Winter is coming

Israel to turn clocks back early Sunday as daylight savings ends

Israelis will get an extra hour of sleep this weekend when clocks fall back into winter time

By ToI Staff 25 October 2018, 1:49 pm

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Illustrative: A custodian inspects a clock face before changing the time on the 100-year-old clock in Clay Center, Kansas on March 8, 2014. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Israel’s winter will officially begin early Sunday as clocks turn back one hour, marking the end of daylight savings time.

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

Daylight savings time will return officially on March 29, 2019.

The change in Israel coincides with the EU and the Palestinian Authority, but not the US, which changes on November 4.

In 2013, the Knesset passed legislation extending daylight savings 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, 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 political parties.