Historically, life in Jerusalem has been challenging. There’s nothing new there. If you could, you might ask any of the marauding civilizations that came, saw, conquered, and were ultimately driven out of the hilltop walled city across the millennia. Literature – poetry and prose – is replete with epithets relating to the harshness of quotidian existence in Jerusalem, often citing the unforgiving local masonry as a powerful, unremitting symbol.
On a far more practical contemporary note, you might have a natter with business owners across the capital, many of whom have endured more than their fair share of income-generating quandaries and other existential dome scratchers over the years. One bar owner, who said she preferred to remain anonymous on the simple, and somewhat paradoxical, grounds that she was fed up with moaning about her plight, said she had resigned herself to her lot in the city.
She noted that her establishment had somehow come through the Second Intifada, which ran and ran for the first four and a half years of this century and turned the center of the city into something of a ghost town after nightfall. That’s even without considering periodic terrorist attacks, and reprise upon reprise of IDF operations down south and up north, that left their ongoing mark on turnover.
The seemingly interminable construction work on the light rail began while suicide terrorists were still blowing up buses and other places, eventually ending in August 2011, over two and a half years after the scheduled completion date. The fact that the actual outlay came in at over seven times the initial budget didn’t help local financial matters, either. The nine-plus years of infrastructure development caused downtown businesses no end of headaches, with roadworks and sidewalks riddled with open pits, preventing potential customers from getting to the front door of the stores. Many a business went under during that time.
And now we have this never-ending sequence of military altercations, missiles heading this way from foreign climes, and folks scrambling for the nearest bomb shelter or residential safe space. For Jerusalem business owners, including eateries, that significantly impinges on the volumes of clientele dropping by for a beverage or a full repast.
The business owners of Jerusalem
AMIT MAGAL has a painful inside track on all the above, and more. In three full decades as, initially, partner in, and now full owner of, the Nocturno café-restaurant-cum cultural venue, he has seen it all. The accumulative dents on his returns have left Magal struggling to make ends meet and cover the enterprise’s regular outgoings. “I’ve opened savings plans and taken loans to keep the place afloat,” he tells me. The grand shortfall currently amounts to a whopping NIS 1 million.
That is a huge hole to fill, caused through no fault of Magal. He does everything he can, not only to keep Nocturno – which over the past 30 years has become a bona fide Jerusalem institution – going but also to expand the place’s offerings as far and wide as possible. That, naturally, takes in the vittles, which feature a welcome broad range of vegan dishes, but also extends to musical and other entertainment, and various broader cultural activities.
So where are the state powers that be, specifically the Finance Ministry, in all this? By all accounts, the folks with their hands on the national purse strings do not appear to be in any hurry to help the tax-paying business owners to survive these most testing of times.
“I only received compensation for damages sustained during Operation Rising Lion [the previous round with Iran, in June 2025] just yesterday,” Magal says. How much? And did it cover all his losses? “Hardly,” he replies with a wry smile. “I received a bit more than NIS 60,000 set against losses of around NIS 350,000 to NIS 400,000.” That’s quite a cash flow conundrum and doesn’t make for particularly encouraging news.
It transpires that the state authorities know full well how much the tax-paying business people have been losing, and have no intention of covering those deficits in full. “Yes, that is exactly the situation,” Magal states. There is a formulaic method to the madness. “The compensation you get is based on a percentage of your outgoings. They take the regular expenses of the business, and they give you a percentage of that based on brackets of decline in your turnover,” he explains.
That is tantamount to the state saying, “We know you are losing money as a result of the war, and that’s your problem.” “Absolutely,” Magal concurs. “It’s like [insurance policy] excess, but a very big amount of excess,” he says, smiling grimly. “But it’s better than nothing. Of course, we would prefer if the [state compensation] outline plans were more like the [compensation] plans they had during the corona [COVID-19 pandemic] and, in particular, the timetable for providing grants.”
To put it bluntly, it seems the folks over at the Finance Ministry don’t overly care. “They say, ‘You have to manage and, in a few months’ time, we’ll talk about it, we’ll look into it.’ The compensation I received for Operation Rising Lion took 10 months to get to me. I received the first installment four months after the war.”
Perhaps, to be fair, this is not just a gross failure of the Finance Ministry to provide businesses with the support they need to survive during times of national crisis. It may be a screw-up on a grander parliamentary scale. “There is an outline plan [for compensation],” Magal enlightens me, “but there is no legislation yet to implement it.”
It seems a new law has to be passed by the Knesset to enact each outline plan, to provide financial assistance that business owners urgently need following this or that outbreak of regional violence. One wonders whether ad hoc laws are also required to raise MKs’ salaries, which amount to over NIS 47,000 a month, and that is without supplementary payments for travel expenses, pension plans, and other benefits that ensure politicians never have to worry about paying their bills even well after they retire or fail to get back into office.
Magal comes across as a tough cookie. That appears to be part of his personal makeup. He took on a managerial position in Nocturno when he was 17 and became a partner in the business at the tender age of 21 before taking over the whole shebang. The smile hardly leaves his face while we chat, pressing subject matter notwithstanding. Despite all his trials and tribulations, he maintains a sunny disposition and continues to hope for the best. “I am grateful for anything I get,” he says.
Not that the boyish-looking 46-year-old is exactly sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the state coffers to cough up. “We have tried to keep the wheels turning,” he states. That has entailed taking financial leaps of faith in an effort to keep the show on the road and boost morale, come what may. “We kept staff on, and paid them. Mind you, around 30% were called up for reserve duty, and another 30% – many of them young students – went home to their parents’ place because they didn’t have a residential safe space of their own. They were on unpaid leave. But we appreciated any employee who chose to carry on working.”
That determination to get things back on track, as quickly and as best they could, extended to the wider cultural hinterland too, as Nocturno jump-started its downstairs stage facility. “We got shows back up as soon as we could. And we didn’t expect artists to perform for free. They also need to put food on the table. We paid them – the sound men, the artistic director, and everyone else involved.” That despite not charging patrons for admission.
Magal says it is not just about providing Jerusalemites with a place to grab a coffee and pastry, salad, or sandwich, and some invaluable downtime from the rat race. He calls Nocturno his “life’s work” and says the business has an important place in the local social fabric. “This is a community,” he declares. “People come here to feel a part of that.” The entertainment aspect, Magal feels, does its bit as well. “Nocturno has become a Jerusalem institution because of that, and also because of the cultural contribution we have made over the past decade.”
All that is highly commendable, but in the cold light of the harsh regional reality, does Magal still have faith in Nocturno’s ability to muddle through the crises, state financial backing deficiency notwithstanding? “I have to be optimistic,” he says, calling on biblical narrative for dialectic collateral. “We’ve had six bad years since COVID-19, so we’re getting near the end of the seven bad years, aren’t we? I think we’re due for seven good ones.” From his lips to divine ears…
DAN GOLDBERG also puts on a brave face when I drop by his iconic culinary and literary establishment, Tmol Shilshom, another pillar of the local social, cultural, and leisure scene. Goldberg says he has seen it all over the years. “We’ve been here 32 years. There have always been wars, all sorts of events, terror. Two weeks after we opened, from the window on the other side, we saw policemen shooting terrorists. There has always been something.”
There’s no denying that. There was personal tragedy in there, too. “During corona, we were closed. [Tmol Shilshom founder and partner] David [Erlich] died [in March 2020]. I was here on my own. I’d sit here for long hours every day, I’d skirt around the police and come here to the empty restaurant. It was so quiet here, a deathly silence.”
Sadly, that has been a leitmotif of life here in general for some time now, as we all put our lives on hold and hunker down until the politicians, here and over the side of the Pond, decide enough is enough, for now. That stop-start dynamic does not do much for Tmol Shilshom’s chances of making it through to its 33rd anniversary. “You invest so much work, and then a war comes along, and within a couple of weeks there is no income, but the outgoings don’t stop.”
Like Magal and his other professional counterparts up and down the country, Goldberg had to wait some time to get some recompense for his losses during Operation Rising Lion. “I got my compensation just a couple of days ago!” he exclaims. “And that was only after [Israeli Restaurants & Bars Association Chairman] Yakir Lissitzky went to the [income tax] authorities, sat there, and told them we’d all filled out the relevant forms and told them get on with it. We’ve all got salaries and other expenses to pay.”
Goldberg says it has been hard going for at least the past six years since the COVID-19 lockdowns. “It is tough just to find the get up and go, the will to keep soldiering on. I have wonderful young people working for me. They bring their energy and motivation, and they keep on coming up with initiatives. I don’t think I’d have the strength to try to keep Tmol Shilshom afloat without them.”
It is a far cry from the halcyon days when local literary giants, the likes of Yehuda Amichai, David Grossman, and Meir Shalev, would come by and hold literary evenings for riveted audiences.
Naturally, Goldberg has to keep the cash register ticking over and can’t carry on shoring up the finances out of his own pocket and taking out loans. But, more than anything, he misses the buzz of the good old days. “We have a group of 11 retired accountants coming over later today from Bnei Barak. We used to have groups of 100, but who cares? It’s not about the money. It’s just wonderful to be able to host a group again.”
He echoes the world-weary take of the aforementioned unnamed long-suffering bar proprietor. “We’ve stopped losing hope,” he chuckles ruefully. “I simply don’t have the strength to despair anymore. I get on with my life, pray for better days.”
MOSHE BEN NAIM, owner of the veteran Bikeway bicycle shop in Givat Shaul, exudes a similar air of resignation. “During the corona lockdown time, things were closed down because they didn’t want us to meet up and infect each other. But people would get out on the bikes, and they came by the store. But this last war was a total catastrophe. People didn’t leave home. Very few people went out to cycle.”
That is particularly bad news for Ben Naim Bikeways as we gradually leave the cold-rainy season behind and fair-weather cyclists dust down their two-wheelers and get back onto the tarmac and out into meadows and suitably hilly off-road terrain. “The store uses up its cash during the winter, and then tries to set up to start the spring with a bang.”
Things could hardly be worse. “We had a long, cold, rainy winter, and then we had one war after another,” says Ben Naim. “You build up your stock – in readiness for the new cycling season – your checks keep on going out to the suppliers. You don’t have any resources left. You fall into a financial hole of hundreds of thousands of shekels. The cash flow stops abruptly, but you still have to bring home the bacon.”
Naturally, long-running business concerns have collateral to get the banks to tide them over, but at a cost. “The banks have been fine, they haven’t bounced my checks, but the interest rates are going through the roof.”
Ben Naim was also kept waiting for a few compensatory breadcrumbs from the income tax authorities for his income shortfall in 2025. He says even that wasn’t much good to him. “The state’s help just about allows you to buy some bread and cheese to take home. The big headache is the cash flow. Suddenly, you have no money!” he exclaims.
I have been a regular member of the Bikeway clientele for quite some time and have never heard Ben Naim talk like that before. He is always ready with a 200-watt smile and is keen to keep his customers well served and happy.
He doesn’t even know when – if – he’ll get some form of state assistance. “I have asked my accountant to follow up on it. But I don’t think there is even an outline plan [for compensation] for Epic Fury [the most recent conflict with Iran]. Nothing is clear.” Ben Naim isn’t exactly getting his hopes up. “I don’t think there will be [an outline plan] at all.”
And so the depressing beat goes on. “When there’s a war, I lose staff who go off to do reserve IDF duty,” Ben Naim expounds on his catch-22 predicament. “But I need employees to generate income. Even though I have work coming in, it’s difficult to get it done with few employees available. And one of my [few available] workers has to be home to care for his small kids while his nurse wife works shifts. It’s been crazy.”
Ever the optimist, Ben Naim can’t stray too far from the sunny side of the street. “Thankfully, everybody is back in the store now, and there’s work. But you never know what’s just around the corner next week.”
Indeed, the ceasefire could cease at any given moment, and businesses whose owners have invested their lifeblood in getting them up and running, and then keeping them afloat, could collapse. That would leave proprietors with huge interest-drenched debts, and their employees with floundering to pay the rent.
One can argue about the rights and wrongs behind the latest clashes with Iran and Lebanon. But, at the very least, tax-paying business owners should have access to the timely financial assistance they need to keep their show on the road, their employees’ dependents fed, and their clientele assured of the morale-boosting community spirit we all so desperately need in these dark, unsure days.