Israel Daylight Time

[Chris Carrier]

Ephraim Silverberg > INTERNET:ephraim at cs.huji.ac.il wrote:
 
>Yesterday, the Knesset (Israeli parliament) passed a law changing the
>daylight savings changeover times for 1997 (a mere ten days from when the
>old times were to take effect).
 
>An article from the English-language Jerusalem Post of late January explains
>the rational for the change and can be found in:
 
>       ftp://ftp.huji.ac.il/users/ephraim/tz/timezone97.ps.gz
 
>Please note that the starting time mentioned in the English-language article
>is NOT the time that was finally decided upon by the Knesset.
 
Could you please post the article here?  Not all of us have Web access, sadly.
 
>According to the Office of the Secretary General of the Ministry of
>Interior, there is NO set rule for Daylight-Savings/Standard time changes.
>Each year they decide anew what havoc to wreak on the country.  However,
>there is a "supposed" set of rules which is subject to change depending
>on the party the Minister of Interior, the size of the coalition
>government, the phase of the moon and the direction of the wind...
 
Sounds like Indiana in the good old days before the Uniform Time Act where
each county had its own time, each city within that county could secede from
that, and where a 35-mile stretch of road had seven different sets of rules.
 
I heard an apocrphyal story from Indiana at that time that a city council met
on a Saturday evening and decided to cancel DST which was to go into effect at
2 a.m. that night (Sunday morning).  The police and fire departments went
around all over town late that evening and early next morning broadcasting the
change on their bullhorns.
 
Although the 1999-2009 dates do bounce around the Gregorian calendar quite a
bit, in the Jewish calendar they are quite consistent: DST begins on the
fourth Sunday in Nisan and ends on the first Sunday after Elul 20.
 
(Ran the dates through a program of mine that takes Civil dates and translates
them into a number of other calendars, including the Jewish).