Other bloggers, like Heshy Fried of Frum Satire, found humor in the situation. “Everyone knew that [Vos Iz Neias’s] sole purpose was to show how foolish the frum community looked when it tried to formulate opinions,” Fried wrote.  

Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, who signed the ban, said he was not familiar with the site but was given the ban by Rabbi Malkiel Kotler, of Lakewood.

“I know very little about it, but I relied on the rabbanim that signed it and they said it’s terrible,” Rabbi Kamenetsky told The Jewish Star. “They said it has a lot of lashon hora,”

Rabbi Malkiel Kotler could not be reached in time for The Jewish Star’s deadline. Rabbi Yaakov Perlow declined to comment.

The ban is already having an effect according to blogger Dov Bear.

"I speak to hard core Haredim, and post-ban many have started speaking about Vos Iz Neias in cautious terms," Bear said. "When they email me Vos iz Neias stories, for example, many now add

qualifying language such as 'This came from Vos Iz Neias, not that I think Vos Iz Neias is so great.'"

Shimon Weiser, who identified himself as one of the proponents of the ban, offered a simple reason for the ban.

“I couldn’t stand that the heimish called yiddieshe website became a distribution for shmutz,” said Weiser, using the Yiddish word for dirt. “It’s as simple as that.”

As an example, he listed the case of Israel Weingarten, a rabbi from Monsey who was found guilty of molesting his daughter.

“Every day of the trial Vos Iz Neias brought down the newspapers, the exact testimony,” he said referring to the graphic nature of the case. “When you’re reading the goyish papers you know going into the site that that’s what they sell. But if you’re going to a heimish Shomer Shabbos website, it doesn’t belong there, it’s as simple as that.”

However, Weiser stressed that the ban had nothing to do with specifically featuring sexual abuse cases on the site, or with Vito Lopez.

“It’s a vicious lie to say such a stupid thing that there was an agenda,” he said. “We showed the rabbonim. I have a whole list of articles going back a whole year. [The gedolim] were shocked that a yiddish website with a frum name should be poisoning the minds of the young, old, and the bochurim.”

Weiser said that he and several others had given a warning to the owners of the site about their content in January 2010, well before Lopez was associated with the scandals.

Yair Hoffman, who writes for both Vos Iz Neias and the Five Towns Jewish Times, and was the source of the information for the American Israel Press Service, said that the ban was filed under a mistaken impression.