Daylight saving time to stretch till end of October

Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced Wednesday that he had adopted the recommendations of a fact-finding committee and will extend daylight savings by three weeks starting this year.

Instead of moving clocks forward on October 6, Israel will, like other countries in Europe, wait till the end of October to do so.

“I announced when I set up the committee that the objective was to find the best arrangement for the citizens of Israel,” Sa’ar said at a press conference. “After checking the committee’s work and its recommendations I decided to change the status quo.”

The thorny issue of when and how to implement daylight saving time was the focus of a special committee appointed by Sa’ar (Likud) in April.

Headed by Shmuel Abuav, a former Construction Ministry director general and head of the Or Yarok (“Green Light” in Hebrew) road safety organization, the committee examined the current daylight saving time policy and its impact on road safety, energy consumption and the economy.

“The additional hour of daylight for the citizens of Israel has a positive influence on every one of the central aspects of life,” Sa’ar said, adding that he would immediately begin working on getting government and Knesset approval for the legislation.

Daylight saving time went into effect across Israel on Friday, March 29, turning 2 a.m. into 3 a.m., and was set to last until the first week of October.

In November, the Knesset passed legislation extending daylight savings time until the first Sunday after October 1. 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, where daylight savings time ends on November 1.

As a result, the issue of the seasonal time transition became contentious among Israelis, and was caught up in political tensions between religious and secular politicians.

Religious parties generally pushed for the early time change to ease the Yom Kippur fast, and some secular activists protested that the change was unnecessarily inconvenient and expensive. They pointed to a relatively early loss of daylight hours and a resultant rise in electricity bills as well as car accidents as people who would otherwise drive home from work in daylight were forced to drive in darkness.