Urban Israelis are in the main apartment dwellers, although there are many suburban neighborhoods throughout the country in which families live in private houses, referred to as “villas,” and two-story town houses, known as “cottages,” surrounded by their own relatively small gardens. There are also houses built on large plots of land on moshavim and private land in the countryside.
Apartments in the suburbs and city vary from standard to luxurious, depending on their location and when they were built or renovated. Most apartments range from two to five rooms and, including upmarket housing, their living areas are relatively large and the bedrooms small. All modern buildings have elevators, but you may find yourself climbing four flights of stairs to visit a friend with an apartment in an old building. Some apartments have balconies, others don’t. In the narrow urban streets where apartments tend to overlook each other, the balconies of yesteryear (including those of the Bauhaus buildings) were enclosed with plastic shutters in the sixties to enlarge the living space and increase privacy. In later years builders did away with the balcony altogether to provide more spacious living rooms.
Today the sun terrace is right back in fashion, and can be found in many attractive modern high-rise buildings both in the city and in the suburbs, where they are built on larger tracts of land with uninterrupted views. With the advent of modern air-conditioning the old rule that apartments should have cross-ventilation is often disregarded. The modern residential complexes consist of high-rise luxury apartments with marble ceramic or wooden floors and fitted kitchens. Most have lobbies with porters, health clubs in the basements, and are built far from the bustle of city streets. Many of these luxury complexes are near country clubs with swimming pools, tennis courts, and other sports facilities, and well equipped gyms, offering a wide range of exercise and yoga classes, and children’s sports activities and programs.
Lifestyles, of course, vary according to where people live and their economic circumstances—from spilling out on to the streets to escape cramped living quarters, eating hummus and pita and shwarma (shaved slices of meat) in little cafés, and barbecuing in parks, to dining out in chic restaurants, subscribing to the Philharmonic Orchestra concerts, to theater and opera performances, and entertaining and relaxing in their own comfortable homes. Many Israeli homes, even in less affluent areas, enjoy some form of household help (having a good ozeret, or helper, is a concern of most housewives).
Most Israelis aspire to own their own homes, renting mainly when young and unmarried.
The Israeli working week begins early on Sunday and continues to Thursday. Weekdays begin early. School begins at 8:00 a.m. and the working day starts at 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. Nursery schools open earlier to oblige working mothers who drop their children off on their way to work. On kibbutzim and moshavim the abundant Israeli breakfast is still served, but most city dwellers give their children a bowl of cereal and a hot or cold drink and pack a midday snack for them to take to school. Adults tend to have tea or coffee with bread rolls and spreads and a yogurt for breakfast, or munch a granola health bar in the car on the way to work. The athletic rise even earlier for early morning jogging, walking, or swimming, and can be seen marching briskly around the neighborhood at dawn or exercising on the beach or in the parks.
The working day ends at 5:00 or 5:30 p.m., but lawyers, high-tech, and managerial staff in every area will leave the office much later. After work, for those who have time, there are enrichment courses (anything from learning massage techniques to business, music, and academic courses); entertaining and being entertained, going to the movies, or other cultural events; shopping in malls, markets, main streets, and all-night supermarkets. Many will seize the chance to have a nap after work before setting off for a restaurant, pub, club, or café. Visitors are always amazed to see the streets of Tel Aviv alive till the early hours of the morning right throughout the week.
The idea of having a two-day weekend that includes Sunday, in line with the rest of the world, has been raised numerous times in Israel. The most common proposal is to have a four-and-a-half-day week, with Friday as a working day until noon to allow people time to prepare for Shabbat. To compensate for the longer weekend, each working day would be half an hour longer. Whether this would work in practice is unclear, since many working parents already come home late each day. Working mothers especially devote most of their free time to the children, helping with homework and other routine tasks. For most people Friday is a day off work, and parents may have some time for themselves. They will often have breakfast out together in a café before collecting their children from school at lunchtime. The family may then do an activity together, or rest at home before getting ready for the Shabbat family dinner and the remainder of the weekend.
Daily life in Israel is accompanied by the pressures of reserve duty; of having children serving in the army, and not knowing at any given time what they are doing and if they are in any danger; of the high level of taxation, which presents a particular challenge to the self-employed—and of keeping up with the latest trends.
Jewish mothers everywhere boast of their children’s educational achievements and Israel is no exception. Education is a core value, with every generation bent on maintaining or raising the level. From the moment a baby is born, the proud parents plan his future. There are DVDs and special toys to develop intelligence, children’s computer programs, private preschool English-language classes, and so on, and many parents gladly sacrifice their own comforts and standard of living to provide their children with the highest standard of education.
The visitor to Israel may wonder at the sight of children from the age of five or six trudging to school under the weight of heavy backpacks containing their books and other school supplies. Israeli schools have no lockers. Why? Perhaps finance, who knows? This may be one of the reasons so many adults suffer from back problems in Israel.
Because of other demands, mostly defense, paradoxically for a people who place such emphasis on schooling, government budgets for education are generally accepted as being woefully inadequate. Teachers are underpaid and many schools, particularly in poor areas, suffer from a lack of amenities, including computers, and poor maintenance.
For youngsters under the age of five, day care centers are available but optional, and, apart from some that are subsidized, not free. From five or six until the age of sixteen, education is compulsory, and is free until the age of eighteen. Schools in Israel are mostly coeducational, with boys and girls studying together from the stage where they find the opposite sex “so annoying” till the age when they find them anything but.
“Free” does not mean free books, paper, pens, pencils, uniforms where required (mostly T-shirts bearing the school’s logo, and jeans), transportation, school trips, non-curricular courses, after-school programs, or of course the ubiquitous schoolbag.
There is a view that the best education and formative training is provided in the gan hova (compulsory preschool for five-year-olds). Dedicated and well trained teachers (gannanot) do a great job, particularly in the area of self-esteem at this critical stage of their young wards’ lives.
Primary school follows from first to eighth grade. There are two official tracks for this group—secular (traditional) and religious. There are also separate state schools for Arabs and Druze, where instruction is in Arabic. The devoutly Orthodox Jewish community have their own schools, differing according to the nuances of their observances, some partially and some fully government funded. The divergence between secular and religious Israelis now becomes more pronounced, with the religious often required to sleep in or become boarders at high school. There are a few private schools where the medium of instruction is English or another language: the Walworth Barbour American International School in Kfar Shemariyahu; Tabeetha, the Church of Scotland school in Jaffa; and the French School in Jaffa (Collège de Frères). In high school pupils select the stream in which they wish to continue their studies—academic, technological, agricultural, or military. Corporal punishment is forbidden at schools in Israel.
Over recent years there has been a disturbing increase in deviant behavior in schools—violence and drug abuse—which may be caused by high unemployment, the growing gap between rich and poor, and, among the unemployed, the diminished status of the father as a role model.
For high-school graduates there are seven main institutions of advanced learning: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Bar Ilan University, Haifa University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. None of these is free, and all students other than those with scholarships have to pay for their own tuition. In addition to these there are private colleges that have been accredited to award degrees. Admission is easier, but they are more expensive than the universities.
Although higher education has greatly contributed to the growth and development of the country, with more than 200,000 students currently enrolled in its various academic institutions, most Israeli postgraduates have little nostalgia for their university days and alumni associations hold little allure. This is perhaps because Israeli students enroll at university at the age that students elsewhere have already completed their undergraduate studies, and have to work so hard to pay their relatively high university fees that they have no time to enjoy a full campus life. After three tough years in the army, many take a year off and backpack around the world, especially to South and Central America, India, and Thailand. These begin their studies even later.
Minimum admission requirements are the Israeli matriculation certificate, the bagrut, or its equivalent, attaining the required standard in the psychometric exam, and proficiency in Hebrew to cope with the courses. Certain faculties require Israeli citizenship for admission. There are programs to help students reach the required level of Hebrew proficiency.
Israelis are increasingly taking to the streets to walk, run, and cycle, and all over the country you can see people taking some form of early morning exercise. The annual marathons in Tiberias, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem are international sporting events that attract thousands of athletes from overseas, and there are 6.2 mile (10 km) fun runs in many other cities. The triathlon is very popular, with thousands of competitions taking place every year. There is an annual international triathlon and iron-man competition in Eilat. There are cycle tracks and trails all over the country, and road biking has become very popular, attracting riders of international standard. Israeli men are passionate soccer fans, following the fortunes of their chosen teams and not allowing anything to interfere with live broadcasts of national and international matches. Next to soccer comes basketball.
Another passion is reading the daily newspapers. There are more papers published and read per capita in Israel than anywhere else in the world. Most print media is in Hebrew, but there are also English, Russian, French, German, and other foreign-language publications. They are read at home, in cafés, on buses, on airplanes, at beaches, and on benches in all public areas. Keeping up with the ever-changing news is vital, and in addition to the print media there are radio and television broadcasts on the hour throughout the day and in the evenings. The evening news programs on Kan 11, Keshet 12, Reshet 13, and Channel Ten dominate the air waves.
Israelis love card games and usually play for money. Bridge, poker, and 21 are popular, as are the board games backgammon (shesh besh) and chess. There are chess centers throughout the country. In Israel there are 4,500 chess players participating in organized leagues, while 10,000 other players take part in school and club competitions. The Kasparov Chess Center near Tel Aviv University’s campus, donated by former world champion Gary Kasparov, teaches chess teachers.
For those Israelis who can afford it, travel is high on the agenda. The well-off travel to Europe and long-haul destinations, and those with smaller budgets go to Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. Post-army youths, as we have seen, backpack for months at a time to the four corners of the globe.
Thai Break
It is said that because of the large numbers of Israelis visiting Thailand, many Thais think Israel must be the largest country in the world.