The scholarly literature and research on emotions in teaching has shown that teaching is inherently an emotional practice (Labaree, 2000; Zaretsky & Katz, 2018) and that school life is very complex, mainly because emotions are an integral part of the learning process).  Likewise, emotions are related to a variety of important outcomes such as student achievement, teacher moral, school effectiveness, and so forth (Jiang, Vauras, Volet & Wang, 2016; Kelchtermans, 2011). As a result, the interest in researching emotions in teaching has increased over the past decade (Oplatka, 2018). However, research on emotion management in teaching has not received much attention in research literature and become a kind of a "missing link". Even when the issue of emotion management is studied, it has usually been explored mainly in western societies while our knowledge about this topic in traditional, collective societies is extremely limited. After all, societies differ from each other in the way in which their cultural and social structures affect emotion expression in the public sphere (English & Oliver, 2013).

   To the best of our knowledge, this study focuses for the first time, on the issue of emotion management among female teachers from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish society. This society is characterized by cultural closure and unique norms that differ largely from Western cultures and influence the way emotion is managed by individuals living and working in this society.

Communities characterized by strong religious observance and social closeness encourage their members to suppress their emotions publically in order to maintain social cohesion and avoid self-indiscipline (Saroglou, 2013; Vishkin, Ben-Num, Schwarts, Solar & Tamir, 2019). Similarly, emotions seem to contrast collectivistic values dominating the Ultra-Orthodox society and, therefore, the individual is expected to suppress his or her emotions in any interaction with other individuals out of the families. Self-restrained is highly valued in this society (Vaserman, 2015).

Likewise, in the Ultra-Orthodox community everything that is unrelated to Torah Study and devotion to the God (like emotions) is considered socially negative. Thus, emotions such as pride, anger, aggression, and greed are forbidden and one should refrain from feeling or expressing them. In other words, one should suppress a display of emotions that are inconsistent with good virtue.

The purpose of this study was, though, to identify forms of emotion regulation among Ultra-Orthodox female teachers during their work in schools serving the Ultra-Orthodox communities. It also traced the cultural, social and organizational factors affecting these forms of regulation.

Since the study dealt with people and their perceptions and experiences relating to the emotional world in which they live, the study was carried out using the qualitative research method and was based on the principles of the qualitative-constructive paradigm that is characterized by its holistic attitude to phenomena (Marshal & Rosman, 2011). This method is preferable in cases such as these, in which the research question attempts to trace the nature of phenomena of little knowledge (Creswell, 2014). The research tool was a semi-structured in-depth interview that included an organized series of questions subject to changes in accordance with the dynamics created with the interviewee. The study's population included 13 Ultra-Orthodox teachers (women only) who have at least 3 years of seniority - a period of time that allows the teacher to properly get to know the school comers, its various systems, cultural codes and similar. 8 teachers were employed full-time and the rest part-time - to make sure that they were teaching a lot of hours that required a host of of interaction at the school. The sample is characterized by different seniority and roles and student configuration, aiming at maintaining a sample that represents the widely studied population. They all teach in schools belonging to the Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian sector. Manual analysis of the interview data followed the four stages described by Marshall and Rossman (2011): “organizing the data,” “generating categories, themes and patterns,” “testing any emergent hypothesis” and “searching for alternative explanations.” This analysis aimed at identifying central themes in the data, searching for recurrent experiences, feelings and attitudes in order to be able to code, reduce and connect different categories into central themes. The coding was guided by the principles of “comparative analysis” (Creswell, 2014), which includes the comparison of any coded element in terms of emergent categories and sub-categories.

The main findings of the study indicate a number of insights regarding the suppression of the feelings of Ultra-Orthodox female teachers who teach at the educational system of ultra-Orthodox society. The results of the current study revealed a collective cultural structure that differs from this discourse and identifies the suppression of emotions as an expression of respectability and a goal to aspire to. According to the Ultra-Orthodox approach, which fears the danger of direct and explicit expression of emotions, Ultra-Orthodox teachers are required to suppress their emotions, including positive emotions such as joy and enthusiasm and negative emotions such as anger and bitterness. The more the teacher manages to suppress her emotions and respond calmly to the various situations during her work, the higher her position is perceived between the school comers. As a result, the teachers who serve as an educational model refrain from expressing their feelings during their work. In addition, the current study has shown that ultra-Orthodox society is different and opposes the Western worldview that advocates striving for a meaningful personal connection with the student. In ultra-Orthodox society, learning is traditional and based on a great emotional distance between the teacher and her students, which is one of the causes of the emotional repression process of the teacher at the school. The current study flooded the issue of emotional repression of Ultra-orthodox female teachers during their work and turned the spotlight on the many emotional difficulties faced by Ultra-Orthodox female teachers and their feelings in relation to this. The study found that suppression of emotions is an inherent part of the work of the teachers in the school, and that it stems mainly from the Ultra-Orthodox culture that strives for it.

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