New drive seeks to attract expat tech workers
Back2Tech opens next week
A new program initiated by the Israel Innovation Authority will try to bring back Israeli hi-tech workers living abroad to fill thousands of vacant jobs.
Israel’s hi-tech sector has long complained about the lack of available talent for science, development and technology positions. But the sector’s massive growth over years has exacerbated the situation.
There are not enough qualified people in the country to fill the 18,500 open hi-tech positions, according to Yotam Tzuker of CQ Global, which will manage the program.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has encouraged many Israelis to return home. An estimated 600,000 Israelis currently live abroad, 10,000 of whom have a technological background.
The new program, Back2Tech, opens on March 24 with an online meeting of Israeli hi-tech figures who will outline a variety of employment opportunities in companies and development centers operating in Israel. The goal of the program is to allow Israeli hi-tech workers and their families to return to Israel with a guaranteed job.
The program will create meetings between companies and candidates to ascertain mutual suitability that will guarantee employment and facilitate return to Israel. In some cases, accepted tech professionals will be able to start working remotely abroad and coordinate their return at a mutually suitable time.
In the past, the prevailing perception was that Israel’s tech sector was immature and could only develop small start-ups that would be sold to large global companies, Tzuker said.
Now, the story has changed, and Israeli entrepreneurs are turning start-ups into giant industry leaders worth billions of dollars, he said. Multinational corporate giants are also establishing development centers to create influential products for the global market, he added
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fragments of textiles still carrying their bright colors dating back to the Roman period, parts of sandals, a small comb with a 2,000-year-old lice stuck between its teeth, seeds and pieces of rope.
Dozens of scroll fragments from a biblical scroll dating back some 2,000 years were also unearthed in the first discovery of its kind in decades.
About half of the area still remains to be surveyed and shed further light into life in Israel over the course of millennia.
It’s the stuff, unfortunately, that late night comedy routines are made of: the Jerusalem Rabbinate demanding that a kosher restaurant expunge the word “bacon” from its menu.
That’s right, the popular Jerusalem eatery near Mahane Yehuda – Crave – was told recently by a kashrut inspector that it would have to rename its “Lamb Bacon” entry on the menu, which just happens to be one of the favorite toppings for its hamburgers and the star in its kosher BLT (bacon, lettuce and tomato) sandwich.
Why? So that customers don’t somehow associate the lamb bacon in the kosher eatery with pork. Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon would have a ball with that type of material.
Crave is a kosher restaurant which for years has had a kashrut certificate from the Jerusalem Rabbinate. The Rabbinate is not saying the restaurant is not kosher, only that the word is.
But since when is the Rabbinate in the business of certifying words as kosher or not? Since when does the Rabbinate employ mashgiachei milim (word supervisors)?
Actually, over the last year, the Rabbinate has become inordinately interested in words and their power. For instance, in September the Chief Rabbinate was forced by a 2017 court decision to publish a kashrut directive stipulating that businesses who do not pay them for certification can display a certificate declaring the kashrut standards they observe as long as they do not use the word “kosher” for their eateries.
Why not? Because the Rabbinate uses the word “kosher” on the certificates it issues to restaurants, and does not want to let any other kashrut supervisory body use that powerful and emotive word – and possibly grab a slice of the lucrative business of issuing kashrut licenses that it has dominated for so long.
In other words, a restaurant with a kashrut certificate from the Tzohar religious-Zionist rabbinical organization might meet all the halachic requirements for kashrut, but can’t print the word “kosher” on its certificate. More material there for Fallon and Kimmel.
Once upon a time, restaurants received a kashrut certificate based on whether the food they served and the manner in which it was prepared met halachic dietary requirements.
Then the authority was expanded, and kashrut authorities could take away a kashrut certificate for restaurants open on Shabbat, or from hotels that held “Sylvester” parties on New Year’s Eve.
The recent intervention by the Rabbinate in what can be listed on Crave’s menu is just another step up the ladder.
The restaurant was compelled to change the entry from “Lamb Bacon’’ to “facon,” to indicate it was fake bacon and not a pork product. Co-owner Yoni Van Leeuwen was quoted as saying that the matter was raised just a week before the restaurant was to get its kashrut certification renewed, and it was “very clear that we didn’t have a choice” but to remove the offending word from the menu.
What’s next: kosher sushi restaurants serving “shrimp” rolls made out of faux shrimp being forced to change their menus? No more kosher cheeseburgers – made out of parve cheese – on the menus of a multitude of unique burger joints across the land who serve them?
And what is going to happen on Passover? Will the Chief Rabbinate nix the word “Pizza” on the menus of restaurants serving kosher-for-Passover food because pizza dough is generally made from leavened flour? No kosher for Passover hamburgers, because hamburgers are associated with buns made of bread?
The Jerusalem Rabbinate’s intervention in what is on Crave’s menu is an example of the rabbinical establishment’s overreach, and it is is an overreach that leaves both the restaurateur, as well as the Rabbinate, poorer.
Restaurateurs loses out because, in addition to all the other obstacles that need to be cleared in order to operate and run a thriving business, they now have to worry about losing their kashrut certificates if one of the names of their dishes does not get rabbinical approval.
And the Chief Rabbinate loses out because this just casts it in a silly light, making it look as if it is focusing on inconsequential trivialities, rather than on truly significant religious issues that it could and should be dealing with.
Whereas the first part of Lawrence Becker’s letter regarding Nitzan Horowitz and the ICJ is reasonable (“Unleash the ICC on Israel,” Letters, March 15), one gains the impression the ad hominem attacks on Horowitz’s lifestyle show the true source of his ire.
The selectivity of this attack is very interesting. The Bible uses the word “abomination” to describe a variety of acts, from eating a BLT sandwich, usury, creating civil strife, breaking agreements, cheating and oppressing the poor. I wonder when the religious community will oppose these last five items (lol).
Furthermore, the same “Book of Books” permits genocide, selling one’s daughter as a sex-slave, and the killing of sons who eat too much food. So clearly a good source of morality for the 58th century.
Given that almost every week another prominent religious person is literally caught with his pants down, that child abuse (of both sexes) is endemic and enabled in the religious community, and that both Shas and UTJ are in favor of prostitution, it is laughable that Becker promotes his lifestyle as the basis for a just society.
KOBI SIMPSON-LAVY Rehovot
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union wants to work with the US government to curb aviation’s contribution to climate change, including through possible pollution standards on jet fuel, a senior European Commission official said on Tuesday.
The EU has said every sector must contribute to its goal of eliminating its net emissions of the greenhouse gases causing climate change by 2050.
That includes aviation, whose global emissions increased over the past two decades until the COVID-19 pandemic grounded flights and caused a temporary drop in pollution last year.
As well as emitting carbon dioxide, flights contribute to climate change by producing nitrous gases, soot and water vapor contrails that can cause an amplified warming effect.
“Historically... these nonCO2 impacts haven’t really been taken into account, and maybe we could work with the US administration to encourage them to be taken into account,” said Damien Meadows, acting head of the European Commission’s department for aviation climate policy.
An EU study in November found non-CO2 emissions are responsible for about two thirds of the global warming caused by aviation.
“If we worked with the United States we could try to raise fuel standards to diminish the amount of soot elements causing non-CO2 impacts,” Meadows told the European Parliament.
Another option could be to design transatlantic flight routes to minimize their condensation trails, he said.
The Biden administration has given early signals it will scrutinize the climate impact of aviation, including with the appointment of Annie Petsonk as the Department of Transportation’s top international aviation official.
Petsonk, an environmental lawyer, worked for years at the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund to push the United States to adopt more stringent aviation emissions policies.
Meanwhile, Europe is drafting targets, due to be proposed in the second quarter of the year, for airlines to use a minimum share of sustainable aviation fuels. It is also mulling fuel tax changes to speed the shift away from fossil fuel kerosene.