Rav Jeremy and Emily Zimmer Tibbetts were in a conversation with a member of their JLIC Jerusalem community, Yvette Latinik, who works at the Jerusalem municipality, when the housing lottery came up. A thought landed immediately: how many of the young people in their community even knew this existed? How many had ever heard it explained in plain English?
They already knew the answer.
So they did what JLIC directors do. They found someone who could help and invited the community over for pizza.
Twenty couples showed up, the room bursting. They kicked things off with an icebreaker: if you could live anywhere in Israel, where would it be? By the end of the evening, that question felt a lot less hypothetical.
Buying a home in Israel feels out of reach for a lot of young Anglos. The numbers look impossible, the system is confusing, and it doesn’t help that the whole thing is in Hebrew. Nobody wants to make a costly mistake because they didn’t understand how something works, so most people just don’t engage with it at all. That’s not something Jeremy and Emily were willing to leave unanswered.
The Expert in the Room
Tzvi Gleiberman is a veteran mortgage broker who has spent years helping Olim and English speakers finance homes in Israel, making sure they understand every step of the process. He gives free talks for Anglo communities all over the country. Originally from New York and now living in Ramat Beit Shemesh with his family, Tzvi is also the kind of person who runs the Jerusalem Marathon, takes his kids camping, and is somehow writing a sefer in whatever time is left.
He sat down with the community and explained the whole thing. No jargon, no sales pitch. Just a straight breakdown of how the system works and what it actually takes to use it. By the end of the evening, the question in the room had shifted. It wasn’t “can we afford a home in Israel?” It was “why did nobody tell us about this sooner?”
The Short Version
The m’chir l’mishtaken, Israel’s government housing lottery, lets eligible buyers purchase brand-new apartments at a subsidized price with only a 10% down payment instead of the standard 25%. On a 1.3 million shekel apartment, that’s the difference between putting down 325,000 shekels and putting down 130,000. No real estate agent fees. No closing costs. The government adds a grant on top for apartments in certain areas.
It’s a lottery, so nothing is guaranteed. But for people who thought homeownership in Israel was a decade away, the math looks very different once someone actually walks you through it.
What This Evening Was Really About
The housing lottery was the topic. The evening was about something else.
The JLIC Jerusalem community is full of young Anglos at exactly that stage: singles, couples, recent arrivals, people who’ve been in Israel for years, all navigating the same questions. The ones that keep coming up aren’t always about Torah or programming. They’re the ones that feel almost too practical to ask out loud: Can we actually stay? How do people afford this? Where do we even start?
JLIC directors across the network show up for those questions every day. It looks different on every campus and in every city. In Jerusalem, on a Tuesday night in April, it looked like a room full of people eating pizza and learning that the path to owning a home in Israel might be a lot more accessible than they thought.
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