The Economist: Few Charedim in Israel’s Start-Up Industry

A group of charedi Jews arriving at a meeting recently at Facebook’s Israeli headquarters were initially barred from entering by the security guard. “He couldn’t believe we actually had a business reason for being there,” said one participant. “He thought we wanted to hold a demonstration”.

The altercation was a sign of how rare it is to see black-garbed charedi Israelis in the shining development centers of the startup nation. Some 300,000 people, or about 8% of the Israeli workforce, are employed in the country’s burgeoning high-tech industry. The industry has gathered in talent so quickly that it is now constrained by a shortage of qualified engineers and programmers and is looking abroad. Yet a large and almost untapped pool of talent lies close to home. Only 2% of Israel’s tech employees are ultra-Orthodox Jews, although the community makes up nearly 10% of the population (similarly just 3% of tech employees are Arab, despite making up about 20% of the total). And of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who are employed by tech companies, about two-thirds are women who work mainly in call centers for low pay.

The barriers are highest for those who want to fulfil the Israeli dream of founding their own startup company. “Even when I succeeded in getting a meeting with potential investors, they looked at me as if I was an alien,” says Moshe Friedman, who at the age of thirty, left his yeshiva and, with friends, developed an app to simplify video-editing. After seeing how tough it was for religious Jews to get a foothold in the tech industry, he went on to set up Kamatech, a company working to place Haredi employees with some of the largest tech firms in Israel, and to create a network for entrepreneurs from the community.

So far he has connected eight charedi startups with established tech firms. The startups have raised more than $6m in initial investments and employ seventy people. That might sound like an impressive start, but when compared to the $4.5 billion raised by Israeli startups in 2015, it shows how much ground charedi entrepreneurs still have to make up.

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