The editor of the Statistical Yearbook of Jerusalem is convinced that secular residents’ fear of the capital becoming ultra-Orthodox is groundless. She predicts that the birth rate among the ultra-Orthodox will drop, that numerous Haredi families will leave Jerusalem and that ageing neighbourhoods like Rehavia will get new life. “Some people like to live near similar people, but some believe it’s important for the population around them to be varied,” says Dr. Maya Choshen, who has edited the yearbook, issued by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, for the past 28 years. “Those who don’t like different people around them aren’t suitable to live here,” she says.

The thick volume’s publication has become one of the rituals of Jerusalem Day, in which the media and politicians mostly focus on the emigration rate from the capital and the size of its secular, ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities. In the first yearbooks Choshen edited, at the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s, only 20 percent of the capital’s Jews classified themselves as ultra-Orthodox. This year the ultra-Orthodox residents made up 34 percent of the capital’s population.

On the face of it this corresponds to Jerusalem’s image as a city in the process of becoming ultra-Orthodox. But Choshen says the figures don’t necessarily reflect reality accurately. She recalls, for instance, that when she would leave the office to go home in the first years of work, no café in the Rehavia neighborhood was open.

Read the full article at Haaretz.