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To shul in a Mercedes

Wealthy haredim shun hedonism of secular counterparts, despise ostentation, consult with rabbis before making important decisions

Shoshana Chen

The past few years have seen the introduction of a new social class to Israeli society - wealthy Ultra-Orthodox people. While these individuals are quite affluent, they shun the hedonism as well as the materialistic trappings of their secular counterparts.



Instead, they observe all the traditions and restrictions of haredi society and continue to maintain close ties with their less well-off haredi brethren.


The list of prominent haredi businessmen includes Chaim Fink, who recently acquired Shemen Industries and subsequently granted his first interview ever, Lev Leviev, whom the media basically ignored until he purchased Africa-Israel, and Shaya Boymelgreen, who leaped from relative obscurity to buy the Ezorim construction company from Nochi Danker.


In addition, a significant number of haredim – including many diamond dealers – are undisputed members of Israel’s economic elite yet somehow manage to fly beneath the media’s radar.



Part of the community

According to haredi advertising executive Rachel Bolton, haredi businessmen go to great lengths to avoid ostentation. “The rich haredi needs his community,” she explains. “He needs his prayer quorum to read the Torah three times a week.


“His contact with the regular community requires him to live modestly. Otherwise, the community will reject him. The congregation will be scared of him and will isolate him. Therefore, the rich haredi will drive a fancy car but not a limited model.


“No haredi in Israel has a private yacht,” Bolton continues. “That would invite conversations in the community, in the synagogue. Not just common gossip, but in a manner which would distance him from the nation. Almost no one owns private jets, and those that do - offer them to patients requiring operations abroad.”


The difference between wealthy haredim and secular Israelis extend to their children. “The haredi upper crust’s offspring do not really benefit from the prosperity. The very prosperous will provide an apartment, nice vacations, jewelry. They’ll ‘buy’ a good son-in-law, but they won’t give out handouts or monthly salaries,” Bolton says.


“They try to keep their children within the accepted framework until the wedding,” notes Eitan Dobkin, general manager of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency’s haredi division. “It’s important to them to worry about not doing anything that will potentially harm a wedding match. In general, only after the wedding do they allow them to join the family businesses.”


Furthermore, affluent haredim send their children to the same educational institutions as do the rest of the haredim. There is no such thing as an exclusive yeshiva for the rich.


In general, haredi attitudes to wealth are unique. “The haredi sector doesn’t analyze or scrutinize the well-heeled haredi based on his private life,” observes Avraham Rachtshefer, CEO of Minahalim Nachon, a haredi business monthly. “They check how much he contributes to the community and to those around him. Almost every top-line rich man identifies with a specific organization, tzaddik (righteous individual), or institution to which he donates.”


Another difference is that although wealthy haredim are respected, they do not receive the community’s highest honors or accolades. That distinction is reserved for the sector’s spiritual leaders.


Most haredi businessmen strive to cultivate close ties with the community’s most distinguished figures. Whether they do so for spiritual reasons or in order to advance their careers is open to debate. Cynics may perhaps decry the magnates’ motives, but, indisputably, Torah scholars occupy a higher rank than the tycoons.


“We like money; we even like it very much, but I neither have nor did I ever have a desire to amass piles of it,” one of the new wealthy haredi businessmen insists. “Besides the issue of the business game and besides the personal enjoyment, the question is what gives me pleasure. I have donated Torah scrolls. That gave me a good deal of pleasure as well as satisfaction. You know when you donate a new Torah scroll to the synagogue where you pray that it will be read from each time. What more is there? It’s a special feeling of joy, a sense of exaltation and spirituality.”


Shimon Glick is an American-haredi diamond dealer and real estate entrepreneur. Recently, he hosted Rabbi Aharon Shteinman, a leader of the Lithuanian haredi community, in his New York home. In addition, Glick underwrote, to the tune of one million dollars, the plane fares for the rabbi and his entire entourage. Thus, in one fell swoop, Glick managed to achieve fame and glory, even outside his hometown.


Nevertheless, according to Bolton, much of the capital is lavished on the women. “The wife is the main beneficiary of the money,” Bolton states. “She purchases expensive jewelry, clothes, shoes and handbags for herself. Generally, the wife doesn’t work. And her job is to care for the house and the nuclear family. Also, she deals with all the family issues pertaining to the extended family and the married children.”



Buy yourself a son-in-law

Religion plays a dominant part in wealthy haredim’s lives. As such, most of them do not take any business steps without first consulting with a rabbi.


For instance, according to Sholem Fisher’s relatives, the happiest day of his life was the day that his son married the Erloi Rebbe’s granddaughter. Fisher, an Erloi hassid, is Mathew Bronfman’s partner in the Blue Square chain, deals in real estate in New York, and owns candle factories in Israel and abroad. He credits the Erloi Rebbe, whom he reveres, for his success.


Another old haredi custom is once again becoming increasing popular. In order to marry off their daughters, many wealthy haredim “purchase” eminent Torah scholars from prestigious yeshivas.



“Among the hassidic public, grandchildren of the Grand Rebbes marry each other, and among the Lithuanian public, the ‘blue-bloods’, the sons of the yeshiva heads, are often ‘bought’ by the leaders of the financial aristocracy,” Rachtshefer asserts.



The “price” for pedigreed and talented Torah scholars is an apartment in one of the popular haredi neighborhoods, where high-end apartments can run up to 250-400 thousand dollars.



Occasionally, a rich father-in-law will establish and support a yeshiva or kollel, in order that his exceptional son-in-law can continue learning Torah in the future.


Yet, Dobkin believes that the main difference between wealthy haredim and secular Israelis is that the former are happier. “Religion stabilizes you, it gives you something to lean on,” he muses. “When you are sitting in front of a page of Gemara, it doesn’t matter how much you have in the bank.”

Falling into the gap trap

Oct. 12, 2006

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Last Monday night in Jerusalem, my family and I were walking home with thousands of people from a Succot concert in the City of David, the remarkable archeological remains of King David's ancient city, when I saw four young American yeshiva students, dressed in black and white, disrespectfully taking pictures of soldiers standing on the side to protect us.

They were sticking their cameras in the soldiers' faces, an inch from their noses, and flashing right in their eyes. The soldiers grimaced and asked them to go away. I was disgusted by what I saw. I walked over to the yeshiva students and said, "These soldiers risk their lives for you. Should you really treat them like garbage?"

The leader of the pack screamed at me, "It's none of your business," and ran off with his friends. I walked over to the soldiers to apologize, but they rolled their eyes and told me that they see way too many Americans coming to Israel and behaving like out-of-control idiots.

From there we walked to the Ben-Yehuda mall, where we saw the usual nightly parade of hundreds of American yeshiva kids - in Israel for their year after high school, either hanging out for hours on end, like so many lost sheep, or running amok, booze in hand, like wild jackasses.

In the famous and palpable divide between Orthodox and secular in Israel, it is often overlooked just how often ostensibly religious American teens who come for their year abroad and behave like party-obsessed fools contribute to that divide.

Secular Israelis read about the growing number of American students who are arrested for marijuana possession at their yeshivot, or the even more horrible story, last year, of a yeshiva student dying of a drug overdose, and it hardens their opinion that the Orthodox are hypocrites.

STUDYING IN yeshiva and seminary in Israel for the year after high school has become a rite of passage for thousands of American teens every year. I have a particular interest in the matter because this year my eldest daughter is one of those students in seminary. As a parent you're not supposed to question the year in Israel. It's part of the Jewish canon and creed. As far as the American Orthodox high schools are concerned, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai he brought with him the 11th commandment: Thou shalt send thy high-school graduates to Israel.

But questioning it is exactly what I have been doing on my trip to Israel for Succot. As you walk in the Jerusalem city center at night and see the often drunken orgy of American kids behaving like hooligans, or just wasting so much of their year hanging out at boring caf s, one wonders what they are gaining by being there. For many of these youngsters, Israel is really just a year of freedom, a time to spread their wings and shirk parental supervision. The problem is that it seems that some yeshivot aren't really supervising them either, and they have way too much free time on their hands.

This is, unfortunately, the same impression that I gained last year when we visited as well. I saw so many American kids supposedly in a yeshiva‚ who were drinking and humiliating themselves in front of secular Israelis who were then getting the mistaken impression that this is the way real yeshiva students behave as well.

Don't get me wrong. I too came to Israel, of my own choosing, right after I graduated high school and studied in Jerusalem for two years in the Chabad Yeshiva. In terms of academic and spiritual growth, they were the two greatest years of my life. And the love and reverence that I gained for the Holy Land and the modern State of Israel from being there those two years has stayed with me my entire life.

But without sounding self-righteous, I did not come to Israel seeking fun, but Torah study. Less so was I concerned with freedom, but with a mastery of Judaism. I wanted to drink in the air of the Holy Land through the agency of Judaism's greatest texts, rather than its pizza shops and shwarma stands. I was in a haredi yeshiva where it was unthinkable that we would hang out with girls at outdoor plazas. No one even warned us that if we did so we would be kicked out. The very mention of even such a prohibition would have been ludicrous.

Because whatever flaws we had as students, one of them was not that we thought that yeshiva meant being on Ben-Yehuda flirting every night. Today, so many of the yeshivot and women's seminaries have elaborate rules of what is allowed outside the yeshiva and what is not.

Would it not be better to screen the students before they arrive to ensure that they're looking for the right things when they come to Israel in the first place? I remain a strong believer in the year in Israel, which is why I sent my daughter here, even though letting my baby girl go away from home - even at 17 - was painful. And my daughter was fortunate to have registered in a seminary which is serious and studious and where she is, thank God, flourishing. And even so, I try and keep an eye on her from afar.

Just because she is Israel does not mean that I should not check up on her, inspiring - but also cautioning - her to make the most of her opportunity by vastly increasing her awareness of her Jewishness as well as of the Holy Land.

The blessings that Israel can bestow on one's Jewishness are incomparable, which is why the year in yeshiva in Israel is so important. But lax standards in many of the programs, and parents who don't monitor the activities of their children, are undermining the integrity of the idea.

WORSE, THIS laxity is having a nefarious effect on Israel itself. The Jewish state doesn't need out-of-control teens from abroad who arrive with a wealth of cash and a paucity of values.

On the contrary, the Orthodox young people who come to Israel must know that it is a privilege and a responsibility.

There actions must accord with the holiness of the land, and that as ambassadors of both American Jewry and Orthodoxy, their behavior is being closely scrutinized by religiously non-observant Israelis to determine whether American Jewry has lost its bearings, and whether Orthodox Judaism has lost its sincerity.

The writer's new book Parenting with Fire: Lighting Up the Family with Passion and Inspiration‚ has just been published by Penguin.

Amazing Pictures - Makom HaMikdosh

This morning myself and about 20 of my neighbors made a group visit to the Temple Mount, some for the first time.
At first there were some problems allowing some members of the group to enter (including myself) but in the end everyone was permitted in, with extra special restrictions (in addition to the normal laundry list of restrictions) l'kvod Ramadan.

Here are some pictures with brief explanations and a view you don't often get to see of the makom hamikdash:

Shomer Negiah?

Click to play.

Judaica Man: Putting the Oy back in Oy Vey

Jewish marketing gone mad!

The David Zucker Albright Ad

Fun!