An unmarried woman – an “older single” by the standards of the Orthodox Jewish community, where most women are married by their early twenties – was discussing her situation the other day in the office of Dr. Meir Wikler, a psychotherapist and family counselor who works in Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Borough Park neighborhood.

To illustrate the difficulty that a single woman her age had getting a date with an eligible Orthodox man, the woman mentioned “the hoops” that another single woman whose name she mentioned, Rochi Kichel, also had to jump through in her effort to meet men.

Dr. Wikler knew Rochi Kichel’s name, and her dating situation. He acknowledged the similarities between his client’s problems and Rochi Kichel’s.

Just one problem. Rochi Kichel does not exist. She is a member of a fictitious Orthodox family. The Kichels.

“The Kichels” is a comic strip that began as a three-month experiment, and will mark its tenth anniversary next year.  Centered around the day-to-day exploits of a purportedly typical haredi (aka “ultra-Orthodox”) family (the Kichel mishpacha) and the members’ extended circle of friends (and rabbis, neighbors, camp counselors, etc.), it appears weekly on the back page of Mishpacha, a popular magazine that caters to rigidly-Orthodox-but-not-chasidic readers.

The Kichels is the creation of writer Bracha Stein (it’s a pen name), who lives in Jerusalem, and artist Chani Judowitz, a resident of Lakewood, NJ; both are members of Orthodox Judaism’s “litvish” yeshiva-oriented community – the real-life “Kichels” are their friends and fellow congregants. Hence, The Kichels combines both an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s irreverent perspective on Orthodox actions.

In less than a decade, The Kichels has become a must-read institution, a barometer, for a large part of the Orthodox community, of how its men and women and children operate.

Thought up by Shoshana Friedman, the magazine’s managing editor, The Kichels, which thrives on humorously hyperbolic depictions of Orthodox behavior, has become an eagerly accepted and awaited feature of the magazine.  It is an instrument of self-examination that lovingly critiques and accurately reflects life in the Orthodox circles that tend to be foreign territory to many non-Orthodox Jews in the country (and in Israel, where much of the action in The Kichels also takes place.)

The Kichels provides insights into the Orthodox community, which, while a distinct minority in U.S. Jewry, is growing in prominence, affluence and political influence.

Friedman brought Stein and Judowitz, who did not know each other, together, describing her idea for a weekly comic that would serve as “a form of social commentary … fun and thought provoking.”

“We spent a lot of time and discussion figuring out that balance between too mild and overly peppery,” Friedman wrote in an essay, “Not Too Sweet, Not Too Salty,” in Mishpacha. “We didn’t want the back page to become a repository of cynicism, an angry place where our readers’ lifestyle........

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