Among Friends

 https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2010/01_02/2010_01_19_Hoffman_AmongFriends.htm

If the silence of the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate is meant to keep members of their community in the dark, and shield the authority of the rabbinate from shame, it has been countered by outraged discussion on ultra-Orthodox blogs, whose commenters have been following the money that passed through Tropper's organization—and venting their anger at the ongoing silence from the halachic establishment. One anonymously written blog, The Unorthodox Jew, called on Feinstein to shut down "this house of prostitution." A commenter on the blog called for a letter-writing campaign to "as many Orthodox-affiliated Jews as possible, alerting them to the unworthiness of our so-called 'gedolim'"—a Hebrew term used by ultra-Orthodox Jews to refer to their leaders. "King Lear should be obligatory reading in the ultra-Orthodox world, along with All the King's Men," wrote another person. At another highly critical blog, Daas Torah, a commenter wrote: "The chillul hashem"—insult to God—"of Tropper's scandals is only getting worse with time like a festering untreated cancer."

One of the few religious authorities to speak out publicly on the Tropper case has been Aba Dunner, the executive director of the Conference of European Rabbis, a group that publicly opposed Tropper's incursion onto its turf even before the scandal; last week, Dunner published an op-ed in the Five Towns Jewish Times, a New York-area paper catering to Orthodox readers, in which he accused Eternal Jewish Family of conducting a "bounty hunt" for new Jews, by allegedly paying local rabbis to funnel intermarried couples into its fledgling conversion courts. "Tropper is a fraud," Dunner wrote. "The organization he created is in his image and is therefore a fraud too. The creators of that image are fraudsters and hucksters who are trying desperately to keep the line to Mr. Kaplan's millions open."