Study finds growing numbers leaving Charedi community

 When Yehuda Moses was 25, his worldview began to shift.

A member of the Belz Hasidic community, Moses found himself placed under excommunication by the group’s grand rabbi after he criticized a decision to use money raised for the poor to fund the construction of a new synagogue.

“I began to wonder how people considered righteous could do such harmful things,” Moses, now 52, told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.

That moment marked the start of Moses’s departure from the Haredi world, a life-altering choice being made by a growing number of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, according to a comprehensive study published earlier this year by Out for Change, which provides help to those leaving the ultra-Orthodox community.

The study found that rather than marking a complete break, a stereotype enforced by pop culture portrayals, leaving the ultra-Orthodox world is a complicated process that can preserve some aspects of the former lives of ex-Haredim, from faith to their relationships with their parents.

At the time of his shunning, Moses was already married with five children, all of whom left the ultra-Orthodox world with him. Yet while he now describes himself as completely secular, getting there took over two decades, while his wife and three daughters still maintain some level of religiosity.

“Only recently I started to travel on Shabbat,” he said.

Based on publicly available Central Bureau of Statistics data, Out for Change found that many former members of the Haredi community maintain some level of religious observance, albeit a less stringent one.

Fewer than one in five former Haredim describe themselves as completely secular, according to the study, which was published in February.

“Past qualitative research on the topic has shown that the choice to leave Haredi society behind often is not an issue of faith, but rather of seeking a different lifestyle or quality of life,” said Adar Anisman, head of research at Out for Change and one of the authors of the report.

Still, even the first step out of the cloistered ultra-Orthodox community can be a shock. For Moses, whose father Menachem Eliezer Moses served as an MK for United Torah Judaism from 2009 until 2019, leaving the confines of Haredi life was like stepping into an entirely new world.

“I didn’t even know how the human body functions — I believed that prayer alone was enough to recover from illness,” he recalled.

Clear trend

According to Anisman, most who leave the Haredi world do so by age 25, making it possible to identify trends by looking at different age cohorts.

Drawing on CBS surveys conducted on a representative sample of the entire Israeli population, the researchers determined that 12.5 percent of Israelis born between 1997 and 2001 who grew up in Haredi households no longer identify as ultra-Orthodox, the highest figure in decades.

The figure progressively drops for older cohorts: 11.3% of those born between 1992 and 1996, 10.3% among the 1987–1991 age group, and 8.9% of those born from 1982 to 1986 no longer identify as ultra-Orthodox. The numbers drop even lower, to around 7.5%, for those born earlier, going all the way back to the 60s.

“While it can be difficult to be precise with numbers, we definitely see an upward trend,” Anisman said.

According to the researcher, the figure reflects a broader shift that began in the 1970s, when Haredi society grew increasingly insular.

“In the early years of the State of Israel, the Haredi world was more open, and we saw a significant wave of people choosing to leave,” Anisman explained.

Around 13% of those born between 1957 and 1961 who were raised Haredi no longer identify as such, and in earlier generations, the rates were even higher, she noted.

“Beginning in the 1970s, the community became more closed off,” said Anisman. “Leaving has been harder, and as a result, fewer people did.”

“There’s no single ‘type’ of person who chooses to leave the Haredi community,” Anisman told The Times of Israel over the phone. “People often assume that former Haredim couldn’t fit in, but there are also those who come from top yeshivas and seminaries. The data reflects this diversity, especially in their wide range of choices afterward.”

After leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, where education is often limited to the study of Jewish religious texts, Moses immersed himself in academic courses on everything from philosophy to astrophysics, he said.

Although the gaps in his education prevented him from earning a formal degree, he eventually trained to become an accountant.

Transitional support network

Out for Change was established in 2012 by people who had themselves left the ultra-Orthodox community.

The organization assists around 1,500 ex-Haredim a year, offering individual counseling and community programs.

It is also active in research and advocacy to support the integration of former Haredim into general society.

A 2020 study by the Israel Democracy Institute, which also showed growing numbers of people leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, estimated that as of 2017, there were some 53,400 Israelis ages 20-64 who could be considered ex-Haredi.

Nationally, there are believed to be over 1.3 million Haredi Jews in Israel, making up 14% of the population, according to an IDI study published last year. That proportion is expected to rise as time goes on due to high birth rates in the community, meaning ex-ultra-Orthodox will make up an increasingly significant slice of Israeli society if current trends continue.

Israeli census data does not directly identify who is formerly Haredi, meaning Out of Change needed to parse several separate sources of public data gathered by CBS to build its report.

The primary source was the CBS Social Survey, which polls a representative sample of Israelis aged 20-64 on a wide variety of topics, including their family status, education, career, standard of living, health, and more.

Between 2007 and 2012, and then again from 2017 onwards, CBS asked participants to describe their current religiosity and the religious level of the households they belonged to when they were 15. This allowed researchers to identify respondents whose level of observance no longer reflected their ultra-Orthodox upbringing.

Additionally, Out of Change teased out numbers from the CBS Labor Force Survey for 2020-2023, which polled male respondents on what educational institutions they attended and their current religious identity. Former Haredi men could be selected based on those who stated they attended ultra-Orthodox yeshivas but no longer identify with that affiliation (no option for educational institutions was available to help identify former Haredi women).

Out of Change also surveyed 1,206 self-identified former Haredim in April 2024.

“The report was done at a very high level, using multiple reliable sources and cross-referencing them,” said Leah Bloy, a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bloy, who was not involved in the survey, studies Haredi society at the university’s School of Business Administration.

“We can see that in most cases, the results are consistent across the sources, which is always a sign that they are dependable,” she added.

Lifestyle, not faith

The researchers found that two-thirds of former Haredim still identify as religious (46%) or traditional-religious (20%), with less than one in five (18%) becoming secular and the remaining 16% calling themselves traditional but not so religious.

“If we consider that most people leave between the ages of 17 and 25, we can understand how this is a time when people want to find themselves and sometimes rebel against the system,” said Anisman. “Faith plays a role for some people, but not for everyone. We see very clearly that leaving ultra-Orthodoxy behind is more a sociological phenomenon than a religious one.”

Researchers were also able to conclude that many who leave Haredi society stay in touch with their families, dispelling a stereotype that the move usually leaves parents and their children estranged.

“The reality is often very different,” said Anisman. “In many cases, families stay in touch — and sometimes the relationship remains strong, even warm.”

According to the data, 49% of the former Haredim respondents who were not married were very satisfied with their relationship with their families, and another 39% reported a medium level of satisfaction.

The high level of satisfaction reached 61% among those who were married, but the report acknowledged that this group might have based their responses on the family they built rather than their family of origin.

Though encouraging, the numbers were still lower than the 64.5% reporting high satisfaction with ties to family nationwide across all categories reported by CBS in 2019.

In its own survey, Out for Change found that among those who had left their community within the past two years, 36% of respondents described the level of connection as high and 26% as medium. A decade after leaving the community, the rates went up to 40% and 28%.

Only 10% of the respondents reported being completely disconnected from their parents.

Moses said that he had remained in sporadic contact with his parents.

According to Anisman, though, many ex-Haredim find that leaving the community leaves them unmoored financially, no longer able to count on the financial support of their family, who may object to funding their lifestyle, but without the needed skills to enter the job force.

“The data clearly shows that without financial assistance, former Haredim are at risk of becoming youth at risk,” said Anisman. “They often enter mainstream society without understanding its cultural norms and the skills needed for stable employment or access to higher education. They can easily find themselves in crisis without the means to support themselves.”

According to the survey, only 54% of former Haredim described themselves as satisfied with their financial situation compared to 73% of current Haredim and 65% of non-Haredi Jews.

The rate of those able to cover their monthly expenses among former Haredim aged 20-29 was 12 percentage points lower than among their non-Haredi peers. Among older groups, the rates were similar.

The study found that 58% of former Haredi men were employed in low-skilled professions compared to 33% of current Haredim and 35% of non-Haredim.

Experts blame the disparity on the Haredi education system, which eschews instruction on core subjects such as English and math

Groups like Out for Change say they provide an essential service by helping support former ultra-Orthodox and integrating them into the job market.

“When they receive the right support during those critical first years, they tend to integrate successfully into Israeli society. Without it, the gaps tend to persist,” said Anisman.

Moses, who volunteers for Hillel, another group that supports former ultra-Orthodox, said the state should also step in to provide help.

“I think they should at least receive support to learn everything they were not taught in their childhood,” he said.

The aftermath of October 7

Army service is also seen as a major driver of societal integration. While the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox shun army service, 58% of those who leave the community enlist in the IDF or for National Civil Service, the report found.

According to the results of a 2024 survey conducted by Out for Change, among those who enlisted after leaving the community, approximately 40% still served in tracks designated for Haredim. Anisman suggested that a possible explanation for this trend was the age of enlistment, since many Haredi tracks are open only to older people and offer opportunities to acquire a profession during service.

Moses said that after he left the Haredi community, he tried to enlist, but the army rejected him because he already had five children.

“At least I gave my children the right education,” he said, noting that his two sons, who are secular like him, are officers in the army.

According to the CBS Labor Force Survey for 2023, which includes data from the last three months of the year, 7.7% of former Haredi men reported missing days of work for reserve duty, compared to 13.4% of non-Haredi Jews and less than 1% of current Haredi men.

Data for the Out for Change report was gathered before the October 7, 2023, attack, however.

Anisman said it was too early to know whether the Hamas onslaught had impacted the number of people choosing to leave the community. Official data shows that most Haredi men still refuse the military’s mandatory draft; ultra-Orthodox leaders claim that joining the army is a major factor in leading members of the Haredi community to secularize.

“Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many who said they were searching for their path — and after October 7, they felt a clear calling to join the army,” she said. “However, it is too early for data.”

According to Bloy, who has also been researching the impact of the war on Haredi society, different gradients within the Haredi community reacted in different ways to the war.

“After October 7, the level of identification with Israeli society went up dramatically, but about three months into the war, as the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox became a major topic of discussion in the public arena, things changed,” she said. “While modern Haredim continued to feel part of the general society, the identification among conservative Haredim significantly decreased.”

Bloy said that one of the most interesting aspects of the Out of Change study was the different levels of loneliness and depression among former Haredim documented by CBS data compared to the organization’s own survey.

According to CBS data, 25% of former Haredim experienced loneliness, and 29% depression levels similar to those in the non-Haredi society. The Out of Change polling showed rates of 75% and 66%.

The report itself acknowledges that this might be due to the nature of their sample and not reflect the average for the population as a whole.

Bloy though, suggested a different theory.

“In my own research, I find that Haredim tend to be less willing to share their difficulties with the CBS relative to the surveys we conduct,” she said. “The discrepancy in the Out of Change study might be part of the same trend.”