Orthodox Jews Unite Against the Internet

This Sunday, there’ll be a sellout crowd at Citi Field, a rare sight at the home of the New York Mets. But the big draw isn’t a baseball game. It’s an ultra-Orthodox rally against the Internet that had sold out all 40,000 seats more than a week in advance.

An organization called Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane (Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp) raised $1.5 million for the massive asifa (rally) protesting the “evils of the Internet and the damages caused by advanced electronic devices.” It is a watershed event, marking the arrival of online censorship as a primary—and public—focus in the ultra-Orthodox community. The rally is not, as some have joked, merely about pornography: Rabbi Moshe Drew, who operated the Ichud HaKehillos technology-awareness hotline, identified “Facebook and social networking sites” as the most damaging material online, while others see the Internet as an issue of politics as much as piety. “By having a following that will make no decisions on their own, the ruler sets the tone,” wrote Michael J. Salamon in the Times of Israel, stressing that Internet access—and everything that comes with it—threatens basic rabbinic authority. And then, of course, it is also about porn.