Leaving the Yeshiva for Mainstream Israel

They still wear yeshiva black, but the students of Ono Academic College have put their religious texts aside to study a different world.

They are among thousands of haredim, a community of Orthodox Jews, who in recent years have abandoned their seminaries to study law, business, accountancy, social work and computer programming, and to function better in the secular world.

This quiet breakout from behind the walls of the yeshiva, or seminary, is part of a wider trend of assimilating into mainstream Israel. It could help chip away at the resentment many secular Israelis feel toward the haredim, who are mostly exempt from army service and survive on government aid.

It could also help ease poverty in a community that makes up about 10%, or 500,000, of Israel’s 5.3 million Jews.

Menachem Friedman, a sociology professor at the religious Bar-Ilan University, said the new work force wasn’t large enough yet to end the community’s dependence on welfare. But he said the number was growing -- and taking a risk by embracing modernity.

“It will happen probably more and more as the [religious] society opens the gates to the mainstream. It’s impossible to stop it,” he said.

For now, studying religion remains the top choice for male haredim. According to the Education Ministry, nearly 85,000 are enrolled full-time in seminaries, relying on government stipends or working wives to support them.

The arrangement has plunged about half the haredi families into poverty, and alienated them from secular Israelis who see them as welfare freeloaders and don’t buy their argument that studying the Torah is as vital a national need as being taxpayers and serving in the military.

Acknowledging the tensions, some rabbis have permitted followers to leave the seminaries and learn a profession. Finance Ministry officials estimate that some 1,000 haredi men begin technical or academic training each year.

Ono, the largest of several colleges catering to them, has about 1,400 students, half of them men.

Rony Paluch, 31, was in Ono’s first graduating law class last year, and now is studying for the bar. The new crop of students “will make the polarization [in Israeli society] smaller,” he said.

The trend started years ago with a new generation of Israeli-born haredim. They speak Hebrew, once reserved for prayer, rather than Yiddish, the language of the diaspora. Their newspapers carry different viewpoints and challenge leading rabbis who once commanded absolute obedience. Their stand-up comedians lampoon Israeli politicians. Their Hebrew-language websites brim with irreverent debate and Orthodox in-jokes. More of them are forfeiting their exemption from military service and enlisting.

The Zionist state, which many of their fathers shunned as a secular preempting of the Messiah, has become a fact of life and they are deeply engaged in its politics.

The new college classrooms segregate the sexes. Besides offering limited religious study, they teach remedial math and other subjects not tackled extensively in the haredi educational system. Most of the colleges only admit married men older than 23.

“In the past few years, going to college became very popular,” said Meier Sternberg, 30, a business administration student at Ono and married father of three from the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak. Sternberg said he got his rabbi’s permission to leave the yeshiva and attend college.

Still, he wishes it wasn’t necessary to quit religious studies to make a living. “If somebody can learn [in yeshiva] and survive, that’s better,” he said.

A yeshiva education remains the ultimate haredi pedigree. “There is still the same ideal type, of the man who studies the Torah,” said Tamar El-Or, a sociology professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The new professionals say they still adhere to a strict Orthodox lifestyle, attending synagogue every morning, observing the Sabbath and devoting time to Torah study.

Gabi Itzovitz, who opened a small software business near Jerusalem two years ago after graduating from a technology institute catering to haredim, said he wished he had more time for religious study.

“But I separate my wishes and the world we live in,” he said.