About 40 percent of children up to the age of four in
Jerusalem are Palestinians, and 41 out of 100 births in the
capital are to Palestinan mothers. Annual birth rates in
Jerusalem's Palestinian sector are much higher than rates in
the Jewish population: 31 births per 1,000 people in the Arab
population, versus 19 births per 1,000 in the Jewish
sector.
Annual figures for Jerusalem, released by the Jerusalem
Institute for Israel Studies and the Jerusalem Municipality,
show that chareidi children represent a solid majority in the
city's pre-school frameworks.
Chareidi children constitute 62 percent of the children in
compulsory kindergarten, whereas just 38 percent of
Jerusalem's kindergarten children are enrolled in the state
and state-religious streams combined.
On average, a Jewish woman in Jerusalem has 3.8 children,
whereas the figure for Jewish women throughout the country is
2.6 (in Haifa and Tel Aviv the figure is 1.8).
The numbers are higher in Jerusalem mainly due to the large
size of chareidi families which have an average of 7.5
children.
Muslim families in Jerusalem are also large; Muslim women
have an average of 4.5 children, which is slightly below the
national average for Muslims.
Speaking at a press conference held to mark the release of
the city's 2001 data, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert declared:
"I am very worried by Jerusalem's demographic situation.
Nothing is more worrisome than this topic. The situation has
to be taken in hand, but doing so means wide-scale
intervention, and a much more intensive use of national
mechanisms than can be done by the Jerusalem
municipality."
The new data establish that departures from Jerusalem to live
elsewhere lessened in 2001.
In 1999 and 2000, Jerusalem lost an average of 8,000 people a
year; this figure dropped to 5,900 in 2001. The reason is
that fewer city residents left to live in the territories
during 2001. However, in contrast to previous years, more
Jerusalemites left the city to live in Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem's population grew 152 percent between 1967 and
2001. The city's Jewish population, which today stands at
456,000, grew 130 percent in this period, while the Arab
population, 215,400 today, rose by 214 percent.
Over half the city's residents -- 371,000 Jews and Arabs out
of 670,000 -- live in areas that were added to Jerusalem
after the 1967 Six-Day War. A minority (46 percent) of the
residents of post-'67 neighborhoods are Jewish.
In terms of the city's total Jewish population, 62 percent
live within the Green Line boundaries, and 38 percent live in
regions that were annexed to the city after the 1967 war.
If the current intifada has harmed tourism to all parts of
the country, it has delivered a lethal blow to tourism in the
capital.
In the western section of the city, hotel stays have dropped
80 percent over the past two years; in East Jerusalem, the
figure is 100 percent. In the western areas, the number of
persons staying in hotels dropped from 2.85 million in 2000
to 1.36 million in 2001; in the city's eastern (Arab) parts,
this figure dropped from 600,000 in 2000 to 104,500 in
2001.
The statistics indicate a sharp drop in the number of
visitors to museums and cultural institutions in Jerusalem.
This decrease was apparently caused by the security crisis,
and perhaps also by the stagnant economy. In 2001, 1.6
million people visited a defined group of museums and
cultural institutions in the city; in 1999, 4 million visited
the same group of institutions, and 3.7 million in 2000.
