Did you hear the one about the time a group of top hi-tech CEOs, a former air force commander and the chairman of Bank Hapoalim walked into the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak on a Thursday night and started learning Talmud with the students?
It’s not a joke, but it might be part of a major shift happening in Israeli society.
A group of top executives, including the Israeli CEOs of Facebook, Cisco, IBM and other giants, recently got a close-up look at haredi community life on a bus tour through Bnei Brak organized by Kamatech, an organization that connects haredi entrepreneurs to Israel’s hi-tech ecosystem. For many of them, including some who live just minutes away in the secular neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, it was the first time in their lives learning about the ultra-Orthodox world from within.
Kamatech was founded in 2012 to help solve one of the economy’s most pressing problems: that the haredi community doesn’t provide its members with the tools to take part in the high-flying tech sector. The community’s lack of education and exposure to the world of technology had reached the point where, as one person observed, “a haredi person working in hi-tech was like a secular person writing a commentary on Rashi,” the medieval rabbinical commentator.
Now the situation is changing. At the time Kamatech was founded, just about 0.7% of the hi-tech workforce was haredi. Now, they make up more than 3%.
When I ask Kamatech founder Moshe Friedman what his organization does, he says it offers two main programs. The first is a training course to help men and women find work in hi-tech fields. The second, which began as a suggestion from Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua, is an accelerator program to train haredi entrepreneurs how to build start-ups. That program has 50 graduates, including 12 women, Friedman said.
However, as I learn more about the organization, I start to understand how humble his answer was. Friedman, who at age 41 has been one of Israel’s most influential figures, has built Kamatech into a powerhouse movement whose reach extends through the highest levels of the Start-Up Nation. Kamatech maintains a coworking space called Ampersand in a swanky office building in Bnei Brak, the first in the country designed especially for ultra-Orthodox workers and teams. The workspace is supported by Cisco, with mentorship provided by WeWork and others.
The organization also runs professional training and placement programs with many of Israel’s top companies, including the local offices of Cisco, Facebook, Nokia and Huawei. At Facebook, for example, two classes of 20 students – one for men, one for women – were given data science training, with graduates placed within Facebook and other partnered companies. It runs similar programs at Cisco, Huawei and many other companies.
“The CEO of Nokia told me that when he first met me, there wasn’t a single haredi employee in the company,” Friedman says. “Now, three years later, 10% of the office is haredi.”
In addition, the team runs countless events that Friedman puts in the category of “ecosystem building.” These include conferences, tech competitions and hackathons, social events and tours of companies where haredim can get a close-up look at the workings of the Start-Up Nation.
The bus tour of Bnei Brak was part of that last category, but while most of Kamatech’s tours bring haredim to Tel Aviv, this was one of its first that brought Tel Aviv to the haredim.
“I THINK PROGRAMS like this are very important,” Friedman says. “When I meet with, for example, Facebook Israel CEO Adi Soffer Teeni, we sit in our office to talk about our partnership plans. But she never came to learn about Bnei Brak, to meet the local business owners, the yeshiva students, the people who run the gemachim (community loan organizations). By coming deeper into the community, even learning a bit of Torah together, people from that world can learn to appreciate who we are and what motivates us.”
With that mission, a bus filled with CEOs and their spouses, haredi representatives and a few journalists left the Ampersand coworking space to explore Israel’s second-largest haredi community, after Jerusalem.
Bnei Brak, with a population of a bit more than 200,000 mostly haredi residents, is the poorest and most crowded city in Israel, notes Avreimi Wingut, Kamatech’s managing director and the group’s tour guide for the night. However, he says, surveys also consistently show that its residents are the nation’s happiest and healthiest, with the greatest life expectancy rates and self-reported levels of satisfaction, creating a phenomenon that is known as “the Bnei Brak Paradox.”
The social tightness of the community and its sense of purpose are among the reasons attributed to the paradox, but you need to see the city’s gemachim to appreciate what makes Bnei Brak tick, he says.
The idea of a gemach is simple: a free loan organization where people can borrow everything from food and money to wedding dresses and baby pacifiers.
“There are believed to be as many as 5,000 gemachim all over Bnei Brak,” Wingut says. “Sometimes it seems like almost everyone runs one out of their house.”
The group’s first stop is at the city’s most successful gemach, the Haverim Le’Refuah (Friends for Health) organization, which collects unused medicines to distribute to those who cannot afford them.
“Founded in 2011, this is now the largest voluntary pharmacy in the world,” says Baruch Lieberman, Haverim Le’Refuah’s CEO. “About NIS 600 million worth of medicines are thrown in the trash every year that could be used by someone else. People can donate their old medicines at 830 different collection points around the country, and we now give free medicine to about 5,000 needy people a month, worth about NIS 90 million a year.”
For many of the organization’s customers, NIS 30 for a routine prescription would be a hardship that stresses the family finances. For others, the costs of treating rare diseases are prohibitively high without communal help. To illustrate the point, Lieberman holds up a small bottle of pills he says is worth NIS 120,000.
Haverim Le’Refuah works with about 4,000 volunteers, including pharmacists who check every prescription for accuracy and validity before distributing them. The organization is located in a small office overflowing with shelves of medicines, and Lieberman says he is in talks with the municipality about the prospect of moving to a larger location.
“A volunteer organization distributing medicine like this would be illegal in any other country in the world,” Lieberman says. However, he explains, Israel passed a law in 2016 that specifically made an allowance for Haverim Le’Refuah.
It is easy to see from the looks on their faces how impressed the CEOs are. The chatter on the bus is about the extraordinary levels of innovation put to work for charitable purposes.
THE BUS DRIVES past the famous Itzkovitz Synagogue – believed to be one of the most active synagogues in the world with some 20,000 people coming in to pray every day – on the way to visit a local business the likes of which most Tel Aviv residents have never seen.
In the basement of an apartment building is one of Bnei Brak’s most well-known wig sellers, Dvori Gantz, who together with her daughters, sells human hair wigs for as much as NIS 20,000 each. Married women are required by Jewish law to cover their hair in public, and a fancy wig is an expected provision at the time of the wedding. The group crowds into the eclectically designed store to hear the young Dvori and her daughters (each of whom has several children) laugh and tell stories about how they provide for Bnei Brak’s most stylish women. That is, when they aren’t doing charity work twice a week, providing wigs for male and female cancer patients through the Zichron Menachem NGO.
The three women tell their stories, laugh at each other’s jokes, and interrupt each other’s sentences with a level of energy that makes many of the founders in the room wish their sales teams had that kind of excitement.
Next, it’s back on the bus toward a different location where a short Talmud lesson is given. Most of the secular executives present have heard of the Talmud but never seen it up close, so a short passage is chosen and discussed.
Using an archaic and unlikely scenario, the Talmud teaches timeless legal and philosophical principles about life and death decisions, in a conversation held over the span of Jewish history. Reuven and Shimon are lost in the desert, and Reuven has enough water to sustain only himself. Can he drink it, or must he share it, even though they will both likely die if he does? The first rabbinical opinion states that the water must be shared, and an 18th-century commentator argues with a 12th-century authority over his reasoning. The second opinion states that Reuven may drink the water himself and live, and his opinion is ultimately accepted.
The group is surprisingly attentive as the charismatic young teacher spells out each side of the debate, and they thank him as they shuffle out of the room. But there seems to be a mood shift among the group, as the visitors suddenly become more aware of how much they don’t understand about this world.
ARMED WITH a bit of familiarity with the Talmud, the next stop is Ponevezh Yeshiva, one of the world’s leading Torah study institutions. Some 2,700 young men study here day and night in what is sometimes called the Harvard of the haredi world. (With an acceptance rate of just 2%, Ponevezh is actually more selective than Harvard.) Entrance to the main study hall is for men only, so the women of the group are invited for a personal talk with the wife of one of the top rabbis. (“She’s really connected to reality,” one of the group members reported later.)
The yeshiva was established in Bnei Brak in 1944 by Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, who also bought up land around the neighborhood and established an orphanage as part of his vision to build the world’s largest Torah institution there after the Holocaust. In hi-tech parlance, that makes him a visionary start-up founder with a scalable and sustainable social business model. The group is impressed.
But the scene inside is what many participants said left the strongest impression of the night. The sight of a full, vibrant beit midrash (study hall) at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, when classes for the week are over, teachers are at home, and the learning is completely voluntary, is no less than shocking for our executives. The idea that these young boys, most of whom have no career ambitions in life, are putting in upwards of 70 hours a week studying toward no degree or certification is something that they are impressed by, but can’t wrap their heads around.
“Go sit down next to one of the boys and ask them what they are learning,” Friedman says. No one obliges, so he grabs the arm of Eliezer Shkedi, retired IDF general and former CEO of El Al, and pushes him down into a seat next to an 18-year-old boy studying a tractate dealing with property rights. Next is Moshe Lichtman, start-up investor and founder of Microsoft Israel.
That experience gave these executives a new appreciation for the potential haredi workers can bring to the hi-tech sector.
“The only thing I can say is that there is so much great horsepower here that I’d love to put to better use,” Lichtman commented after his study session. “These people can continue studying the Torah, but I think they can do so much more with their brains.”
Ron Buckman, head of equity and alternative investments at Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I’ve lived in this country for 30 years, and it’s unbelievable that three kilometers from my home, there’s a culture that I don’t understand at all,” he said. “It’s incredible that they study from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., and I don’t have a clue about what motivates them. A person who can study with that kind of intensity has skills that could be very valuable if he brought them over to ‘our world.’”
However, many of those students have no interest in the world outside the corridors of Torah study. Wingut tells the story of a yeshiva student who is asked if he has ever heard of Microsoft. “Oh, that’s the machine that you look inside and see really tiny things, right?” was the reply. More haredim will have to understand the difference between the world’s largest software maker and a common lab microscope before real change can happen in their community.
Our visit concludes back at the Ampersand coworking space at 11 p.m. to conclude the way most tours of haredi society conclude: with a meal of cholent and kugel, traditional Sabbath delicacies. The group hears from a few of Kamatech’s success stories before the night is over.
Yoni Luksenberg is one of the founders of Elementor, a template editing tool for WordPress sites that is used on more than five million sites worldwide. Founded in a basement in Bnei Brak five years ago, the company employs more than 300 workers and is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. In March, the company opened a customer service assistance center in Sderot, a town less than a kilometer from Gaza that is a frequent target for missiles, with the goal of helping create quality jobs for residents there.
“This was all made possible by Kamatech,” he tells the group.
Next to speak is Yisrael Gurt, a Gerrer Hassid who was named the 22nd-best hacker in the world by Google. Gurt grew up in Bnei Brak, studied in hassidic yeshivot, taught himself English and coding, and co-founded cybersecurity company Reflectiz in 2016 with a non-religious hacker to create a solution to monitoring vulnerabilities in third-party applications. Gurt is another Kamatech success story, and there are thousands more in the waiting, Friedman says.
“Haredim currently make up about 10% of Israel’s population,” Friedman says. “Can you imagine if 10% of the tech sector would be haredi? It would be unbelievable.”