Lessons in Community Building—From Israel: How a Religious Community Took Root in Ariel

From its early days as the Shomron’s outlier secular town, Ariel is finally finding its Jewish soul.

Founded in 1978 with government approval, Ariel spreads over a scenic and breezy mountain top local Arabs once dubbed “the mountain of death” because its land was considered nonarable. Though Ariel always had religious residents, they were a small minority.

That has changed.

“Today, more religious people are moving to Ariel than secular,” says Chava Rozmarin, a veteran Ariel Religious Council employee and longtime resident. South Ariel, a new neighborhood whose first phase includes 839 homes, is nearly complete and includes three synagogues and a mikveh; there are two other mikvaot in other parts of town. According to Rozmarin, 300 religious families are already living there.

With fourteen Orthodox synagogues, two religious elementary schools, a brand-new religious girls’ junior high and plans for a religious girls’ high school, two Bnei Akiva chapters, and even a kippah-wearing mayor, Yair Chetboun, religious life is thriving in the city, and the future looks bright.

How did a religious community come to be built in Ariel?

“Some religious Jews come for ideological reasons,” says Rozmarin. “They want to live across the Green Line to keep it part of Israel. [At the same time,] they like living in a real city that retains the flavor of a yishuv.” Rozmarin says that Ariel is now home to 1,000 religious families, making up 30 percent of the city’s population. Once a sleepy outpost, Ariel now boasts shopping malls, medical clinics and a university with 17,000 students—some of whom end up settling there for good.

Many of the religious newcomers actually grew up in Ariel and have come back home to raise their own families. Some secular families do this, too. “People like living in Ariel,” says Avi Zimmerman, a US immigrant and a consultant who worked closely with each of Ariel’s three mayors.

It wasn’t always this way. When Zimmerman and his wife, Dana, landed in town in the early 2000s, religious life was far less vibrant. “Back then, the Bnei Akiva chapter had five kids,” recalls Zimmerman. Today there are 250.

Approximately 1,000 religious families live in Ariel. Courtesy of the Ariel Development Fund

In those years, half of Ariel’s residents were Russian immigrants who were drawn to the city by its visionary mayor, Ron Nachman, who greeted them upon their arrival at Ben Gurion airport. Some had brought along their non-Jewish spouses and children.

“There was fear of Jews and non-Jews mixing, so many of the religious residents left,” recalls Rozmarin.

“When we came, the other religious people said, ‘you’ll leave too,’” recalls Rabbi Avner Ben Yosef, who arrived in the city twenty-seven years ago as part of a six-family Garin Torani—a group dispatched by the Shiloh Hesder yeshivah with the mission of revitalizing religious life in the area.

(A Garin Torani is a group of young Religious Zionist families who move together into a neighborhood to effect social change and strengthen Judaism.)

Religious neighborhoods dot the city of Ariel. One such neighborhood, led by Rabbi Ben Yosef, is the Shvut Ariel community, a network of 300 families spread over three synagogues.

“[In the early years,] I put ads in the religious newspapers to get people to come [to Ariel],” recalls Rabbi Ben Yosef. For the most part, his efforts weren’t successful, at least not initially.

One factor keeping people away was the persistent and widely publicized rumor that Ariel was rife with missionary activity—it was not.

“We were very scared to come,” says Tamar Silberschein, a former New Jerseyite and a Torah teacher who arrived in 2005 along with twenty other families who came from the Gush Katif town of Netzarim.

“The town was very secular and very nationalistic,” recalls Rabbi Zion Tawil, the rabbi of the Netzarim community in Ariel, known as Netzer Ariel, and head of the Netzarim Hesder Yeshiva.

Though Ariel always had religious residents, they were a small minority. That has changed.

The Netzarim community was founded after the disengagement of 2005. Evacuees from Gush Katif were looking for a place to settle; Ariel—its mayor, Ron Nachman, and the townspeople—warmly welcomed them.

But most of the members of Netzarim couldn’t adjust to a diverse city after being thrown out of their pastoral all-religious Gush Katif village. Of the seventy-six families who came, only twenty stayed. The rest moved to the Gaza envelope to recreate their destroyed home.

For those who stayed, it wasn’t easy.

“Our kids were shocked to see cars on Shabbat,” says Asi Hiller, a retired nurse and mother of eleven who came to Ariel with the Netzarim group.

While the Shiloh Garin Torani families spread throughout the city, the Netzarim evacuees settled together in a tightly knit enclave that came to be known as the Atar Hakaravanim—the caravan compound. For the first nine years, they lived in what was essentially a trailer park of tin-sided temporary homes. Today, they reside in permanent housing in a nearby neighborhood.

But it was ideology that drew some of them to Ariel.

They believed that their fight against the disengagement failed because the Gush Katif communities were perceived as having distanced themselves from the rest of the country.

Their answer was to “join the nation”—to embed themselves in existing cities and towns and, in doing so, bridge the divide that had once left them isolated. By building relationships and living side by side with the broader Israeli public, they hoped to change hearts and prevent their tragedy from repeating.

Like the Shiloh Garin Torani, which was committed to making a positive religious and social impact on the local population, the Netzarim community wanted to make their mark in Ariel as well. “Our goal was to integrate,” recalls Hiller.

The city’s secular residents weren’t far away—they were right next door or down the block.

Though Ariel’s religious residents prefer to live within walking distance of a shul, the town lacks an exclusively religious neighborhood. The closest approximation is a section of the Moriah neighborhood, near Ariel University, where many Netzarim families eventually settled. Even that area is mixed: the Netzarim residents often rent out rooms to secular university students. “We all live near chilonim,” says Dana Zimmerman. “The goal was, of course, to be good neighbors, and the community has succeeded.”

Working side by side at the university and at Ariel’s other businesses and health care clinics, religious residents gradually wove themselves into the city’s social fabric. “For twenty years, I ran the local Kupat Cholim [a branch of one of the health funds that provides health care services in Israel],” says Hiller. “And I heard a lot of praise for the religious community.”

Hiller and her husband, Rabbi Yair Hiller, also made ties with the Russian community. She recalls one particularly moving Shabbat meal that they shared with a secular Russian couple. “This was their first real Shabbat meal,” says Hiller. “When I brought out a kugel, the husband jumped out of his seat to tell us that his grandmother made the same dish in Russia. He was so emotional.”

Eventually, the couple became fully observant. While that isn’t the norm, some of the Russians living in Ariel do move closer to their Jewish roots. “There is a large population of [intermarried] Russians who have converted to Judaism,” says Rozmarin.

Perhaps the key to Ariel’s religious success is that the city is rich in chesed organizations.

Anyone seeking Shabbat hospitality can turn to the local Shulchan Shabbat, which feeds some sixty people a week, among them students, singles and widowed or divorced people. Efforts are underway to establish a second branch in the city.

The Ginsberg Gemach, which operates through the city’s welfare department, provides money and food to needy families before holidays. The Netzarim and Shvut Ariel communities operate similar initiatives.

Additionally, there are gemachim for medicines, breast pumps, and baby carriers, as well as meal trains and other help for families in which one of the parents is doing IDF reserve duty. All of these groups serve both the secular and the religious.

In a society that is so torn by disagreements, many of them over religion, Ariel points the way to a better future. Religious and non-religious can live together with respect. “We talk about it daily,” says Yaden Cohen, a forty-one-year-old Ariel resident who is an educator, father of eight and director of OU Israel’s Teen Center in Ariel. “Our goal is to influence the public space to be more value oriented. We want to be a lighthouse for Israeli society.”

Since 2008, the OU Savitsky Home Relocation Fair has helped thousands of Orthodox families find the right community in the US and in Israel. Held every other year, the now-virtual event, directed by Rebbetzin Judi Steinig, OU senior director of Community Projects and Partnerships, draws more than 2,500 participants and features dozens of communities from across the US and Israel. The OU Savitsky 2026 Community Fair is scheduled for Sunday, February 22, 2026. If you are a community leader and would like to showcase your community, please apply at https://communities.ou.org/savitsky-fair-2026/. For those looking to relocate, stay tuned for upcoming registration information.

Carol Ungar is an award-winning writer whose essays have appeared in Tablet, the Jerusalem Post, Ami Magazine, Jewish Action and other publications. She teaches memoir writing and is the author of several children’s books.