"Black fanatic, heavy orthodox penguin with black side curls"

Who has not heard at least once one of the following statements: "the orthodox do not want to work," "The Haredim are useless eaters", these phrases are heard permanently whenever the subject of Haredi integration in the labor market or recruiting haredim into the IDF comes up.

Are all these sources really interested in combing the ultra orthodox at work?
The story of Avraham Maya, a Breslev Baal Teshiva, shows the other side of the story.
Maya grew up in north Tel Aviv in a secular family. At 18, after graduating from high school, he joined the army like the rest of his peers and served at the training base 11. Towards the end of his service he began to engage in startup led by one of his commanders, from building websites and other things that went on in the high tech field.

A year after his release he began the Teshuva process, "I realized that this is what I want," says Maya during an interview with B'Chadrei Charedim. "Everything else was on the back burner when I was drawn to religion through Breslev. It all happened faster than I thought it would happen."

His continued his Teshuva process whilst working in a high tech company in Raanana, but after a year Maya left everything and became a full-fledged yeshiva student at the 'Chut shel Chessed' Yeshiva led by Rabbi Shalom Arosch, a Breslev Rabbi.

At 25, after he married and became a father to 2 children, Maya realized that he should return to his work, "I started to relearn the field to narrow the gaps and at the same time I started going to job interviews," he says.

The orthodox penguin

4 years ago when he arrived for an interview in a well known high tech company in Herzliya, he experienced a shameful story, "When I entered the room, the CTO was on the phone. The director of human resources left the binder on the table and left the room," he says. "I looked at the binder in the hope to see the praise she wrote about me, and then the big black bold letters jumped in front of my eyes: ' Black fanatic, heavy orthodox penguin with black side curls and a beard'.

"Boom. This was a humiliation. I really felt the racism at a work place in the Jewish state."

The manager promised to return to Maya, but he never did.

Maya did not give up; today he is the social media manager of the website, Breslev in Israel, a site run in 6 different languages. "Today I work where Avraham is not a penguin but is a man surrounded by people who appreciate him for his contribution to his workplace." And whether he forgave the same lady? "Yes. I decided - like the words of Dr. Martin Luther King – 'stick with love, hate is too great a burden to bear'."

He decided to publish his story now, four years later, "especially due to the public discourse on the subject. It seems that more than the secularists want to see the ultra orthodox working - they want them to fly out of their sight." His goal in publicizing his story is one: "to understand and internalize that prejudice and hatred is something that one should get rid of."

'בחדרי' גם ברשתות החברתיות - הצטרפו!