Aliyah Blog 78: (Separate) Beach Day

Sun, Tue, Thurs for women; Mon, Wed, Fri for men

One of my most popular articles in this blog of all time is titled Israel Separate Beaches written years ago. It’s #1 on Google for the search term this many years later and needs an update now that, in addition to my website, there are plenty of places to find the information that was hard to come by. Now you can just type ‘separate beach’ into Google maps.

There are beaches in Israel with both men’s and women’s sections at the Kinneret, Dead Sea, and Eilat.

Based on my research, all other beaches alternate between man day and woman day. For the entire country women get days Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Men get days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Shabbos is an “open” day. These beaches, that I know of, are in Ashdod, Rishon L’Zion, Tel Aviv, and Nehariya. There’s no single compiled list that I’ve found anywhere, though there are more separate beaches in the country.

What Separate Beaches are Like in Israel

Beaches in Israel are BEAUTIFUL.

This time I chose Ashdod because a) it’s beautiful, b) it’s relatively close to my house, and c) there’s plenty of free parking right next to the beach. (Traffic jams are a success of Zionism though that doesn’t mean I like them.) In Ashdod, the separate beach is so long and wide that you can forgot there are walls between you and the next beach. Once you’re out far enough in the ocean, you’re past the wall though.

My secular Hebrew tutor said that many secular women like to use the separate beach as well because they feel safer.

Not that I’ve been to every or even many different beaches in Israel, though they’re all beautiful. One of my favorites is Cesaria beach because where else are you going to have a 2,000 year old aqueduct behind you? (It’s also possible to find ‘walk a bit’ areas with a lifeguard which are sparsely populated.)

Tel Aviv … it’s been years, though the separate beach was cordoned off after a little more than a shallow zone.

Ashdod Separate Beach

It’s like … people here care about aesthetics and cleanliness. There are equi-spaced garbage cans and no garbage anywhere. The sand is soft, clean, and packable. There are no shells or rocks to speak of. This stuff is perfect for digging and building with.

The waves were good – just when you go out far enough for the water depth to be somewhere between 4 feet and 12 feet (best guess), there’s a second rope with buoys. Can you go past that one? Probably not … though there was an earlier buoy line that you could climb over, as well as another line separating two swimming areas which was fine to cross. <shrug>

Being that I work American hours, I have many days free to explore the country. Monday morning, a workday, probably would be a not-so-busy day. One quarter of the people there were from my neighborhood. Had I not come, there’d of been three people there in total.

It’s near the end of September and I wanted to get in a nice beach day while we’re at peak water temperature: 82 degrees! It’s a bathtub. Plus, the Mediterranean Sea has about an 8% or 9% greater salinity compared to the American Atlantic coast making floating much easier here due to the warm climate evaporating water and limited inflow through the Gibraltar Strait. (See also the “Messinian crisis” … maybe).

Israel beaches also have flags . . .
white: boring water;
yellow: better water;
red: warning that there’s really fun water;
black: you’re not going in the water today.

Lifeguards seem to like to get on megaphones and shout things to people in the water. That didn’t happen today though I generally haven’t a clue what they’re saying because it’s in muffled Hebrew.

Some Beach Scenes

These things are all the rage on beaches in Israel these days. It’s a “sun shade” – you feel the corner bags with sand, spread it out, and insert two poles:

This piece of fabric and two tent poles costs $75 in an outdoor store in Israel. It’s about half that on Temu … we can still buy from Temu in Israel … no tariffs and Uyghur slave labor isn’t banned – or even known about over here.

Lunch of champions. There are so many more kinds of sardines in this country … some of them are really good. I’ve decided that Seasons brand sardines in America, which are so mass produced, like must food in America, give a bad name to sardines. I like American Seasons sardines … these were 50x better.

This picture says everything … there’s the mechitzah between this beach and the next, the artsy apartment buildings next to the beach, a crane – the national animal of Israel found in every city, and a metal detector prosthetic.

The women’s bathroom is locked. Took me a cycle of brain turnover to figure out why they needed separate men’s/women’s bathrooms anyway … days are alternated. Then I realized – what woman wants to share a public bathroom with a man? Yech.