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‘Two Israels’: What’s really behind the judicial reform protests
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause two weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy protests continued among Diaspora Jews and Israeli expats, including those who gather each Sunday in New York’s Washington Square Park.
On its face, the weeks of protest have been about proposed legislation that critics said would sap power from the Israeli Supreme Court and give legislators — in this case, led by Netanyahu’s recently elected far-right coalition — unchecked and unprecedented power. Protesters said that, in the absence of an Israeli constitution establishing basic rights and norms, they were fighting for democracy. The government too says the changes are about democracy, claiming under the current system unelected judges too often overrule elected lawmakers and the will of Israel’s diverse electorate.
But the political dynamics in Israel are complex, and the proposals and the backlash are also about deeper cracks in Israeli society. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently said in a podcast that the crisis in Israel represents “six linked but separate stories unfolding at the same time.” Beyond the judicial reform itself, these stories include the Palestinians and the occupation, a resurgent patriotism among the center and the left, chaos within Netanyahu’s camp, a Diaspora emboldened to weigh in on the future of Zionism and the rejection on the part of the public of a reform that failed the “reasonableness test.”
“If these protests are effective in the long run, it will be, I think, because they will have succeeded at reorganizing and mobilizing the Israeli electorate to think and behave differently than before,” said Kurtzer.
I recently asked observers, here and in Israel, what they feel is really mobilizing the electorate, and what kind of Israel will emerge as a result of the showdown. The respondents included organizers of the protests, supporters of their aims and those skeptical of the protesters’ motivations. They discussed a slew of issues just below the surface of the protest, including the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divisions over the increasing strength of Israel’s haredi Orthodox sector, and a lingering divide between Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe and Mizrahi Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern and North African.
Conservatives, meanwhile, insist that Israeli “elites” — the highly educated, the tech sector, the military leadership, for starters — don’t respect the will of the majority who brought Netanyahu and his coalition partners to power.
Here are the emerging themes of weeks of protest:
Defending democracy
Whatever their long-term concerns about Israel’s future, the protests are being held under the banner of “democracy.”
For Alon-Lee Green, one of the organizers of the protests, the issues are equality and fairness. “People in Israel,” said Green, national co-director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement in Israel, “hundreds of thousands of them, are going out to the streets for months now not only because of the judicial reform, but also — and mainly — because of the fundamental question of what is the society we want to live in: Will we keep living in a society that is unequal, unfair and that is moving away from our basic needs and desires, or will it be an equal society for everyone who lives in our land?”
Shany Granot-Lubaton, who has been organizing pro-democracy rallies among Israelis living in New York City, says Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the coalition’s haredi Orthodox parties “are waging a war against democracy and the freedoms of citizens.”
“They seek to exert control over the Knesset and the judicial system, appoint judges in their favor and legalize corruption,” she said. “If this legal coup is allowed to proceed, minorities will be in serious danger, and democracy itself will be threatened.”
Two researchers at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Herzliya’s Reichman University, psychology student Benjamin Amram and research associate Keren L.G. Snider, said Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform “undermines the integrity of Israel’s democracy by consolidating power.”
“How can citizens trust a government that ultimately has no limitations set upon them?” they asked in a joint email. “At a time when political trust and political representation are at the lowest points, this legislation can only create instability and call into question the intentions of the current ruling party. When one coalition holds all the power, laws and policies can be swiftly overturned, causing instability and volatility.”
A struggle between two Israels
Other commentators said the protests revealed fractures within Israeli society that long predated the conflict over judicial reform. “The split is between those that believe Israel should be a more religious country, with less democracy, and see democracy as only a system of elections and not a set of values, and those who want Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state,” Tzipi Livni, who served in the cabinets of right-wing prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert before tacking to the center in recent years, recently told Haaretz.
Author and translator David Hazony called this “a struggle between two Israels” — one that sees Israel’s founding vision as a European-style, rights-based democracy, and the other that sees that vision as the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
“Those on the first side believe that the judiciary has always been Israel’s protector of rights and therefore of democracy, against the rapaciousness and lawlessness of politicians in general and especially those on the right. Therefore an assault on its supremacy is an assault on democracy itself. They accuse the other side of being barbaric, antidemocratic and violent,” said Hazony, editor of the forthcoming anthology “Jewish Priorities.”
As for the other side, he said, they see an activist judiciary as an attempt by Ashkenazi elites to force their minority view on the majority. Supporters of the government think it is entirely unreasonable “for judges to think they can choose their successors, strike down constitutional legislation and rule according to ‘that which is reasonable in the eyes of the enlightened community in Israel,’” said Hazony, quoting Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and bane of Israel’s right.
(Naveh Dromi, a right-wing columnist for Yediot Achronot, puts this more bluntly: “The problem,” she writes, “lies in the fact that the left has no faith in its chance to win an election, so it relies on the high court to represent it.”)
Daniel Tauber, an attorney and Likud Central Committee member, agrees that those who voted for Netanyahu and his coalition have their own concerns about a democracy — one dominated by “elites,” which in the Israeli context means old-guard Ashkenazi Jews, powerful labor unions and highly educated secular Jews. “The more this process is subject to veto by non-democratic institutions, whether it be the Court chosen as it is, elite military units, the Histadrut [labor union], or others, the more people will lose faith in democracy,” said Tauber.
Green also said there is “a war waging now between two elites in Israel” — the “old and more established liberal elite, who consist of the financial, high-tech army and industry people,” and the “new emerging elite of the settlers and the political far-right parties.”
Israelis protest against the government’s planned judicial overhaul, outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
And yet, he said, “I think we will lose if one of these elites wins. The real victory of this historic political moment in Israel will be if we achieve true equality, both to the people who are not represented by the Jewish supremacists, such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to the people who are not represented by the ‘old Israel,’ such as the haredi and Mizrahi people on the peripheries.”
The crises behind the crisis
Although the protests were ignited by Netanyahu’s calls for judicial reform, they also represented pushback against the most right-wing government in Israeli history — which means at some level the protests were also about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of religion in Israeli society. “The unspoken motivation driving the architects and supporters of the [judicial] ‘reform,’ as well as the protest leaders, is umbilically connected to the occupation,” writes Carolina Landsmann, a Haaretz columnist. If Netanyahu has his way, she writes, “There will be no more two-state solution, and there will be no territorial compromises. The new diplomatic horizon will be a single state, with the Palestinians as subjects deprived of citizenship.”
Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, said that “once awakened, the simmering resentment of those liberal Israelis about other issues was brought to the surface.” The Palestinian issue, for example, is at an “explosive moment,” said Novik: The Palestinian Authority is weakened and ineffective, Palestinian youth lack hope for a better future, and Israeli settlers feel emboldened by supporters in the ruling coalition. “The Israeli security establishment took this all into account when warning the government to change course before it is too late,” said Novik.
Kurtzer too noted that the Palestinians “also stand to be extremely victimized following the passage of judicial reform, both in Israel and in the West Bank.” And yet, he said, most Israelis aren’t ready to upend the current status quo between Israelis and Palestinians. “It can also be true that the Israeli public can only build the kind of coalition that it’s building right now because it is patently not a referendum on the issue of Palestinian rights,” he said.
Religion and state
Novik spoke about another barely subterranean theme of the protests: the growing power of the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, parties. Secular Israelis especially resent that the haredim disproportionately seek exemption from military service and that non-haredi Israelis contribute some 90% of all taxes collected. One fear of those opposing the judicial reform legislation is that the religious parties will “forever secure state funding to the haredi Orthodox school system while exempting it from teaching the subjects required for ever joining the workforce. It is to secure for them an exemption from any military or other national service. And it is to expand the imposition of their lifestyle on non-Orthodox Israelis.”
What’s next
Predictions for the future range from warnings of a civil war (by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, among others) to an eventual compromise on Netanyahu’s part to the emergence of a new center electorate that will reject extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.
David E. Bernstein, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law who writes frequently about Israel, imagines a future without extremists. “One can definitely easily imagine the business, academic and legal elite using their newfound political voice to insist that future governments not align with extremists, that haredi authority over national life be limited, and, perhaps most important, that Israel create a formal constitution that protects certain basic rights,” he said. “Perhaps there will also be demand to counter such long-festering problems as corruption, disproportionate influence over export markets by a few influential families, burgeoning lawlessness in the Arab sector and a massive shortage of affordable housing.”
Elie Bennett, director of International Strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute, also sees an opportunity in the crisis.
In the aftermath of the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur war, he said, Israel “rebuilt its military and eventually laid the foundations for today’s ‘startup nation.’ In this current crisis, we do not need a call-up of our reserves forces, or a massive airlift of American weaponry to prevail. What we need is goodwill among fellow Israelis and a commitment to work together to strengthen our society and reach an agreed-upon constitutional framework. If we are able to achieve such an agreement, it will protect our rights, better define the relationships between the branches of government, and result in an Israel that is more stable and prosperous than ever as we celebrate 75 years of independence.”
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Did Qatar meddle in the Israeli Arab vote? Election officials reject Netanyahu’s claim of widespread fraud
(JTA) —
Allegations that Qatar secretly funded efforts to boost Arab voter turnout in Israel’s election have sparked a political firestorm, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring the vote “stolen” as his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine the results.
“The Ra’amgate affair is an earthquake,” Netanyahu’s Likud party said in a statement posted on the prime minister’s X account, referring to Ra’am, one of two Arab lists running in the election. “They stole the elections in Israel.”
Elections officials were at pains to say that the allegations did not indicate widespread fraud, and even if they were substantiated, would not invalidate the election.
“The elections to the Knesset were conducted lawfully,” acting Central Elections Committee director-general Dean Livne wrote Thursday, adding that “to the best of our knowledge there is no basis for claims of systematic harm to the integrity of the elections.”
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security apparatus, also cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “The Shin Bet has not yet completed its investigation, and any statements concerning the substance or nature of the suspicions under investigation do not reflect the agency’s position,” the statement said. “Such statements should have been avoided.”
Opposition leaders welcomed any investigation and accused Netanyahu of fearmongering – and noted that figures in his office have been under investigation for months for alleged ties to Qatar.
“I welcome the fact that Netanyahu is finally condemning Qatari involvement in the State of Israel,” said Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar Party is the largest in the opposition bloc. “It is serious when it happens in the Prime Minister’s Office and it is serious if it happens in the election system.”
Eisenkot accused Netanyahu of trying to change the rules after losing the game.
“What is already clear is that Likud and Netanyahu have embarked on an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results,” he said.
If the allegations are substantiated and found to have affected the results, a court could invalidate the election in whole or in part and order a new vote – though overturning an entire election is unprecedented in Israeli history.
The controversy erupted after Arab parties won a record 19 seats in Tuesday’s election, potentially giving them a decisive role in efforts to unseat Netanyahu.
With counting complete, Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats and the opposition bloc led by Eisenkot has 48, leaving neither with the 61 seats needed for a majority. One potential path for Eisenkot is to form a government with Arab parties or a minority government with their support from outside the coalition.
In a letter Wednesday to Shin Bet chief David Zini, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, called for an investigation into suspected foreign interference.
“Serious suspicions have been brought to my attention regarding improper influence on the elections through foreign funding by outside actors operating against Israeli interests,” Sohlberg wrote.
“I cannot attest to the nature of these suspicions,” he added, but said that because they involved foreign entities, “there is an obligation to investigate them thoroughly.”
Sohlberg instructed Zini to “uncover evidence to substantiate or refute the suspicions,” requesting findings within a week, ahead of the deadline for filing election appeals.
The letter did not identify Qatar or any Arab political party.
Likud alleged that foreign actors had sought to bring about an “Islamization of Israel” and overthrow the right-wing government. It urged other Zionist parties not to cooperate with Ra’am or the Joint List to replace the Knesset speaker or form a government reliant on Arab lawmakers.
Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas denied any connection between his party and the suspected financing.
“Ra’am has no connection whatsoever to the affair in question or to any other such affairs,” Abbas said in a statement, pledging full cooperation with law enforcement.
He mocked Netanyahu by invoking the allegations that Netanyahu’s office has been infiltrated by Qatari agents and also by linking him to his son Yair, a provocateur who has been caught up in separate controversies.
“To Abu Yair [father of Yair], who employs Qatari agents in his office, we have one message in response to the campaign of incitement and delegitimization he is waging against Arab citizens: There will be nothing, because there is nothing,” he said.
Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called the allegations the most serious in Israeli democratic history, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged the arrest of Arab party leaders suspected of involvement.
In a statement Thursday, the Shin Bet said the intelligence originated from its own operations and “did not come from any political party or political entity on either side of the political spectrum.”
The agency stressed that the investigation was narrowly focused and “does not cast suspicion on, or accuse, an entire sector of society that went out to vote democratically and legally.”
Qatar rejected the allegations, calling them “ridiculous and dangerous.”
“We categorically deny allegations that Qatar has interfered in Israeli elections or funded any activities intended to influence their outcome,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement.
Al Ansari accused Israeli politicians of attempting to use Qatar as a scapegoat for their electoral setbacks, pointing to what he described as contradictory accusations that Doha had bought Netanyahu’s loyalty, financed Israel’s left and now manipulated Arab voters.
Experts on Israel’s Arabs said the massive turnout was organic.
Rami Zeedan, a professor of Israel studies and author of a book on Arab political participation in Israel, said he observed extensive grassroots mobilization during three months of fieldwork in Israel this summer. Many Arab voters viewed Netanyahu’s government as particularly hostile to their community and were determined to replace it, believing that almost any alternative would treat them more equitably as Israeli citizens, he said.
“The exceptional turnout was therefore not inexplicable,” Zeedan told JTA. “It reflected a genuine and highly visible effort to remove Netanyahu and his government.”
Zeedan said Likud and the Israeli right have long sought to delegitimize Arab political participation. He warned that the allegations could be used to cast doubt on the entire Arab vote or justify calls for a new election.
“The danger is that an investigation into specific financial or criminal allegations will be transformed into a sweeping claim that the Arab vote itself was fraudulent,” he said.
Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen accused Netanyahu of attempting to delegitimize Arab voters and prevent the new Knesset from being sworn in on schedule.
“Netanyahu was defeated at the ballot box. No incitement campaign will change the voters’ decision,” Jabareen wrote on X.
Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, also from the Joint List, fired back after the prime minister questioned why he had visited Qatar four days before the election.
“I told Al Jazeera in Doha that we very much want to bring you down,” Tibi wrote on X, quoting Netanyahu’s post.
“Meanwhile, according to Israeli police, the only ones who received Qatari money are those in your own office. Lots of money,” he added, referring to the investigation into allegations that Netanyahu’s aides received payments to promote the Gulf state’s interests.
Anwar Mhajne, a political scientist originally from Umm al-Fahm, said she was not surprised by the Arab voter turnout, saying she witnessed “sophisticated social media mobilization by journalists, influencers, activists,” who made a compelling case for voting.
Mhajne argued that Netanyahu was using the allegations to discourage opposition parties from partnering with Ra’am and the Joint List.
“The allegations risk achieving Netanyahu’s objective before the investigation concludes: making cooperation with Arab representatives appear illegitimate and closing off a possible route to replacing his government,” she said in an email to JTA.
President Isaac Herzog called for the allegations to be thoroughly investigated but warned against casting suspicion on Arab voters collectively.
“Even at a moment like this, we must not tarnish an entire community that sought to exercise its right to vote and take an active part in democracy,” Herzog said Thursday.
The post Did Qatar meddle in the Israeli Arab vote? Election officials reject Netanyahu’s claim of widespread fraud appeared first on The Forward.
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Beyond the frame, thousands are being murdered in Auschwitz but here, there are blueberries
”It’s a detective story,” Moisés Kaufman said. “It focuses on an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who is offered a mysterious album. The person offering the album claims that it is photographs of Auschwitz.”
Kaufman is talking about Here There Are Blueberries, the play about those photographs and that archivist. Kaufman conceived and directed the play, which he co-wrote with Amanda Gronich of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The archivist — Rebecca Erbelding — “is very skeptical because there are very few photographs of Auschwitz in existence,” Kaufman, Tectonic’s founder and artistic director, told me over Zoom. “The Nazis did not want any photographs or records of what they were doing there.”
Once Erbelding gets the album, she discovers that the photos are authentic, but there are no photos of victims, only Nazis, including Josef Mengele. “The play,” Kaufman said. “is a detective story of her trying to figure out what these photos tell us.”
The album, which consisted of more than 100 photos taken between May and December 1944 and put together by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, a Nazi SS officer, was front page news in 2007 when Erbelding and the museum revealed it. “It’s something we didn’t know,” Kaufman said. “When you think Auschwitz, what do you think? Gas chambers, crematoria, you think barracks. And this is not that. We had never seen these photos before.”
Höcker “was a very high-up guy,” Kaufman continued. “That’s one of the reasons why the album is so important. Because he was very close to the center of operations. We’re looking at how the people who were running the camp behaved, and how they lived their daily lives.”
Kaufman decided he needed to turn those photos and that story into a play.
“I come from a Holocaust survivor family,” he said. “My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I knew that … I would at one point in my life have to write about this. But I kept postponing it because, as you probably know, the Holocaust is the one historical event that has been most written about. Many movies have been made about it. It’s like the historical event that has been most chronicled in art. So I thought, ‘What else is there to say?’ And yet, when I saw these photographs, I thought, this is something we didn’t know. I want to write a play about that.”
The play uses the photos, projected on the stage as the story is told.
“The Tectonic Theater Project is an experimental theater company,” Kaufman said. “And the kind of formal question for us was, ‘Can you write a play from an album of photographs? Can the photographs carry part of that narrative?’ Every play we do has a new form. We try to never repeat ourselves.”
Kaufman, 62, grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and immigrated to New York City in 1987. He was nominated for a Tony Award for directing I Am My Own Wife and for writing 33 Variations. Blueberries previously played at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC and Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop.
The play’s title is taken from a picture in the album. “There’s a photograph in the album where they are eating blueberries,” Kaufman said — the title is a caption that the album’s owner had written. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Kaufman said, “but the location where this photograph is taken was something that few people knew about — that this location existed. And to me, it kind of encapsulates the spirit of the photos, which is a spirit of, a quotidian, a casual, the how do we live life in a moment like this?”
“What is happening outside the frame is that they’re killing 1.1 million people. Right outside the frame,” Kaufman continued. “And it poses questions about who we are as human beings.”
“We talk a lot about, what is the distance between culpability, complicity, and complacency?” said Kaufman. “And where do each one of us fall in that continuum?”
Why would someone knowing what’s happening in the camp take these photos and make an album of them?
“I think he thought the Reich was going to last a thousand years,” Kaufman said. “I thought that, in part, he wanted to chronicle his contribution to it.”
Kaufman said that although the play deals with what happened more than 80 years ago, it has a key relevance to today. “I think at a moment in time where so many governments around the world are turning towards authoritarianism, this play holds a mirror up to us. Who do we want to be?” he said.
What does he want audiences to get from this play after seeing it? What does he hope they are thinking as they leave the theater or afterwards?
“Number one, they’re going to see photographs that they’ve never seen before, and they’re going to see images that they’ve never seen before. Hopefully, the images will elicit new ideas, and hopefully, the conversation that they’re having when they exit the theater is different from the conversation they were having when they entered.”
The photo album, Kaufman said, “chronicles the life of everyone who runs the camp — people who worked in the kitchen, secretaries, high command, the people who drove the buses, the people who run the offices, the people who run the gas chamber. Everybody is portrayed. And I think that it invites the audience to think about not only how are humans capable of such a thing, but how are we all capable of such a thing? And what do we have to do in order to prevent ourselves from doing such a thing?”
‘Here There Are Blueberries’ begins performances Nov. 2 at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater and runs through Jan. 10.
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‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state
Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.
“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.
“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.
“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.
There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”
“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”
Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.
The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.
The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.
But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.
“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.
Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”
Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”
Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.
Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”
All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.
“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.
The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.
“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”
But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.
After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.
“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”
“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.
“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.
One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.
“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”
This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.
“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.
Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.
“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”
The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.
“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”
Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”
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