Kave Shtiebel, a Yiddish-language website founded in 2012 to provide what scholar Ayala Fader called an “unusually tolerant” forum for Hasidim to discuss everything from art and poetry to criticism of rabbinic leadership, announced Wednesday that it will close unless it can recruit new, qualified administrators.

"After more than 12 years of providing a forum for freedom of speech on the path of the Torah for Jewish peoplehood, the time has come to go," an administrator wrote in Yiddish in the announcement, which was posted on the site.

The administrator pointed to a new forum called Kraiml, which they hope will carry on Kave Shtiebel’s legacy of providing what they described as a “forum for observant Jews where they can talk openly, without any censorship of narrow and partisan interests.” Kraiml, unlike Kave Shtiebel, requires users to log in to view content.

Kave Shtiebel means “coffee room” in Yiddish and refers to a place in schools and synagogues where men chat casually. The site was founded by Hasidic men who were frustrated that moderators on iVelt, a similar forum, deleted posts criticizing rabbinic leaders. In the last few years though, Kave Shtiebel has been blocked by some kosher internet filters.

According to Fader, users have discussed — mostly pseudonymously — such controversial and taboo subjects as racism within the community, secular education in boys’ schools, strict rules about girls’ clothing, and even — in a separate section of the website specific to married men — sex. Still, Kave Shtiebel limits what users can post. “The administrators of KS drew a line at outright heresy,” Fader wrote in her 2020 book Hidden Heretics.

According to linguist Isaac Bleaman, “online platforms, and KS in particular, have created new opportunities for Hasidic men to acquire experience and skill as Yiddish writers,” since Hasidic boys’ schools tend not to emphasize writing. One source told Bleaman he couldn’t spell in Yiddish or use the Hebrew keyboard until he joined Kave Shtiebel.

In an email to Shtetl, Bleaman said, “Over the last several years I’ve provided technical support to KS’s administrators, and so I know firsthand how much work went into maintaining the forum.”

Bleaman said he has used Kave Shtiebel to advance his scholarship about Hasidic communities. “Kave Shtiebel provided me with great connections in the Hasidic community while I was conducting fieldwork,” Bleaman said. “I have always found Kave Shtiebel members to be helpful and generous with their time.”

Operating in a community with strict gender roles, Kave Shtiebel is considered a male space. In Hidden Heretics, Fader described what happened when one woman made an account. “When a woman I knew wrote in English with a feminine pseudonym, an active member wrote to her and suggested she use a male username and write in Yiddish,” Fader wrote.

Although a women’s equivalent to Kave Shtiebel, called Imamother, exists, the latter site appears to be used largely to share childrearing and housekeeping advice. Frieda Vizel, a writer who grew up in the Satmar Hasidic sect, wrote in a 2020 blog post that this difference has real-life implications.

“There is no female ivelt or kave shtibel, two busy and interesting male forums,” Vizel wrote. “The effect of tech on men’s confidence, worldliness, self-development, is extremely visible.”