Recently, it seems that almost all the problems have been solved – apart from the problem of ultra-Orthodox employment – men and women, the Direct Falls Institute, publishes tonight (Saturday), new data, coming after a two-year in-depth study – on the extent of ultra-Orthodox employment.
According to the findings, which were obtained in a deep mapping of the ultra-Orthodox public – the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel numbers about 1,285,000 people, which is about 13.5% of the country’s population. The vast majority of the ultra-Orthodox (70.1%) are young people up to the age of 25, who are considered below the age of employment in Israel – due to the fact that the age of employment according to the CBS is calculated from the age of 25.
About 78,960 ultra-Orthodox men of working age do not work at all. They constitute only 1.85% of the 4.2 million people who make up the labor force in Israel. Most of those about 80,000 men – married, what is interesting is that 89% of those married – their spouses work, most of them full time and in a higher percentage than the national average.
The ultra-Orthodox men of employment age about 172,000, with 54.3% of those ultra-Orthodox, working full-time or part-time and only 45.7% in this section (about 79,000 ultra-Orthodox men as such) studying Torah in yeshivas and kollels.
According to the results of the study, the ultra-Orthodox society has four main factions: Hasidim, Lithuanians, Sephardim and others. Of these factions, the high percentage of learners focuses mainly on the Lithuanian sector, and this is also the sector in which women work at a higher percentage even than the employment rate of women among the entire population in Israel.
Direct Plus said after the study was published: “This is just the tip of the iceberg of the revolution taking place in ultra-Orthodox society. To sum up, finance officials, fashionably late, are trying to offer solutions that may have been important a decade ago – but become irrelevant in the coming years.”