In an era of growing social divisions in Israel, the Barmi family of Modiin represents a unique bridge between the religious and secular worlds. Attorney Oren Barmi, 44, and his wife, Neta Goshen-Barmi, 44, have built a life that seamlessly blends their different backgrounds while raising their three children to appreciate both traditions.

The Home: A five-bedroom townhouse with a garden in Modiin's Cramim neighborhood. The row of houses is tucked away, accessed through a parking area. A charming small path leads to the house. While each child has their own room, the family spends most of their time together in the living room.

Good Morning: The day begins around 7 a.m. Each morning, one parent prepares sandwiches and food for the children, each with different preferences for their lunch contents – "nothing spreadable except chocolate." They wake the children, and Neta drives them to school on her way to the Paatei Modiin train station for work. Oren usually leaves around the same time for his office, though sometimes he stays back to pray and have coffee at home before departing.

Students: They met during orientation week at the Hebrew University Law Faculty in 2002. Groups were divided alphabetically, putting Neta Goshen and Oren Barmi in the same sections with shared courses throughout. "We formed a tight-knit group of six or seven really good friends who lived the true student life, just like in TV shows and movies. Always going out together, hanging out. We were part of the group and good friends with each other."

Ponytail: Oren had a ponytail when they met, while Neta sported short, spiky red-orange hair. Oren took interest in Neta quite early, but she only "discovered" him, as she puts it, the day her mother gave him a haircut and removed the ponytail, which Neta found unattractive. "We started dating immediately after that."

Blend: They dated for four years, and while studying for the bar exam together, he suggested one evening that she change out of her sweatpants and dress up nicely. She immediately suspected a marriage proposal was coming. They married in August 2007. This wasn't a typical union, as Neta came from a secular background while Oren was Modern Orthodox. "From the beginning of our relationship, we needed discussions about how our shared life would look, where the children would study, and what the wedding would be like. Indeed, at every stage, you can see the blending of our two worlds."

Hot Plate and Pot: During Oren's first Shabbat at Neta's home, he arrived with a Shabbat hot plate and a pot. When she was invited to Friday night dinner at his parents' house as a surprise for his birthday, she thought "Shabbat evening" meant Saturday night. "It's worth noting that both our families embraced our mixed relationship beautifully and lovingly from day one, and that's our part in bringing hearts together to this day."

Phone and Television: The children's daily life follows religious practices: they observe Shabbat, keep kosher, pray, and so on, while Neta's secular lifestyle is present in the home. She uses her phone on Shabbat and watches television in her room. The prevailing discussion at home is that children will shape their own path when they grow up.

Consulting and Problem-Solving: Neta is an employment law expert and partner at Arnon, Tadmor-Levy, working from the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv and occasionally from their Jerusalem office. She provides ongoing counsel primarily to major companies, tech firms, and startups, represents clients in court, and handles company acquisition deals. "I truly love my work and enjoy it, along with the company and atmosphere at the firm."

Oren is an attorney specializing in a niche field: municipal taxation. He co-owns an independent firm with partner Haim Goldfarb. The firm serves major companies across all sectors, dealing with property taxes, development levies, and various municipal fees. "The work involves ongoing consultation and numerous proceedings in appeals committees and administrative court petitions." Oren deeply enjoys his field and the challenge of 'cracking' each case to find the best legal approach for achieving favorable economic outcomes for clients.

Modiin: Initially, they lived in Tel Aviv, at the corner of Dizengoff and Jabotinsky. Oren promised they would move when their first child was born, and when Yonatan was one month old, they relocated to an apartment in Modiin. They chose Modiin for its proximity to family and the city's character. Neta's parents live in Maccabim, one of her sisters lives in the area, and Oren also has a brother in Modiin. "Additionally, given our religious-secular background, we knew Modiin had a school that integrates religious, traditional, and secular students, which was one of the important factors for us."

According to them, Modiin proved to be a wonderful city for families and raising children. "It's like a rural city, full of gardens and green parks, activities, and families in similar situations. We're part of the 'Yachad Community,' which has many activities outside school, including community Sabbaths, which are the crown jewel. We're also part of the 'Orot HaCramim' synagogue community, which has numerous activities and especially makes Sabbaths enjoyable. We've made many friends in the city, and lots of children constantly visit us."

France: Oren was born in Paris to a Religious Zionist family and had two older brothers. In 1984, when he was four, the family decided to immigrate to Israel. "All this while his father was already a doctor of psychology with a clinic and work, and his mother was already ill with cancer, and without knowing any Hebrew. They chose to settle in Rishon LeZion to avoid living in a concentration of French immigrants." They started from scratch, jobless and spending their time in Hebrew language classes, until slowly building their lives in Israel. Oren attended a religious elementary school and a religious high school in Rishon LeZion. In the army, he served in a communications role in a classified Air Force unit.

Maccabim: Neta was born in Rishon LeZion, the middle of three daughters, to a very liberal secular family. In 1986, when she was six, her family decided to move to the then "remote" and new settlement of Maccabim before the city of Modiin or the settlement of Reut existed. Neta served in the army as an education NCO in Shivta and later as an education officer in Har Gilo. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer since third grade.

Schnitzels: Yonatan loves basketball, playing regularly twice a week in a program ("not really a team"), and has even attended NBA games during his bar mitzvah trip. He enjoys hanging out with friends in the city center of Modiin. Nadav plays table tennis in a club and sometimes even beats his father. Rotem studies drama and loves making schnitzels and meatballs, hoping to become an actress or pastry chef. "Thanks to her strong interest in reading the 'Home Visit' column, we're here."

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The Jerusalem Municipality will increase its secular and national religious population, Mayor Moshe Lion said Sunday.

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Speaking at an urban renewal conference of the Israel Construction Center attended by local authority heads, entrepreneurs, and leading professionals in the real estate field, Lion asserted that "Jerusalem is the State of Israel's capital of opportunity. Now is the time to invest and believe in the city, through relatively small investments, a lot of money can be made here."

He said that "ultimately, my goal is to get to a strong Jerusalem. I want to grow, and for that, it [the city] needs more and more residents. I want to get to 10,000 housing units a year. We're talking about a huge city. A lot of urban renewal, construction on empty lots, and a lot of employment."

Some 950,000 people reside in Jerusalem, more than twice the population of Tel Aviv. Just one-third of Jerusalem's population belongs to the secular or national-religious sector.

"We want to grow the city, and the number of secular and national religious residents in particular because that is the most productive sector," Lion explained.

"To that end, we are making every effort to cut bureaucracy to zero. Last year, we noticed there weren't enough construction permits. Up until now, the average stood at 2,000 new construction [projects] a year, and this year, we will cross the 4,000 threshold," he said.

According to Lion, buildings 30-stories high will be built along the route of the Jerusalem light rail.

"Jerusalem is going to grow, and for that, it needs more and more residents," he concluded.

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The coronavirus pandemic has further exacerbated the rift between the secular and ultra-Orthodox sectors in Israel, a new study by the Hebrew University's aChord Center said.

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Some 1,000 secular and Haredi Israelis participated in the study. According to data published by the organization on Thursday, 85% of secular Israeli reported feeling animosity towards Haredim, 69% of those even reported feelings of aversion. In comparison, 33% of Haredim reported feelings of animosity towards secular Israelis, and 31% reported feelings of aversion.

Some 95% of secular Israelis and 71% of Haredim reported being exposed to at least one negative representation of the opposite group in the media at least once a week.

The poll revealed that Haredim see secular people in a much positive light than secular Israelis tend to think. Some 95% of them believed that Haredim feel an aversion towards them, and 93% responded that they believed Haredim harbor feelings of hatred against them, when in fact, both numbers constituted about a third of that.

Asked whether the police discriminates against the ultra-Orthodox sector, 95% of Haredim agreed with that assumption, while only 22% of secular Israelis said as much.

Some 92% of secular Israelis said that the government discriminates against them rather than the Haredi sector in terms of state budget appropriations. In contrast, 90% of Haredim said that the government was discriminating against them.

Some 99% of secular Israelis further believe that ultra-Orthodox lawmakers exploit their position of power. In contrast, only 33% of Haredi respondents said the same.

As for workplace discrimination, 90% of Haredim and 47% of secular Israelis said they thought their sector was discriminated against.

Nevertheless, 85% of secular Israelis and 86% among the ultra-Orthodox expressed hope for a better future for the relationship between them. Some 85% of secular Israelis and 64% of Haredim expressed willingness to foster the relationship.

"The findings of the study teach us that each side, Haredim and the secular, can be much more optimistic about the future of the relationship," aChord director Shimrit Barda said, expressing hope for future cooperation between the two groups.

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"More people tend to define themselves using the 'extreme' categories [of] religious or secular, and fewer categories in the middle," Dr. Yochi Fischer tells Israel Hayom.

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Fischer, a senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute, says that in 2002, 28.4% of Israelis defined themselves as "traditional but not religious," whereas in 2015 23.8% of respondents picked that category to describe their level of religious observance. Fischer attributes this shift to a cultural change that took place within the group that formerly defined itself as "traditional."

"We claim that they're doing this became they want to assign themselves to one of the camps, kind of close ranks, and adjust themselves to discourse that is very polarizing, not to say belligerent"

Polls by the Central Bureau of Statistics, the IDI, the Pew Institute, and other research bodies conducted from 2009-2017 presents a picture of increasing polarization between the "religious" and "secular" groups. But the Van Leer Institute, whose work focuses on social tensions in Israeli society, draws a different conclusion from the data.

One of the data points Fischer uses to make her argument is taken from the CBS' social survey, in which 18% of Jewish respondents said that they were more religious than they had been in the past, whereas 16% said they were less religious than they had been. This would appear to indicate that the two groups were moving further to each extreme, but Fischer says it shows that most of the public is holding steady when it comes to their way of life.

"There is a very large discrepancy between the polarized discourse about religification and secularization and what is actually happening. The numbers contradict the reality, because society is much more complex and more in the center of the spectrum than it has ever been," Fischer says.

Q: But that contradicts some of the polls published in the same time period, some of which you [the Van Leer Intitute] also analyzed.

"Much of the polls are conducted in the context of the present day, when discourse is highly factionalized and people are being asked to place themselves on one side or another and assign themselves a clear identity. But the differences between the two sides aren't dramatic. For example, given the discourse, we would expect to see a large jump in the number of religious people, because of the supposed religification. In fact, other than the increase in the haredi population, which is nothing more than the result of demography [the sector's high birth rate], the past few years haven't seen any major rise, not on the religious side or on the secular side, and certainly not because of cultural and religious changes."

Q: On what do you base your assumption that the talk about religification does not reflect the reality?

"If you look at various sectors of Israeli society, you'll see that there are processes that express secularization alongside religification, and they don't necessarily contradict one another," Fischer says.

This week, Fischer is slated to take part in a panel that is part of a series of events the institute is holding in various bars throughout Tel Aviv to discuss the issues of "Israeli secularism." The panel is titled, "Thank God, Israeli is becoming secular." Fischer has a number of explanations and examples to back up the name: "There are more marriages and possibilities for burial outside the rabbinate. There is private kashruth certification and public transportation on Shabbat. Along with that, there are also more blatant expressions of religious observance, such as gender-separated events, which did not used to exist."

Q: How do those not contradict one another?

"Take the issue of gender-segregated public events. 30 years ago, the haredi public never went to public concerts – today, they take part in events that are considered part of secular culture, but they do so while trying to preserve their lifestyle in a manner that might be even more stringently religious than in the past. They are undergoing a process of secularization, but not in the sense of abandoning their religious lifestyle or the religious commandments.

"Another example is segregation in academia. We can see that segregation as increased religiousness or religification, but when we look at the big picture, this is a conservative population that is opening itself up and going to institutions that are essentially secular, like universities, and using a secular product, like education.

"Some people see that as religification, and some see it as secularization. The haredi public has internalized secular, liberal values like the right to self-fulfillment and to integrate into society. In the name of those values, they're asking for gender segregation. They are undergoing a process of secularization and within the secular sphere they want to do ti in a way that is comfortable for them."

Q: So why is there so much fear of religious coercion and religification?

"Here we have the difficulty and the paradox of the secular word. It isn't confused because it is being made more religious, but because its liberal boundaries are being tested. Generally speaking, secularism has been very successful and now it has to accept a lot more religiousness by individuals who are coming under its umbrella," Fischer says.

Fischer says that today, there is more flexibility and a bigger scale when it comes to religious observance.

"There is a spectrum of religious people and a spectrum of traditional people and a spectrum of 'believers.' There are important, bilateral processes taking place in Israeli society, both toward religion and toward secularism, and not necessarily toward extremism on either side. The wars over religification and secularization are shallow, and that discourse is part of the problem."

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Israeli political battle lines often fracture along how the country balances Jewish religion and liberal democracy. These tensions were a central issue in this week's national election, and are sure to influence the composition of the country's next government.

While the country's Jewish majority is largely secular, parties representing the ultra-Orthodox minority have traditionally wielded considerable political power.

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Acting as coalition kingmakers, religious parties hold a monopoly on many areas of daily life, from the closure of stores and public transport on Shabbat to Jewish burial and marriage rites.

Israel has granted the ultra-Orthodox community sweeping exemptions from the country's mandatory military draft. This has built resentment among the secular majority, who are required to serve.

After Israel held elections last April, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's prospective governing coalition collapsed because a secular ally, Yisrael Beytenu party leader Avigdor Lieberman, insisted on legislation to force young ultra-Orthodox men to also serve in the military.

Playing on this theme, Lieberman's party boosted its strength in Tuesday's election and is poised to be a central player in the next coalition government. He is insisting on a broad secular partnership with the country's two largest parties.

"Israelis voted more on religion and state as a result of the political growth and appetite of the ultra-Orthodox parties," said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank.

Of Israel's 9 million people, 75% are Jewish. Most of the population is secular, traditional, or Modern Orthodox, and 14% are ultra-Orthodox, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. Another 20% of the population is made up by the country's Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs.

As coalition negotiations get set to begin, here's a look at religion's role in Israeli politics:

Orthodox

The two ultra-Orthodox parties – the predominantly Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism and Sephardi Shas party representing Jews of Middle Eastern descent – and the national religious Yamina faction, advocate a greater place for Orthodox Judaism in state life, including religious education and shutting public transportation on Shabbat.

They also have rejected efforts to dissolve a long-standing exemption for religious men to study in seminaries in lieu of having to serve in the military.

Religious Jewish parties won nearly 20% of the vote in Tuesday's repeat election. In recent decades, those parties have typically united with the conservative Likud party to form a governing coalition. But this time, the religious-nationalist bloc fell short of a majority in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, winning only 55 of the 120 seats.

Secular

Several of the main liberal parties – Blue and White, Yisrael Beytenu, Labor, and the Democratic Union – ran on a secular platform, advocating measures such as universal military draft that includes ultra-Orthodox men and civil marriage. Currently, all Jewish marriages in Israel must be performed by the country's Orthodox Rabbinate, which requires that both partners be Jewish and that the ceremony adhere to Orthodox custom.

Lieberman's staunchly secular Yisrael Beytenu party is supported mainly by mostly nonreligious, Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Blue and White, headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, campaigned ahead of election day with ads calling for a "secular national unity government." Those calls were echoed by Lieberman, who supports a partnership with Gantz and Netanyahu that excludes the ultra-Orthodox parties.

Arabs

The majority of Israel's roughly 20% Arab minority are Sunni Muslims, with the remainder made up of Druze and Christians. Most self-define as traditional or religious, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. The Joint Arab List, a union of four smaller factions, including a secular nationalist, an Islamist, and a communist party, won a projected 13 seats in the Knesset. Most Arabs tend to vote based on national identity rather than along religious lines.

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