Every morning, Pinchas would wake up to find his copy of Haaretz on his doorstep, crumpled. Pinchas, then an American yeshiva student living in Jerusalem, grew frustrated – his subscription cost him good money and the newspaper somehow always came wrinkled.

Once, when he woke up earlier, he stepped outside and saw a group of yeshiva students lining up at his door, one of them holding his copy of the paper.

“That’s my newspaper!” he insisted in his American-accented Hebrew.

“There’s a line,” he was told casually, and was pointed to the end of the queue.

Years later, Pinchas Lipschutz laughs as he tells the story in the editorial office of the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman. “No one would have subscribed themselves, you know, their kids wouldn’t get into school if they find out you have a Haaretz subscription,” he said. “So they read mine.”

The thirst here, among ultra-Orthodox English readers in America, for serious journalism has created a robust industry of its own – and in the past three decades, several powerful newspapers and magazines have emerged, entering thousands of Orthodox homes, gracing coffee tables and informing the masses’ Sabbath table conversations and rabbinic lectures alike. Attend any Haredi event – the funerals of saints, weddings of the children of rabbinic celebrities, the Siyum Hashas – and you’ll see a few journalists, bearded and in suits, hovering near the action with their recorders.

Here, the most powerful are the Hamodia (“The Informer”), Yated Ne’eman (“The Faithful Peg”) and the weekly Mishpacha (“Family”) magazine. Other New York religiously affiliated Jewish papers don’t count – The Jewish Week is too secular and too closely tied to the UJA-Federation of NY, and The Jewish Press and The Jewish Voice are too openly Zionist. And then there are the freebies, like the Lakewood Shopper and the Flatbush Jewish Journal, peppered with advertisements selling merits for a shidduch, good business and good health, and where the complicated mathematics of the “matchmaking crisis” are deciphered (“Danger: More than 10% of Bais Yaakov girls may God forbid never get married, may the Merciful One save us”).

While the Internet is spreading in these communities (quietly, subtly, with its own host of online gossip-heavy Haredi news sites – Yeshiva World News, Vos Iz Neis, Matzav), and insularity is becoming nearly impossible, the ultra-Orthodox community still demands print journalism. Here is a world that relies heavily on internal newspapers for local community news, with most reading taking place on the Sabbath, when all electronic devices are turned off and put away.

And it’s here, in these thick bundles, with their own brand of news reporting, opinion columns, detailed classifieds sections, Torah portion discussions, motivational (and at times melodramatic) stories – it’s here that one finds a window inside. Know a newspaper, and you’ll know its readership.

“To me, the most intriguing – and telling – window into the Orthodox world provided by its newspapers lies in the small print of its classified ads,” Agudath Israel’s spokesman Rabbi Avi Shafran once wrote, noting the classifieds listing hundreds of local community services, also known as gemachs – free secondhand baby carriages, clothing, wedding gowns, furniture, wigs, etc. – that “reflect the essence of the community.”

Yet as much as Haredi publications are defined by what they do publish, they are perhaps defined more by what is noticeably absent: celebrity gossip, sports, scandals, crime and any photographs or illustrations of women. “Our children read political analysis and Israel news instead of pop culture,” a Haredi mother tells me proudly.

So – who are the people behind these papers, these powerful opinion-makers? And is journalism still journalism when stories are censored by the all-powerful rabbis? When the editors and reporters who were interviewed for this article requested to review their own quotes before publication – a breach of mainstream journalistic ethics, certainly – what does that say about the definition of a controlled “Pravda” here?

In the offices of Hamodia, the newsroom buzz is like any other, with its staff of 80. Yet this is no typical corporate office, but rather an unassuming three-story house on the border of Boro Park and Midwood, in which the Diaspora’s only daily Jewish newspaper is produced. Circulation: About 100,000. That’s the number of households – take into account the average birthrate here, and you’ll get a better idea of its impact.

“You? You are from Haaretz?” Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein watches me through her round glasses as I enter her office. I’m in my usual attire: wig, pearls, knee-length skirt, tights.

I smile. Yes. She motions me to sit down.

Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein is the stern publisher, editor-in-chief, and matriarch of Hamodia. She rarely speaks to mainstream media.

“I was born into this,” she says simply, in a slight Israeli accent, and points to three black-and-white photos of elderly rabbis hanging above her desk. It was in 1950 that the daily Hebrew-language Hamodia was established in Israel by her father Rabbi Yehuda Leb Levin, the son of Rav Yitzchak Meir Levin, one of the signatories on Israel’s Declaration of Independence and a member of Knesset for over two decades. The English-language edition was established in 1998, and since then has been directed by Lichtenstein.

“I was very close with my father,” Lichtenstein says, glancing at the photograph again. “He was a visionary, an author, a Holocaust survivor. And when I stood up from shiva (mourning) for him, I promised to continue his mission, to create a very high standard for the voice of the Orthodox community, a voice for the people.”

And not a voice for the establishment?

“For the people,” she repeats.

Together, we leaf through that week’s paper: The newspaper offers a daily edition and a thicker weekly edition. Open last week’s “Features”, the news magazine, and you’ll find a set of opinion columns from Haredi rabbis to the Conference of Presidents’ Malcolm Hoenlein weighing in on the Iran deal, along with a policy debate; “On the Record” and “Overheard” offer memorable quotes from world news that week, business and employment columns, satire pages and a section on language.

The weekly Hamodia also includes a “Community” section (local news, crossing America’s Orthodox cities from Baltimore to Seattle, mostly a blur of photos of almost-identical black-hatted men), “Inyan” (“Shabbos material,” Lichtenstein explains, a glossy magazine with no politics but rather religious and inspirational material), “Binah” (a popular women’s magazine: parenting articles, fiction, recipes, advice), and the youth magazine “Binyan,” which is used across ultra-Orthodox schools to teach current events.

Lichtenstein moves quickly through the thick pile of papers on her desk, and says with a sudden smile, “We like humor, we like to laugh about ourselves.”

Lichtenstein tells me that she consults with rabbis when issues come up – with no official rabbinical council overseeing the publication. It is Lichtenstein’s piety which perhaps keeps her in power – the rabbis trust her sharp (and strict) discernment of what is kosher and not kosher to publish.