" “Most Israelis at the time assumed the Haredim would die off in one generation,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a Haredi writer.

" Instead, they have multiplied, joined government coalitions and won subsidies and exemptions for children, housing and Torah study. They now number a million, a mostly poor community in an otherwise fairly well-off country of 7.8 million.

" They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.

" In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.

" “The coexistence between the two is breaking down,” said Arye Carmon, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research organization. “It is an extreme danger.”

" Mr. Carmon compared the strictly religious Jews of Israel to the Islamists in the Arab world, saying that there was a similar dynamic at play in Egypt, with tensions growing between the secular forces that led the revolution and the Islamic parties now rising to prominence. "

" In Beit Shemesh and elsewhere across the country, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have tried to impose a kind of communal piety—a strict code of behavior that includes gender segregation on buses, with men in the front and women in the back. For most Israelis, this zealousness is off-putting. Founded by secular Jews who envisaged a modern, egalitarian state, Israel has all the trappings of a liberal society: progressive laws and cutting-edge universities, women in bikinis and women in business and politics. But it also has a fast-growing community that shuns modernity and views the world through the narrow prism of biblical warrant. Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews—also known as Haredim—now make up more than 10 percent of Israel’s population and 21 percent of all primary-school students. With the community’s fertility rate hovering at more than three times that of other Israeli Jews, demographers project that by 2034, about one in five Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox. "

"In meetings in Berlin last week, representatives of the Hadassah Medical Organization and Charite University Hospital in Berlin set the stage for an academic exchange on stem cell research, as well as for a joint seminar on the subject,"

"Israel's life-sciences field is growing so rapidly that even industry trackers are having a tough time keeping up with the number of start-ups. Of the approximately 750 Israeli companies in the field, nearly 3/4 were founded in the past 10 years"