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Jan. 27, 2012
Charedim join the job market
Attitudes seen to be changing and new programs are there to help.
FELICE FRIEDSON AND ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE
Israel Edri is a young Israeli ultra-Orthodox man. He’d like to spend all his day in religious studies. But, as the father of two children and a third on the way, life’s challenges have stepped in and today he works in telemarketing.
“Reality hit. If you ask me, I’d like to sit and study all day long, but the reality is that you have to get out and work, especially if you want to live in an expensive city like Jerusalem and give your kids what they need,” the clean-shaven 27-year-old said.
Edri is the exception, however. The vast majority of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work or serve in the army, choosing instead a pious and largely impoverished life of studying religious texts, mainly the Talmud. It is not that they cannot find work – Israel’s unemployment rate is at its lowest in decades – rather they do not want it and have none of the education or training needed to be employed.
With birthrates three times the national average, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities are mushrooming. Many live on government allowances and private charity, and on their wives’ earnings. It wasn’t always that way nor is it a problem among ultra-Orthodox Jews living outside of Israel.
In 1970, 20 percent of working-age men in the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel were not working by choice; today, the figure is two thirds (65 percent). Their counterparts in the United States and Britain traditionally do take jobs and their labor force participation rate is the mirror opposite of Israel’s.
Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Charedim, now number about 700,000, or about 10 percent of Israel’s population. And that’s a problem. Israel’s economy can’t afford to have such a big part of the population permanently out of the workforce and living on government handouts paid by taxpayers.
“By the time you are up to 10 perecent of the population, of whom 70 percent of the male part of the population doesn’t work, you are getting to a macro-economic issue,” Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, said at a briefing. “This is not sustainable. We can’t have an ever-increasing proportion of the population continuing to not go to work.”
While the burden on the economy was growing, the rest of Israel largely ignored the problem as voters and politicians focused on security issues. But the country’s economic problems, particularly the high cost of living and shortage of housing, emerged as a key issue last summer in an explosion of mass protests and tent cities that popped up.
In the last several weeks, the growth and increasing extremism of the Charedi sector took centre stage when a spate of incidents in which girls and women were excluded, spit upon and yelled at captured headlines and pointed up the wide gap in lifestyle and attitudes between ultra-Orthodox and other Israelis.
“A Charedi town would not be self-sustaining. Nobody would pay taxes. Nobody works. Well, hey, this is where [they] are taking the entire country. Do that math. This is a problem,” said Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Taub Centre for Social Political Studies.
Now, a host of organizations are making an effort to quietly reverse the trend towards Charedi unemployment by finding ways to integrate ultra-Orthodox men into the workforce.
The economic crunch has definitely led more ultra-Orthodox to work for a living, said Motti Feldstein, director of Kemach, an organization that provides job training and support for Charedi men and women learning a trade.
“It’s not a revolution but a change in realities. There’s not more openness to working, but recognition of a changing world,” he explained.
Kemach means flour or bread, but is also used in a well-known biblical quote in defence work (“Without bread there is no Torah”), and is also an acronym for Promoting Charedi Employment in Hebrew. Over the past three years, it has helped more than 12,000 Charedim with guidance and scholarships.
But Feldstein is keen on stressing that his organization is not luring people out of yeshivot – the academies where religious texts are studied – but only helping those who had already chosen to stop learning full time.
“A rabbi is not going to come out and give a sermon [to go to work]. Everyone has to come to their rabbi and seek his blessing and the rabbi helps direct them. The rabbi’s job is to create a society, it is not to bring money to his community. Everyone is responsible for themselves. They have to decide what is better, to be a schnorrer [freeloader], or to go out and work.”
Most ultra-Orthodox have never studied much in math, science, English and other core subjects employers desire. Furthermore, many young men have no experience in the job market. They imagine themselves working only a few hours and earning high wages even though they have few, if any, skills. They have been taught that Torah learning is paramount. If they decide to take a job and accept the lower social status that workers have compared to full-time scholars, they prefer to do it discreetly.
Shmuel Gotlieb is an employment counselor at Mafteah, a venture by the Joint Distribution Committee’s Tevet program. He interviews men seeking to get their first job. “A lot of people come to me and say, ‘Give me a place to work where I’m not going to be seen. Why? Because it is unpleasant for me. Because my brother doesn’t know I’m working,’” he said. “I know a guy who has worked in a high-tech firm for three years now and no one in his family knows he’s working.”
In general, the ultra-Orthodox disdain change. Even their dress of black frock coats and wide-brimmed hats harkens to 18th century and they tend to speak Yiddish, the language of their European forbearers. Some economists say their background is so constricted that they can’t supply the needs of a modern economy.
“A Third World economy can’t support a First World army,” argued Ben-David of the Taub Centre. “We need more and more educated people because we are a more advanced society, and we need less and less uneducated. What is happening here is perverse because we are enabling a huge portion of society to deprive their kids of what they need when they grow up and to deprive us as a society of the doctors and engineers and everything else that a modern society needs.”
The Technion, Israel’s top engineering school, has been running a program for the past three years to attract ultra-Orthodox to their civil engineering program. They receive a crash course in core subjects like math, physics and English.
“One of the teachers told me it is like teaching the ABCs at the Technion because they know nothing,” noted Muly Dotan, director of pre-university studies.
Out of some 100 candidates quietly recruited from the ultra-Orthodox community, some 30 are chosen annually and receive a hefty scholarship to cover their four-year degree. The first graduates are expected soon and jobs have been earmarked for them, Dotan said.
But Yossi Tamir, executive director of the Tevet employment initiative, countered that, despite a lack of formal education, Charedi men and women catch on fast.
“It’s very easy for them,” Tamir said. “If you are talking about computers, they have a very high ability and capacity of learning those issues. So they can move into technology, computers and mathematics without any problems. Even if they didn’t study it when they were in high school, that isn’t a barrier.”
At Mafteah, however, they direct their clients to train as bus drivers, nurses’ aides, locksmiths and construction workers.
“People are not connected to reality because they are cut off. They’ve never worked and their fathers never worked. They never saw anyone who ever worked and so they don’t have any idea what a workingman does. But the moment they understand that a man with a job needs to work, they work,” Gotlieb said.
Still, once they gain a profession, breaking the stigma that they are lazy or untrained is often hard. Itzik Omasky, an electrician, said he hasn’t had good experience with them. “There aren’t many Charedi guys in the profession, but my experience with them hasn’t been good. I took one from Ramat Beit Shemesh and he was awful, and split. He ended up quitting because he wasn’t used to working so hard,” Omasky said. “He knew his craft, but he told me he could not work so much and, at two o’clock, had to stop. He was always wanting to take a break. I told him that this wouldn’t work out and he had to work a full day. After 10 days, he quit and left me in a lurch.”
Another barrier to ultra-Orthodox employment is the growing phenomenon in the Charedi world of segregating men and women. But like the phenomenon of shunning labor, the rising gender divide is also a modern phenomenon that has little basis in Jewish tradition, noted Ben-David. He pointed to the well-known New York electronics retailer, B&H, which is owned and operated by ultra-Orthodox Jews.
“In New York, Charedi men serve non-Charedi women. B&H doesn’t have a marker in the door ‘women only,’ ‘men only.’ It’s not part of being Charedi. It’s not part of being Jewish. What we are
seeing here has nothing to do with being Jewish,” he added. “They should get used to what modern society is and not the other way around.”
Even Ben-David admitted that there is a change taking place among the Charedi community. “At the anecdotal level, we see more and more Charedim who apparently get it and want to get the skills and go to school. There are now Charedi colleges where there were none before and there are now Charedim going to the army where there were none before and, on the face of it, this is a good direction.”
Matan Nitzky, an ultra-Orthodox man who has stepped out of the mold, is a volunteer for Israel’s civilian national service, which serves as an alternative to the army. He works in the Hatzalah emergency medical service, which he hopes will serve as a springboard for a career in medicine.
“My father is a doctor, my mother is a nurse and … it’s been my dream to also one day do that,” he explained. “With the civil service, I have the option to fulfil my dream and hopefully one day go down that path.”
Edri, the young and working Charedi father, said that he hopes the belief that ultra-Orthodox don’t want to work will fade. “It’s hard to get rid of a stigma,” he said. “I believe that, after a few years, this stigma will go away when they see Charedim in many more senior positions.”
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