Man Threatens To Cancel Subscription To Shul Newsletter

“I’ll give them till next week’s issue, because I know it’s short notice for this week, but then boom – I’m canceling.”

Woodmere, August 26 – A synagogue member who feels that his house of worship’s weekly publication has taken an editorial and ideological step in the wrong direction warned today that if the changes he abhors are not reversed by the time next week’s edition comes out, he will have no choice but to remove himself from the recipient list.

Ari Kastner, 45, sent an angry e-mail to the editors of the Young Israel of North Woodmere on Thursday with a deadline and a threat: restore its previous advertising policy allowing photos of people, or he will unsubscribe. Even if the newsletter still makes it into his inbox, he stressed, Kastner will not open it, and might even relegate all future such messages to the spam folder.

“Sometimes you have to get tough,” explained the junior partner at a law firm. “When many of us in the community felt the New York Times, for example, had adopted a problematic stance on Israel’s duty to defend its citizens, we canceled our subscriptions to the ‘paper of record.’ That’s what I’m doing here. I’ll give them till next week’s issue, because I know it’s short notice for this week, but then boom – I’m canceling.”

The newsletter’s new editor, who assumed the position in June following the incapacitation of his predecessor by COVID, sought to avoid controversy over the appearance of women’s photos in the publication, a phenomenon that irks a small but noisy contingent of the community. Members who own or operate retail fashion establishments in the Five Towns and other upscale locales argued against such restrictions, and noted that refusal to publish pictures of women and girls would run afoul of discrimination statutes. The new editor aimed to mollify both camps by banning images of any people at all.

To his chagrin, another previously-quiescent faction joined the fray: Kastner and several other members who have cast the situation in terms of holding the line against a slide into poisonous fundamentalism. “There’s such a thing as too frum,” he argued, using a Yiddish term for punctilious religious observance. “If your bubby and zaidy didn’t protest when pictures of women appeared in frum publications – and they did appear, I have the receipts – then by what rights do you suddenly object? Were your holy ancestors not frum enough?”

Observers noted that like mass-cancellations of NY Times subscriptions, Kastner’s campaign seems unlikely to have the desired effect. “Does anybody read the thing in the first place?” they wondered.

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