying to keep the children pure, and if one family is exposed, they pose a threat for the entire school. At least that’s what I was told when my son Seth was enrolled in the Satmar Hasidic school in Kiryas Joel.

My then-husband and I were called over to an office above the synagogue and we were made to sign a document of conditions. I remember we were in a room full of men, and they sweet-talked their conditions as if they really-really couldn’t help it that the families in their schools made demands on them that they keep the schools clean, right?

Right. So I signed it. Here it is, I cropped off our signatures.

Partial translation to English:

We the undersigned sign off on the following conditions, and if we will not abide by them, we will not have any complaints that our children will be removed from the schools here in the Hasidic community, even in the middle of a school year, and as soon as the rules will be neglected. Because understandably, it is harmful for the education of our institutions.

Then, item number 6:

We won’t have in the home any internet even for business and no video or unkosher CDs, DVDs, unkosher books, magazines.

Number 7:

My children will not have access to a computer even one without internet.

Part 4: Kosher technology and hidden devices abound

1. Lots of people have flip phones, kosher phones. BUT many people, I’d guess especially men, have a second phone that they hide from the kids (or even wife/husband). In recent years I’ve seen maybe a handful of people openly use their smartphones. Most people don’t walk the street looking at screens, most will have a flip phone to their ear. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a juicy little internet-enabled device in the back pocket.

2. There is a huge growing industry of filtering and modifying solutions. One of them is Cubicles, an internet cafe with filtering, where you can use computers for 15 minutes intervals. Another is a filtering system. When I worked for a Hasidic company, my internet at work was blocked, but some sites were whitelisted, like Cigna, because we were an insurance firm. But you’ll notice even with Cigna, the filter picked up skin color and covered it (in green or black).

3. Some other creative solutions are:

A service that sends recordings with the news; with options to get many alerts or only the very important ones. Think CNN alerts by phone.

Or a service that allows you to send emails by voice, so you don’t need email service:

4. And yet! Despite all that, there is a growing presence and organization Hasidim from these sects on the internet. There are numerous, numerous online services for Hasidim, like options for news. Almost every Hasidic company has a website, even the internet filtering companies like TAG and Meshimer!

Sites like Kaveshtibel and Ivelt are lively forums in Yiddish, mostly for Hasidic men. Plenty of Hasidim are also on social media, even if it’s forbidden.

Every so often someone will link to my tours on one of these Yiddish sites, and I’ll get an influx of clicks from the US and Canada (my usual clicks are much more global) and most of the users will be using either Windows or on IOS/Android. In other words, this is a demographic that is on phones and Windows computers. But mostly phones. Phones are easy to hide!

The result of all of this is that it’s not like people don’t have internet access, but that people use the internet much more sparingly, covertly, as if it is a sinful indulgence. Another result that I am noticing, and this is strictly just my observation, is that because men work in offices with computers, and have a lot more reason to be connected to the internet (with a filter supposedly) a lot more men are online than women. You definitely have a male culture in these Yiddish forums that you don’t see paralleled for women. So internet access isn’t even across the board. Unmarried folks are unlikely to have much internet access, and of those who are married, men seem to be online in much greater numbers than women. And considering that women are around their kids much of the time, I bet they have less of an opportunity to do so.

What does this mean for the future of Hasidim? It’s a fascinating question to mull over.