On this week's episode of the Reply All podcast, a story about the Internet encroaching on a world that has managed pretty successfully to block it out — New York's Ultra Orthodox Jewish community.

New Square, NY, is about 30 miles north of New York city, and it is home to a deeply religious dynasty of orthodox Judaism called Skver. New Square's founder, Rabbi Yakov Yosef Twersky, wanted it to be a complete oasis from the decadence and temptation of the outside world. And for the most part he was successful. The yarmulkes here were bigger. Men and women walked on different sides of the street. The houses looked like cottages. And everyone was Hasidic.

This was the world in which Shulem Deen lived, with his wife and children. He was an active part of this small, close-knit community. And that is the way it likely would have remained, were it not for a day in 1996 when Shulem bought a tool that opened the floodgates to the world around him. A computer.

Now, the Hasidic community does use technology. They aren't the Amish. But they won't use technology that brings in moral influence from the outside world. Radios are banned. TVs are banned. Cars are frowned upon because you could use one to drive somewhere you aren't supposed to. But appliances — vacuum cleaners, photocopiers, washing machines — all of that is fine.

And when personal computers started making their way to the Hasidic community, they were considered no more influential than a fax machine. When Shulem bought his first computer, he had no notion of the Internet at all. "I was working with children at this school," he says. "I thought that I would use a computer to create worksheets, particularly to teach children who had difficulty with Talmud study."



&lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/0ca21666215a4dc6bcf8bc3e9ed67026_a1391ad64d0245b7bdea178ddc873e27_1_post.jpeg" alt="" /&gt;



But when he started setting up the computer, he was fascinated by it, and wanted to explore it well beyond using it as simply a fancy word processor. "Every single disk that came in that box, I put it in [the computer] to check out what's in it," he says. "One of the things that came with the computer was a 3.5 floppy disc. Free AOL trial. So I put in this the floppy disc and it says, y'know 'Welcome! You've got mail!' and there's a whole world. There's news, there are chat rooms."

When he started setting up the computer, he was fascinated by it, and wanted to explore it well beyond using it as simply a fancy word processor.

Shulem started his explorations as close to home as he could — on an AOL chatroom called The Jewish Community. His early exploration of this chatroom was mostly him chiding other members of the chatroom for being not sufficiently observant of religious law. "I'd just always assumed that if you're Jewish and you're not observant it's probably because you just don't know. You just need someone to teach you the law and you'll be on board." But quickly, Shulem realized that his fellow members of The Jewish Community (the chatroom) weren't ignorant. They just had a different idea of what it meant to be Jewish.

Suddenly, he found himself voraciously hungry for information from the outside world. And his thirst for knowledge quickly migrated offline, and to the one place he was never supposed to go — the one place that contained all the information the people of New Square were trying to defend against. The public library.

"I just sat there in the children's section next to a kid, furiously paging through the Berenstein Bears." From there, he went to the encyclopedia. Realizing it was alphabetic, he looked up Jews. Then Judaism. Then Israel. From there, computers, the Beatles, Bruce Springstein, and countries like Botswana and Brazil. "I wasn't just acquiring info," he says. "It was experiencing. Exposure. It was almost like I was traveling."

"I wasn't just acquiring info… It was experiencing. Exposure. It was almost like I was traveling.

From there he made his way to Blockbuster Video. He rented Beethoven (you know, the dog movie), and Titanic. And as he was drifting further and further from his religious roots, he was getting more and more reckless. He recalled a time when he was walking down the street and dropped some DVDs he was holding under his arm. He thought for sure he was busted, but he soon realized that they didn't recognize the Blockbuster Video logo, and so they just kept walking.

While his New Square neighbors may not have known what a Blockbuster was, they were starting to understand what the Internet was. And to the Hasidic community, the Internet was a threat. People put up fliers in New Square, laying out a new rule — no computers. And in Shulem's community when a rule was passed, it was a big deal.

But the way those rules were actually enforced might surprise you. Enforcement was strict, but also informal. That's because the people in charge of keeping you in line were usually your neighbors. Which is easy because New Square is very close knit. People actually build houses in each others backyards. If someone found out you had a secret TV, a volunteer organization called the modesty committee might decide to break into your home and confiscate it.



&lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/239dc7d9d81d4b45b0443ff76dada998_a1391ad64d0245b7bdea178ddc873e27_1_post.jpeg" alt="" /&gt;



And most people welcomed this — after all, the rules were in place to help them hold onto their faith. To keep them safe from the very thing that happened to Shulem. Just six years after he'd first bought the computer, he was still living like a Hassid, dressing like one. But he didn't feel like one.

"I remember, just one morning, I was getting ready for prayers," he says. "I was no longer praying at the synagogue, but I was like 'yeah, I still have to pray,' because if I didn't pray my wife would get pissed. And so I'm in our dining room trying to just do my prayers and the tefillin straps, put them on really quickly, and—And, as I'm doing this, I'm putting my prayer shawl on, and I had this thought like, 'I'm not a believer. I'm just not.'"

Shulem felt increasingly isolated in the tiny enclave of New Square, but online, he felt more connected than ever. So he started a blog. At first he called it shulemdean.blogspot.com, but soon, his writing was reaching people outside the Hasidic community. Still hoping to remain anonymous, Shulem renamed his blog "Hasidic Rebel."

He was still living like a Hassid, dressing like one. But he didn't feel like one.

Shulem stopped attending synagogue. During prayers he would hang out in an empty classroom where a couple other young hasidic men, also doubters, started to turn up. People in the community were whispering that he was Hasidic Rebel. And then, one Sunday evening in 2005, Shulem was having dinner with his family, when he got a call. Can you come to the village council tonight?

There was a tribunal. Literally a rabbinical court. And Shulem was told he needed to leave. "They actually ordered me out of not just, give up your synagogue membership, but they ordered me to move, sell my house, get out of town. I didn't see that coming. I don't know why."

So Shulem left. He moved with his family to another Hasidic town nearby. But his wife couldn't get comfortable there. His kids didn't have any friends. They missed their old home. And his wife, understandably, resented Shulem for all this. For dragging her along on his shameful journey into secularism. So after a few years, Shulem and his wife agreed to a divorce. The kids would visit on weekends. But slowly, one by one, his kids said they didn't want to visit. So Shulem ended up going to family court to force his ex wife to send them.

"The court ordered them to come," he says, "and they came and they simply would not engage. They would not look at me. They would not speak to me. They would not eat any of my food. I asked, do you really never want to see me again? Like is that actually what you want? That was my question to them and they said yes. That's what they said."

Shulem and his kids are now firmly on opposite sides of the chasm.

When I met Shulem last month, it had been seven years since he's seen his kids. He does still keep tabs on them though. There are a couple guys in New Square that he does favors for. And in return for those favors, those guys secretly photograph his kids when they see them in public. Shulem gets the photos on his phone. Pictures of one son at the grocery store, almost ready for his bar mitzvah. Pictures of his youngest son biking down the street. And of his eldest daughter — the one that sat in his lap while he surfed AOL chat rooms — he watched her getting married.

Shulem spent the evening in front of his computer. He had his spies, two on the girls' side and two on the boys' side, emailing him photos as the wedding was happening.

"I don't know how to describe that feeling of getting those photos of like oh my God, this is actually her like getting married," Shulem says. "She was a little, sullen angry teenager and now she's a bride. here is my daughter and I saw photos of my other daughters and my sons and they're happy and they're happy even though I'm not there. Like how could she be so happy?"

Shulem and his kids are now firmly on opposite sides of the chasm. They're both trapped there by the things they now believe. Shulem can't go back to believing what he used to. So instead, he's traded one kind of faith for another. He now has to believe that one day, his kids, some of them anyway, will join him on his side.

On next week's Reply All — we look at the Internet from the perspective of people who are still Hasidic. Subscribe to Reply All on iTunes or with your favorite podcaster, visit our website or just listen on Soundcloud.

You can also subscribe to Reply All's RSS here.

Shulem Deen is the author of ALL WHO GO DO NOT RETURN.​