People living in Jerusalem have been aware of this phenomenon for quite a few years now. As the Jewish month of Tishrei approaches with its many holidays (Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simhat Torah), the lights in many “ghost apartments” go on, and the voices (mainly in English) of the new neighbors — most of them rich Jews from Australia, North America or Europe — can be heard. They come to their vacation apartments in Jerusalem with their entire families to celebrate the holidays here. As soon as the holidays are over, they pack up and go back home, not to return until 11 months later, toward the end of the summer. Their apartments remain empty the rest of the year. In an interview with the real estate supplement of the Israeli economic newspaper The Marker, the mayor of Jerusalem estimated that there are as many as 11,000 such apartments throughout the city.

These apartments are mostly located in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem, but also in quite a few high-end neighborhoods such as Yemin Moshe, Nahlaot and the Old City, where the wealthiest can be found. Ghost apartments reached record highs this year, after real estate developers set up a sales caravan in the Catskill Mountains of New York (where many ultra-Orthodox Jews spend the summer), for people interested in buying an apartment in Jerusalem.

A similar situation is present in cities such as Tel Aviv and Netanya as well, but on a lesser scale. The problem it poses is that these foreign residents damage the local real estate market by hiking prices for people who want to live in Israel all year round. As such, there have been quite a few municipal initiatives recently to rein in the practice. In Jerusalem, for example, Deputy Mayor Ofer Berkovitch called for doubling municipal taxes on these apartments. Still, Berkovich himself admitted later on that even paying double the normal taxes would not really discourage the owners.

Aharon Blau lives in the town of Lakewood in the United States. The owner of a waste removal franchise in New York City, he is a wealthy man. Blau owns a two-story apartment in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem, and it remains empty for most of the year. He said that he bought it in 2003 for $1.9 million, but that it is worth twice as much now, and that he would never consider renting it out, even if the city raises his municipal taxes.