Secular, Religious Israeli Activists Flock to Lod
Tensions are rising in the ethnically mixed Israeli city of Lod between progressive and religiously motivated Israeli activists over the city's demographic future.
LOD, Israel — In the summer of 2011, at the height of the social-justice protest that shook Israeli society, Avital Blonder sent a personal email to hundreds of her friends. At the time, she wondered how she could contribute her share toward correcting the social wrongs that inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to take to the streets in protest.
Avital, a university graduate in her 30s from a well-heeled family, was looking for different path from the demonstrations and the tent pitching on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. An article recounting the endless woes of Lod had caught her eye and gave her an idea. She would go there, she thought, on the social mission she was so desperately looking for.
“Until a few days ago,” she wrote to her friends, “the city of Lod meant nothing to me. For all I knew, it was a forsaken place in which I had no interest. However, I have found that it has tremendous potential to become a symbol of multiculturalism and coexistence. More than 20,000 people living in Lod are still not connected to the sewage system, and to have a shower, they must drag buckets with water they fill elsewhere. The illiteracy rate in the city is one of the highest in the country. There are in Lod neighborhoods without any social services, and in many of them, gangs rule the streets.”
Avital proposed to those young activists, the advocates of social justice who had paralyzed the center of Tel Aviv, to join her and move to Lod to revolutionize the city.
