When Larry Pinczower switches on his cell phone, the seal of a rabbinate council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life.
More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and the like are blocked, and rabbinical overseers ensure that the lists are up to date. Calls to other kosher phones are less than 2 cents a minute, compared with 9.5 cents for normal phones. But on the Sabbath any call costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty.
“You pay less, and you’re playing by the rules,” Pinczower, 39, said. “You’re using technology but in a way that maintains religious integrity.”
A community of at least 800,000 people — out of 5.4 million Jews living in Israel, a country of 7.1 million — the ultra-Orthodox, though comparatively poor, form a distinct, growing and important market, and Israeli companies are paying attention.
While there are rabbinical strictures against watching television, using computers for leisure, immodest attire and unsupervised mixing of men and women, the Israeli market economy has adjusted in creative and surprising ways.
Some 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men do not work regular jobs, preferring religious study. More than 50 percent live below the poverty line and get state allowances, compared with 15 percent of the rest of the population, and most families have six to seven children, said Momi Dahan, an economist at the School of Public Policy at Hebrew University.
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But because they live in tight communities like this one, and obey their rabbis, they have significant power in the marketplace, as well as in the voting booth, said Rafi Melnick, dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.
“You see it in sectors like food, consumer products and transport companies,” he said. The Israeli airline El Al is now privatized. “But they continue not to fly on Saturday,” Melnick said, in order to keep ultra-Orthodox customers.
Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at Hebrew University, studied ultra-Orthodox shopping patterns. “There are lines of cell phones and credit cards and Internet suppliers and software and DVDs and clothes and so many things produced or altered or koshered for them, because they have a certain organized power to get the producers to make what they want,” she said.
Beit Shemesh is a good example, a modern, attractive town of 73,000 people. There is a more secular part, with a large mall, and an ultra-Orthodox district, Ramat Beit Shemesh, which is divided in two. Bet, or B, is very strict, with 15,700 people. Aleph, or A, up the hill, is somewhat more flexible and contains 17,100 people, including a growing number of North American and European Jews who wanted to join an ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.
The sections look similar, but in B the streets are quieter, with fewer women visible. One spray-painted warning reads: “Going here you must be appropriately attired. Modest attire only.”
The Egged bus company has special routes for the ultra-Orthodox that segregate men and women, sometimes in separate buses. But there have been riots in Ramat Beit Shemesh B over certain bus routes, with angry graffiti comparing the company and the police to Nazis and calling Israel “the regime of the apostates.”
Some ultra-Orthodox communities have set up private bus companies, which separate the genders.
The supermarkets, too, are different, with stricter kosher products and Costco-sized packages of basic items, from cornflakes to diapers, for large ultra-Orthodox families.
Here in Ramat Beit Shemesh A, the spacious Shefa Shouk is an outlet for the ultra-Orthodox segment of a large grocery chain, Blue Square-Israel Ltd. Shefa Shouk has its own food labels with the strict “Badatz” kosher certificate. There is special clothing — undergarments with biblically mandated fringes, for example — and a large baby section.
Shlomit Feder, 45, Swiss-born, shopped for her husband and six children, age 18 months to 14 years. Her husband works long hours for a minimum salary, “and it’s hard to get by to the end of the week.”
But the family gets help from local charities and rabbinical funds, she said, pulling down a 56-roll package of toilet paper. The community takes care of its neediest; the supermarket, too, has a charitable fund.