Learning the Talmud involves wrapping our minds around a certain problem and looking at it from different approaches and trying to find different solutions,” says Moshe Slaven, a 26-year-old Haredi man from Jerusalem, who is learning how to code. “Programming is very similar, especially the way of thinking.”

Like many of his friends, Slaven grew up expecting a life of quiet learning. Haredi men are expected to spend most of their time studying the Torah and Talmud, Judaism’s sacred texts, leaving their wives to go out and work. About half of Israel’s Haredi men live this way.

But while the cost of living has risen in recent years, child benefit has been cut – bad news for Haredi families, which often have eight-to-10 children and rely on benefits to make ends meet.

As a result, more Haredi men are looking for work and, like Slaven, turning to Israel’s booming high-tech sector.

Israel is known as the “start-up nation”. Its technology sector is considered by many to be second only to Silicon Valley and it needs more coders and developers.

Technology may not seem the obvious choice for ultra-Orthodox men who have had very little or no training in science or maths – Israel’s Haredi schools don’t teach these subjects – let alone English, the lingua franca of tech meet-ups around the world.

But it involves skills they can learn relatively quickly – whether or not it’s true, as Moshe Slaven suggests, that religious scholarship is a good preparation. They don’t need to spend years studying for a qualification and when they get a job the pay tends to be good.

The world of tech meet-ups and venture capital funding rounds is very different from the inward-looking, religious life of the Haredim, though, and integrating can be challenging says Yoni Reiss, a Haredi coder who has worked for a number of tech companies.

“We don’t eat the same food, we don’t drink the same wine, we don’t go to the same places. If you have a co-worker that has a party in this restaurant or this club, it’s not the place you would show up. So it’s never so easy socially to integrate in a secular company.”

Which is where Moshe Friedman comes in. Friedman is a rabbi-turned-tech-entrepreneur, who runs Kamatech, an organisation that brings together ultra-Orthodox start-ups with often very secular investors.

Friedman grew up in the Haredi community and when he started in tech, he felt very much the outsider.

“I met with a lot of secular people and I realised they were looking at me like I was coming from a different planet, like someone from the Middle Ages,” he says. “They really didn’t believe that I had any chance to do something meaningful in the hi-tech field.”

But, motivated by his family history, he is committed to improving integration between the Haredi and the rest of Israeli society. Friedman’s great-grandfather was the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and it was he who banned maths, science and English from Haredi schools.

“He thought that religion and tradition should be protected from outside influence. That was 100 years ago, and he succeeded. So thanks to my great-grandfather, there are today in Israel one million ultra-Orthodox people, about 12%, who are not connecting to science, not speaking English. I feel a kind of a mission to fix what my great-grandfather did.”

Not everyone agrees with Friedman’s vision. Many in the Haredi community see secularism as a threat to the very existence of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. And they are particularly worried by the dangers of engaging in the world of high-tech and, especially, the internet.