The secret behind VosIzNeias.com

Charedi Internet news takes a new turn

By Michael Orbach

“We’re like the Drudge Report of the Jewish people,” an enigmatic blogger known to his readers as Shlomah Shamos said over the phone with a laugh. A Yiddish accent trailed his words.

Shamos has reason to laugh. Founded in an upstate Orthodox community where the Internet is almost completely forbidden, the news is taking a decidedly unorthodox turn. His website, VosIzNeias, (“What’s News” in Yiddish) is gradually reshaping news in the Orthodox community.

“No one can ban the Internet; in the world which we live in it’s a fact,” Shamos said.

Statistically, it’s hard to disagree with him. This past May, VosIzNeias reached over 34,000 unique visitors and had 1.5 million page visits, according to data provided by quantcast.com, which measures website traffic. And the numbers are only rising. Since last year, VIN has seen a 260 percent increase in monthly visits.

Amid flickering ads for Yitzy’s Car Service and Yad Eliezer, everything that happens to the Orthodox community is on the website. VIN is a combination of original reporting and aggregation, snapping up Jewish-related content from Newsday, The New York Times, Ha’aretz, the BBC and a host of others.

If it’s about observant Jews, it’s on VosIzNeias.

This past Sunday, featured articles included corruption in the NYC housing department, a scheduled Obama visit to Israel, kosher-slaughtered elk meat and the first female cop with a Chasidic upbringing to be hired in upstate New York. The site is a mix of the heimishe and the worldly, on one hand traditional and deeply respectful and on the other, sophisticated and sharp. The comments board, whose contributors vary from chasidic to irreligious and write in a mixture of Hebrew, English and Yiddish, only add to the experience.

VIN began after 9/11 as a community message board before morphing into its current incarnation. Along the way, the staff moved from Monroe to Flatbush.

Part of the purpose of the site is to make Jewish news current and relevant, and also to make general news kosher for the religious population (original headline for Eliot Spitzer’s resignation: “Governor Spitzer involved in Immoral Ring”).

The faces behind VIN remain a mystery. The editors declined an on-site visit, but said the staff is comprised of four charedi men working in a nondescript building in Brooklyn with two more working upstate and volunteers scattered across the globe.

Anonymity is important for the staff, especially in Jewish enclaves known for intolerance of what could be considered a subversive activity.

“We are news driven by the community, but not owned by the community,” Shamos said.

While VIN does stress the positive events in the Jewish community, it doesn’t shy from the negative, unlike most religious news sites. Recent articles have included stories about the shtreimel wars in Bnei Brak and child abuse in the charedi community. VIN was one of the leading commentators on the canceled Lipa Schmeltzer concert at Madison Square Garden, and also focused extensively on Yehuda Kolko, the Yeshiva Torah Temimah teacher accused of pedophilia. The site also doesn’t hesitate to call Jewish politicians to task for not keeping promises.

The notion of publishing negative articles about the religious Jewish community is a quandary in the religious Jewish press. Publicizing negative information can be considered Lashon Hora (slandering fellow Jews) and Chilul Hashem (desecration of G-d’s name), prohibitions that the staff of VIN is well aware of.

“We feel that when an issue is public, it is no longer considered Lashon Hora,” Shamos said in response. “That is even according to the Chofetz Chaim.”

He also mentioned that the information traded on the website is often necessary for the community’s safety.

The response to the site, Shamos maintains, has been overwhelmingly positive. Orthodox Jewish communities are now more aware and consequently more careful. A ripple effect has occurred across Jewish media, and now mainstream religious Jewish newspapers must contend with issues they previously avoided.

Though as with everything Jewish, there are critics.

Isaac Abraham, a longtime community activist in Brooklyn and the first Chasidic candidate for City Council, stressed that while the site began with the good intention of bringing important news to the Jewish community, “It has turned out to be a place where people under ‘anonymous’ vent their anger and lynch people left and right without any backup or proof,” he said. An especially dangerous proposition, Abraham added, in a community where VIN is, in many cases, the only news source.

“And if that’s what a Jewish blog is, then it’s better it should be closed,” he added.

As if to underscore the discomfort Abraham and others feel about the freewheeling nature of the reader comments posted on VIN, Dan Levin, a freelance reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times and New York Magazine, makes it clear that VIN also serves as a window for outsiders to see into the Orthodox world.

“What I find ... fascinating is the talkback that happens on the site,” Levin said. “To be able to read and understand the thoughts of the more machmir elements in the community and how they engage with stories on the site can only be a positive thing.”

It’s safe to say that some things in the Jewish community will never change.

“We’re a shtetl inside an online shtetl,” Shamos said in a closing comment.