For a growing number of Jews in Israel, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

JTA — You ask Yaeli Amir, a seven-year-old Jewish girl growing up in a rural town in Israel, what her favorite holiday is, and she won’t name any of the almost countless Jewish ones. Instead, she’ll say, without hesitation, “Christmas!”

Amir knows all about Santa Claus, and the decorated tree people keep in their home, and the gift-giving. But the joy derives primarily from the weather: “It’s fun because it snows and you get to play in the snow,” she said.

She hasn’t exactly gotten to play in the snow on Christmas in Israel. But she’s imbibed the holiday’s traditions while watching movies like “The Grinch” and going on a family trip to New York City, where she got to hug a Santa mannequin.

Amir’s secular Jewish parents embrace Christmas, not for religious reasons but as an occasion for celebration. The same holds for Halloween.

Yaeli’s mother, Dana, said her rural cooperative village, known as a moshav, is planning to host an American-style Halloween with costumes and trick-or-treating next year.

“I am on the moshav’s education committee and we just talked about how we have to plan a Halloween party next year because all over Israel they have started to celebrate Halloween,” she said. “We are about the last moshav that hasn’t.”

Signs that similar sentiments are widespread can be seen all over Tel Aviv, the bastion of secular Israel. The party stores near Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market carry Christmas-themed decorations and clothing accessories. Tiv Ta’am, a supermarket chain notable for selling food that doesn’t meet kosher dietary rules, has a large Christmas tree display at the entrance to its flagship store. Only about 2 percent of the population of Israel are Christian, the vast majority of whom identify as ethnically Arab, according to the Pew Research Center.

One of the factors likely driving this trend is the influx over the past 30 years of more than a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of whom were deeply secular and, in some cases, identified as Christian or had Christian spouses. The highly assimilated immigrants also brought with them a civic holiday called Novy God that resembles Christmas.