Walking in to the central Jerusalem suburb of Mea Sharim is like walking on to another planet.
Related programme: The Battle for Israel's Soul
All the men are wearing black and white cloaks and clothes. Most have long curls down the sides of their faces. Some don’t like our TV camera. It’s cramped and not as clean as other parts of Jerusalem, and there are children everywhere.
This is the traditional heartland of the community known as the Haredi – which means ‘those who tremble before God’, or ‘those who fear God’.
'We are the real Jews', says one of the men we meet here, Joel, 'Everyone else just happens to be born Jewish.'
So what makes the Haredi different? Well for one thing, their clothes. They tell us the distinctive clothing – including fur hats that look sweltering in this heat – come from the villages in Europe where most of their ancestors came form.
The clothes were adopted in the early 18th century as a way of rejecting the advance of modernity.
Many Haredi sects were almost wiped out in the Holocaust. Four hundred survivors came to Israel in 1948 and the Haredi community spread from there.
They believe good Jews should spend as much time as possible – in fact all their time if possible – studying the Torah and Jewish religious texts,. The original settlers did a deal where they got the government to agree to pay a stipend to any Haredi male who was in full-time religious study.
Now that entailed a small cost to the state when there were four hundred Haredi settlers. But the Haredi believe that they have a duty to God to go forth and multiply and they now have an average of 6-10 children each. As one Haredi man we filmed explained to us, this means their community multiplies eight or nine times every twenty years, which makes them the fastest growing community in Israel. They now make up about 30% of the population of Jerusalem.
The complex election structure in Israel means most major parties need coalition allies to form a government. By controlling a swing vote of about ten percent of the seats in parliament, the Haredi manage to protect the social and economic benefits they have - including an exemption from the mandatory two years military service that all other Jewish men and women must serve. All of this helps explain why we found growing anger among more secular Jews about the Haredi’s privileges and growing influence on life in Israel.
We also found the current government’s Housing Minister keen to use the Haredi as a balance to the growing Arab population in the country’s north. We found a city of 40,000 Haredi already built and growing on disputed West Bank territory.
Most Haredi just want to be left alone to study their religion. However, their rapidly growing numbers are having an impact both on Jewish society and the wider peace process.
