Published: 25 October 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
THERE’S NOTHING REMARKABLE about Chany Rosengarten’s Instagram account. If anything, it’s a textbook of Insta-influencer tropes. There are OOTD (outfits of the day) and QOTD (quotes of the day), giveaways and Q&As, family portraits and food shot from above.
And there is impossibly perfect hair. What’s remarkable is that Rosengarten, who grew up in a community that crusades against the internet, now makes a living from it.
Rosengarten was born in New Square, New York, the state’s poorest municipality and one of its richest centres of Hasidic life. Its name is an anglicization of Skver, the Ukrainian town from which its founders — including Rosengarten’s great-grandparents — arrived in 1954.
These days, New Square is known for putting the “ultra” in ultra-Orthodox, most famously with gender-segregated sidewalks. Like every other ultra-Orthodox community, New Square is organized around the authority of a rebbe. Yet even for a Hasidishe rebbe, David Twersky exercises remarkable authority.
Rosengarten’s parents raised her and her 10 siblings to typically stringent Skverer standards.
However, there was one rule with which, as she got older, Rosengarten kept colliding. She became a writer and wanted to learn how to promote her work, so she enrolled in a marketing course. Her instructor gushed about a new site called Facebook.
After friending a bunch of people, she began receiving “creepy messages.” She recalls, “I was like, ‘If this is what Facebook involves, I’m out of here.’”
But when Rosengarten’s first novel, Promise Me, Jerusalem, was about to be published in 2017, she found herself facing the same dilemma: “People told me the best way to market a book these days, the best way to market anything, was on social media.”
What persuaded Rosengarten to return to the breach was that since her failed Facebook foray, a kosher platform of choice had emerged: “They were saying that the Orthodox community had taken to Instagram.”
FULL STORY On Instagram, Orthodox women find a voice – and power (Haaretz)
Photo: From left, Adina Sash, Bari Mitzmann and Chany Rosengarten (Instagram)
