VIN and Israeli News 2: Charedi Rabbis Ban the Dangerous Internet - Much Worse than TV

If you are reading this, you may be violating rabbinic edicts against the Internet and you may be subject to punishment.

We are tempted to mock this new rabbinic ban with sarcasm. But we resist. Instead we opine.

Bans and dividing walls (mechitzas) do not make a moral person. Morality comes from within. Rabbis need to teach their followers that they can indeed concentrate and pray properly when sitting next to a woman in synagogue. They can indeed control their emotions and have pure thoughts, even when sitting next to a woman on a bus. They can indeed use the Internet to communicate and to learn and not to seek or view objectionable content.

Rabbis here is how we see it. If you are so sure that your followers need porn filters on their Internet connections, if you are so sure they need segregation from women on buses and in shuls, then you have failed to inculcate in them proper conduct, proper attitudes and basic self-control and maturity.

From Chadoshot 2 vie VIN news:

Jerusalem - Rabbonim in Beitar Illit announced all residents must sign an agreement not to be connected to unfiltered Internet, according to a report on Hebrew-language website Haredim.

At a central gathering held in the city this week it was also decided that “all Torah and education institutions and school principals must see to it that every student at their institutions comes from a home free of [unfiltered] Internet.”

HaRav Dovid Tzvi Ordentlich said, “This is a thousand times more dangerous than the threats Am Yisroel faces from without and from within. The Internet is like a tidal wave threatening to swallow up and endanger the entire edifice of charedi Jewry that has been built in this generation through so much hard work. The issue must not be taken off the agenda. The warning must be sounded all the time and everywhere.”

According to HaRav Tzvi Braverman, “Fifty percent of the problems in the city – sholom bayis and chinuch habonim – stem from the Internet. There is a hidden blaze in the city. An atom bomb underneath the city. We cannot have a situation here in Beitar in which an ehrlicht Yid sends his children to Torah-based institutions and there’s something worse than television. This is the battle of the generation.”
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Almost all of the city’s rabbonim took part in the gathering, which was initiated by the beis din headed by HaRav Ordenlich. “Those who are compelled to be hooked up to the Internet for parnossoh reasons, etc., must be linked to the filtered, controlled Internet,” the rabbonim announced, adding that on Shabbos Shuvoh the rabbonim at every shul would discuss these takonos.