The ultra-Orthodox Jews combining tech and the Torah

Israel's ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews have long led a life of seclusion and religious study - but an increasing number are breaking with tradition, and proving surprisingly successful in Israel's tech start-up sector, writes David Baker.

"Learning the Talmud involves wrapping our minds around a certain problem and looking at it from different approaches and trying to find different solutions," says Moshe Slaven, a 26-year-old Haredi man from Jerusalem, who is learning how to code.

"Programming is very similar, especially the way of thinking."

Like many of his friends, Slaven grew up expecting a life of quiet learning. Haredi men are expected to spend most of their time studying the Torah and Talmud, Judaism's sacred texts, leaving their wives to go out and work. About half of Israel's Haredi men live this way.

But while the cost of living has risen in recent years, child benefit has been cut - bad news for Haredi families, which often have eight-to-10 children and rely on benefits to make ends meet.

As a result, more Haredi men are looking for work and, like Slaven, turning to Israel's booming high-tech sector.

Israel is known as the "start-up nation". Its technology sector is considered by many to be second only to Silicon Valley and it needs more coders and developers.

Technology may not seem the obvious choice for ultra-Orthodox men who have had very little or no training in science or maths - Israel's Haredi schools don't teach these subjects - let alone English, the lingua franca of tech meet-ups around the world.

But it involves skills they can learn relatively quickly - whether or not it's true, as Moshe Slaven suggests, that religious scholarship is a good preparation. They don't need to spend years studying for a qualification and when they get a job the pay tends to be good.

"I met with a lot of secular people and I realised they were looking at me like I was coming from a different planet, like someone from the Middle Ages," he says. "They really didn't believe that I had any chance to do something meaningful in the hi-tech field."

But, motivated by his family history, he is committed to improving integration between the Haredi and the rest of Israeli society. Friedman's great-grandfather was the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and it was he who banned maths, science and English from Haredi schools.