Daylight savings time ends Saturday night in Israel
Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar announces the extension of daylight savings time at the Knesset in May. (photo credit: Flash90)
Israel will switch to standard time at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, after
daylight savings time was extended by 3 weeks. Clocks go back an hour at
2 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Israel will switch to standard
time at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, after daylight savings time was
extended by 3 weeks. Clocks go back an hour at 2 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Instead
of moving clocks back on October 6, Israel waited until the end of the
month to do so after Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar agreed to extend
daylight savings time by three weeks.
“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.”
On October 6, Israelis who fought for years to
have daylight savings time substantially extended found that their
phones and computers ignored new state directives and sent their clocks
an hour back overnight.
Many mobile phones were already programmed to
expect the clock change to go ahead over last weekend and were not able
to readjust for the later, October end to daylight savings. The bug
affected some Google phones, iPhones, Android and iOS software,
BlackBerrys and Symbian phones.
Local cellphone providers tried to preempt the
problem by sending text messages to their users last week advising to
set their phones to Athens time, which also has October 27 as the start
of winter time.
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.
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.
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