The Israel Central Bureau for Statistics recently published some of its population data classified according to age for 2018. The statistics cover a period of several years, and are also organized by neighborhood. We looked into the ages of residents in various Jerusalem areas.

In 2018 there were 30,800 people living in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, slightly more than the number living there in 2009 (when there were 29,500 residents).  Today, the percentage of children in Gilo under the age of five is 10.6%, and from the percentage of children in the five to nine and 10 to 14 age groups, we see that the neighborhood is undergoing demographic renewal. The emergence of this renewal could already be discerned a decade ago, when nine percent of the population was comprised of young children.

Another conspicuous demographic group is that of the parents of these children. Currently, the prominent ages are 25 to 34, while a decade ago it was only the ages 20 to 24. It appears that along with the maturation of the parents in the neighborhood, additional young parents moved to Gilo, many of whom would now be numbered in the 25 to 29 age group.

The third group which stands out is the 60- to 64-year-olds. This group, which was even more prominent a decade ago (back then the 50- to 64-year-olds were more prominent), are the residents who were in their early twenties in the mid-1970s. That is when the neighborhood was being populated, and they are apparently the original residents who moved to Gilo as young couples. Perhaps this group was more prominent a decade ago due to the fact that our assessment for the 65 and up age group is inexact.

The ratio between the young parents and the number of children in the neighborhood suggests that there may have been an influx of ultra-Orthodox residents. A similar pattern may be observed in other neighborhoods characterized by ultra-Orthodox migration, and one such example is Kiryat HaYovel. The age structures of additional neighborhoods, including Kiryat HaYovel, appears below.

Translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann