NEW YORK — In the heart of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community, a young man entered an electronics shop and made his way to the back office, where he placed a new iPhone on the table.

The store manager, Baruch Kahana, inspected the phone through thin-rimmed glasses. He plugged the device into a computer and began to tinker, blocking access to certain sites and apps to protect the customer from perceived technological risks. His objective: a “kosher” phone.

Kahana had koshered thousands of devices in his 10 years at the Technology Awareness Group (TAG), a nonprofit that says it helps religious Jews install filters on electronic devices “to retain our Yiddishe values.”

The customer’s request was a new challenge, though — he had asked Kahana to remove an AI assistant from WhatsApp, something Kahana had never done.

“Some temptations I am able to deal with myself. Some temptations I have to block,” the customer said.

Kahana got on the phone with TAG colleagues and began speaking in Yiddish. He improvised a solution and sent the customer home with an AI-restricted phone.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Hasidic communities are grappling with the intersection between AI and the need to preserve religious customs. Some see artificial intelligence’s instant answers — including for religious questions — as a challenge to faith and religious leadership. Others are embracing the new technology as a potential educational tool or a way to ensure their lifestyles.

Groups that are amenable to new technology, such as rabbis affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, are designing their own AI applications. Meanwhile, firms that serve more insular movements, including Satmar, are using AI to filter the internet and restrict access to LLMs to prevent responses on sensitive topics such as sex, politics and religion.

Clerics in other faiths are contending with similar issues, as AI platforms respond to users’ prayers and provide answers to religious queries. With the “faith tech” industry on the rise, Christians can now confide in an AI Jesus, while Muslims can turn to the Islamic chatbot WisQu.

Tensions between faith and technology are apparent in the insular Hasidic communities, though.

The Satmar community in Williamsburg, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, lives a different lifestyle from many of its neighbors. The northern part of the neighborhood is known for its hipster affluence, while in the southern section, Hasidim speak Yiddish, attend their own schools and stick to kosher eateries.

Television, internet access and social media are limited by rabbinical councils and social mores.

“Few religious communities outright reject new technologies,” said digital religion scholar Dr. Ruth Tsuria, a former Orthodox Jew.

Instead, religious movements “culture” those technologies, said Tsuria, who teaches communication at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University.

In one example, in recent decades a “kosher tech” ecosystem has emerged in Williamsburg and other Haredi — or strictly traditionally Orthodox — communities.

When smartphones first became popular, stores in these areas started selling so-called “kosher phones” — a simple flip phone lacking certain features, like an internet browser, which were seen as a potential channel for indecent secular content.

In Israel, Haredim have protested outside stores that sell unfiltered or non-kosher smartphones. Several of those protests have erupted in violence.

Challenging human authority

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© The Times of Israel