Here’s a comment today to Steve Sailer:
Steve-Did you see that the Orthodox bought out the Failed Messiah blog (http://failedmessiah.typepad.com)?
It was a great source of info for Orthodox/Haredi shenanigans in NY/NJ. It apparently has been bought out by the Orthodox to silence criticism.
Went there today looking for the scoop on Orthodox efforts to take over a neighborhood in Toms River NJ, the way they have completely taken over Lakewood NJ and many places in the lower Hudson Valley (linked on Drudge).
A check of FailedMessiah.com reveals there have not been any important posts since Scott Rosenberg left in January.
The Forward reports February 7, 2016:
There’s a media mystery developing around the anonymous new owners of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah, and growing signs the site’s harsh criticism of the Orthodox community may be permanently silenced.
Shmarya Rosenberg, who ran FailedMessiah singlehandedly for more than a decade, announced February 2 that he was moving on. Days later, questions about the blog’s new owners are multiplying, and one Orthodox website has suggested that an Orthodox businessman bought FailedMessiah to “pull the plug” on Rosenberg’s hard-hitting reports on the community.
In a post on February 3, the new owners said they were “a group of people dedicated to protecting the reputation of the Orthodox Jewish community,” but did not identify themselves by name…
An unsigned post on the Orthodox website OnlySimchas.com reported “rumors” that California nursing home magnate Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz was among the buyers of Rosenberg’s site. Rechnitz, 44, is an enigmatic ultra-Orthodox businessman, a major donor to Orthodox charities and yeshivas, and the son-in-law of Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi who died this January.
Rechnitz recently made headlines when he bought Powerball tickets for all his employees in his California nursing homes. One nurse briefly thought she won a slice of the $1 billion prize, but it turned out to be a hoax.
Rechnitz has shown a tendency to be gently critical of the Orthodox community. In early January, while accepting an honor at a gala dinner for a Lakewood, New Jersey yeshiva that he had funded, he attacked of Lakewood’s Orthodox schools for excluding some students. Days later, he issued an apology, saying that he had not meant to insult any rabbis or yeshiva heads.
Meanwhile, Rechnitz’s nursing homes are facing heavy scrutiny from state and federal regulators in California, according to a lengthy June report in the Sacramento Bee. According to the paper, three of Rechnitz’s 81 California nursing homes have been kicked out of the federal Medicare program in recent years, a highly unusual and drastic step. In the Sacramento Bee story, Rechnitz says that his regulatory problems are the result of bad relationships with state officials.
In its February 4 post, OnlySimchas suggested that Rechnitz had bought FailedMessiah to throttle its reporting. “The rumors claim that allegedly Rechnitz was simply fed up with the amount of hatred towards his fellow Jews, and simply could not bear to watch it continue,” OnlySimchas wrote. “If Rechnitz had any hand in the deal to have [FailedMessiah] pull the plug, his share in [heaven] will have just grown to an unimaginable level.”
