At a Carmiel high-tech firm, a female Haredi CEO leads by example

To paraphrase the Passover Haggadah, dayenu — it would have been enough — if Hanita Fridman ran a software development company whose vision was to help the ultra-Orthodox find their place in Israel’s workforce. It would have been enough if she herself were ultra-Orthodox. And it certainly would have been enough if she had set up her company far from the center of the country, the better to bring job opportunities to the north.

As it turns out, she is all three. Along with a partner, Fridman (whose husband studies full-time in a kollel) runs start-up computer software development company Karmisoft, where more than half of the nearly two dozen employees are Haredi men and women, in the Galilee town of Carmiel.

But if that sounds like a rare mix, you’re out of the loop on ultra-Orthodox issues, according to Fridman. “Whenever I hear a debate on public policy regarding how to put the Haredim to work, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said in an interview. “Of course Haredim want to work. It’s just that nobody wants to hire them.”

Fridman spoke to the Times of Israel at the Technology 2013 show in Tel Aviv this week. The show featured the latest in tech for use in industry, agriculture, and manufacturing, representing a further merging of the high-tech and low-tech worlds — with the latter becoming more dependent than ever on the advancement and innovation of the former, show organizers said.

Job opportunities are what it’s all about for Fridman. “Today more than half the Haredim in school are studying programming, but until very recently there were no jobs for them at all. Here in the Galilee, the only jobs open to them were in education. Our vision is to change that. We hire individuals with advanced and basic skills, and they work in-house on our contracted projects, as well as with companies here in the area that need employees. In many cases, those employees stay on with the companies we placed them with and become regular employees there,” she said.

Karmisoft is on top of the latest trends in app development, with employees expert in hot areas like embedded systems, user interface, web apps, and mobile app development. “It’s a little strange to fathom,” she acknowledged, “seeing the Haredi women who work in our office programming for smartphones, when they themselves use phones that don’t even have text messaging capabilities.”

Karmisoft’s staff has done dozens of creative projects, including a remote control card software project for the military, a quality testing tool for embedded system cards with LCD screens, numerous websites, and dozens of mobile and web apps. “We did, for a European company called Grunveld, a security application for trucks, which uses sensors to alert drivers to obstacles in their path when they are going in reverse,” said Fridman. “We did another sensor app for a company called Btline, which gathers data on temperature and humidity in fruit growing areas, and sends the data to a website, where farmers can access it.”

Most of Karmisoft’s projects focus on the area where high-tech methods can solve low-tech issues. But there are some projects Karmisoft won’t accept, said Fridman. “We usually turn down entertainment apps, or projects for websites that are not of the type we would feel comfortable using. In the past, we got a lot of offers from gambling sites to do work for them, but we decided against that kind of work.”

Carmiel may seem an improbable place for a Haredi-oriented company to set up shop, but the town actually has a substantial ultra-Orthodox community, attracted by the relatively reasonable house prices. Fridman and her family moved there from a kibbutz near the northern town of Ma’alot about a dozen years ago, when they became newly Orthodox (ba’alei teshuva). Fridman has degrees in computer science, businesses administration, and marketing, and has been working in high-tech for over 20 years. “I consulted with rabbis who told me that it was great that I had a successful career, but that it would be even better if I could do something to help the community.” Thus was born the idea for Karmisoft, which Fridman and her partner established in 2010.

Fridman is as religiously strict as the term Haredi implies, and so are most of her staff. She does not shake hands with men and avoids business lunches, as the kashrut of even kosher restaurants with Rabbinate supervision would not be acceptable in her community. “We have some secular people on staff and sometimes they will bring food for a celebration, and they always make sure that the kashrut is of the type that the Haredi workers would accept. But still, the women usually refuse to eat, unless the men are in a different room… For reasons of modesty they will not eat a meal in the same room as men not related to them.”

Some political and business leaders concerned with the issue of the ultra-Orthodox in the workplace see Fridman’s company as a model of what could be. Several weeks ago, Economics Minister Naftali Bennett visited, and this week she met (not for the first time) with industrial mogul Stef Wertheimer, who is very interested in bringing more Haredim to work in his Tefen Industrial Zone in the north.

The secular staff at Karmisoft is understanding of ultra-Orthodox sensitivities, but, laments Fridman, that is not the case in many other places. “I spoke to a colleague of mine recently who said that he could not afford to hire Haredim, because some of his employees said that they would rather find another job than sit next to a Haredi.” That attitude has been exacerbated, she said, by the wrong-headed policy of Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Bennett, who are insisting that Haredim be drafted, and jailed if they refuse to serve. “There is a lot of incitement, and it is very hurtful.”

Although the impression is that many in the ultra-Orthodox community are not interested in working unless very specific conditions can be met — or that they refuse to work at all — nothing could be further from the truth, she claimed. “In Carmiel, Bnei Brak, and Jerusalem, everyone who has a family — husband and wife — works. They can’t afford not to.”

The public is also misinformed as to the “demands” that the ultra-Orthodox are reputed to make as conditions for working. “Many of the Haredim who work for tech companies in the center of the country are sent to work in departments and even buildings separate from the rest of the employees, but that is usually a management decision. Here in the north we do not have luxuries such as separate departments for anyone, and Haredim and secular people sit, work, and produce in the same room.” The same holds true for Internet use; most Haredi authorities understand the need to use the Internet in work settings, she said, though they are are concerned over the Internet’s deleterious effect on youth when used at home.

Meanwhile, she said, draconian laws against full-time yeshiva students working are depriving society of untold benefits. “What is wrong with having yeshiva students do a little side work, to get interested and involved in a career?” asked Fridman. “It’s a shame when a yeshiva boy takes up space in a yeshiva even though he is not qualified or interested in studying full-time, just like it’s a shame that there are plenty of ‘bench warmers’ in colleges who are studying because it’s the ‘thing’ to do. And it’s just as bad when you draft a youth into the army who doesn’t really want be there, with the kids taking the easiest job they can get,” costing more to keep them occupied than they produce for the army.

“I am not a politician, and I don’t have answers,” Fridman said. “But as someone who straddles both worlds, I am sure we could be doing a lot better on this issue.”