Following efforts put forth by the Treasury to get Chareidim into the workforce, polling company Direct Pulse investigated trends within the Chareidi community over the past two years, and on Motzei Shabbos publicly published their findings with regard to the scope of employment and unemployment in the community. According to the report, 78,960 men of working age in the Chareidi community are not working. They comprise 1.85 percent of the 4.2 million people who comprise the Israeli workforce. Many of these Charedi men are married and 89 percent of them have spouses who work, most of these women, a significantly larger percentage than the rest of Israeli society,  have full-time jobs. Thus these are families who rely on one working income. The Direct Pulse report stated that the Chariedi community is made up of 1,285,000 people which comprises 13.5 percent of the entire population of Israel. Among them, 2,500 people participated in the poll and were asked a variety of questions about the community and its way of life. The vast majority of Chareidim (70.1 percent) are younger than 25-years-old. This is lower than the employment age in Israel which is listed as 25 by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Chareidi men of working age number some 172,000 people, among which 54.3 percent of them are working a full, or part-time, job, and 79,000 of them are learning full-time. There are four main groups that comprise the Chareidi community – Chassidim, Lithuanians, Sephardim, and others. Among these groups, the group with the largest number of full-time learning men are Lithuanians, and this is the grouping which has the largest number of women who work in positions that are either full-time or a significant amount of part-time work, which is much higher than the rest of Israeli society. The report said that, “The Lithuanian community chose to switch gender roles in the family and are implementing their ideology of ‘Living with what there is.’” The report continued “It is important to note that most Chareidim dedicate the third decade of their lives (age 20-29) to learning, however, once they grow beyond those years, the percentage of those learning drops significantly. The Chareidi men aged 25-35 who incorporate simultaneous academic studies and employment is continuously growing.” Direct Plus stated that “In typical fashion, staffers from the treasury are trying to recommend solutions to the Chareidi community that could have been helpful to solve problems that existed a decade ago, however, these solutions will become irrelevant, regardless of the Treasury, in the next few years simply due to the current trends in Chareidi society.” (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

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