Clocks in Israel to turn back overnight Saturday-Sunday

Israelis get an extra hour of sleep as daylight savings ends; not everybody happy to add an additional hour to 2020

A clock in a Tel Aviv hotel. (Sophie Gordon/Flash90)
A clock in a Tel Aviv hotel. (Sophie Gordon/Flash90)

Israel’s winter will officially begin overnight Saturday-Sunday as clocks turn back one hour, marking the end of daylight saving time.

At 2 a.m. overnight Saturday-Sunday, Israelis need to wind their clocks back to 1 a.m. again.

Daylight saving time will return officially on March 26, 2021.

Some people posted on social media that perhaps an extra hour in 2020 would not be entirely welcome.

In 2013, the Knesset passed legislation extending daylight saving time from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October.

Before that, standard time would begin the Saturday night before Yom Kippur, so that the day’s fast, which is pegged to nightfall, would end an hour “earlier.”

Because the Hebrew calendar is lunar, Yom Kippur can fall between mid-September and mid-October, which used to mean that Israelis returned to standard time as much as a month and a half before most other countries.

As a result, the issue of the seasonal time transition became contentious and was caught up in political tensions between religious and secular parties before the 2013 change was implemented.

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