Survey finds growing Jewish practice among nonreligious Israeli teens, but secular divide deepens

Study shows signs of increased religious practice among non-Orthodox Jewish teens in Israel – with some caveats.

By World Israel News Staff

Nonreligious Israeli teenagers are showing signs of increased engagement with Jewish prayer and traditional practices, according to a new survey, though the trend is concentrated among teens who already come from somewhat traditional families and is accompanied by movement in the opposite direction among the most secular Israelis.

The survey, released by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), found that 46% of nonreligious teenagers said their friends observe more Jewish traditions and practices than they did in the past.

Fewer than one in 10 said their friends were observing fewer.

The teenagers were considerably less likely, however, to report such a change in their own behavior, suggesting that highly visible religious practices may be creating an impression of a broader shift than is actually occurring.

Prayer showed the strongest increase among the practices examined, with 22% of respondents saying they pray more than they did previously.

The pattern resembles one JPPI found among young Israeli adults last year.

In that survey, 38% of young Jews said they had increased their prayer since the outbreak of the war following the October 7 attacks, while 26% said they were reading the Bible or Psalms more frequently.

Among teenagers, increased Sabbath candle lighting among girls and Bible or Psalms reading were the next most prominent changes after prayer.

Tefillin presented one of the clearest examples of the gap between personal behavior and perceptions of peers.

Just 7% of nonreligious teenagers said they personally put on tefillin more often than before, while roughly one-quarter said their friends were doing so more frequently.

JPPI said the difference may partly reflect the visibility of religious practices at schools and on social media.

A single student beginning to wear tzitzit or put on tefillin, for example, can be noticed by an entire class.

That phenomenon has become increasingly visible in some secular Israeli schools.

“If you come to my school, which is a secular high school, sometimes it really looks like a yeshiva,” a 17-year-old student from Petah Tikva told Israel Hayom.

The student described seeing classmates wearing tzitzit and kippot and girls adopting more modest clothing, and said social media — particularly TikTok — appeared to be playing a major role in exposing teenagers to religious content.

Despite the visible signs of greater religious practice, the JPPI findings do not point to a uniform religious revival.

The sharpest distinction was between teenagers describing themselves as “completely secular” and those identifying as “slightly traditional secular” or “traditional.”

Among the completely secular respondents, only 4% said they now observe more Jewish practices, while 35% said they observe fewer.

By contrast, teenagers with an existing connection to Jewish tradition were more likely to report increasing their observance.

JPPI described the result as a simultaneous process in which some groups are becoming more traditional while differences between Israel’s secular and traditional populations grow wider.

“The strong grow stronger and the weak grow weaker,” the report said, stressing that the phrase referred to the degree of traditional practice and was not intended as a value judgment.

Kosher observance demonstrated the same divisions.

Overall, 48% of the nonreligious teenagers surveyed said their homes were kosher.

That figure fell to 22% among completely secular respondents, rose to 52% among those describing themselves as slightly traditional, and reached 80% among traditional teenagers.

More than half of the teenagers surveyed said they avoided foods such as pork and shrimp, even though some did not otherwise describe their homes as kosher.

The survey also found little evidence that the visible increase in Jewish practices represents a comparable surge in belief in God.

About half of respondents said they believed in God when presented with a yes-or-no question, while roughly one-quarter said they did not know.

When offered more nuanced choices, slightly more than half selected an answer indicating belief, including belief accompanied by doubt.

Among completely secular teenagers, 64% chose responses leaning toward disbelief.

Among slightly traditional secular teens, 65% selected answers indicating belief, while belief was overwhelming among those identifying as traditional.

Those findings are broadly consistent with previous studies showing high overall belief in God in Israel without clear evidence of a major increase following October 7.

Pew Research Center found in its 2024 Israeli data that 74% of adults said they believed in God.

Most teenagers also said their level of traditional practice was similar to that of their parents.

Roughly one-fifth described themselves as more traditional than their parents and a similar proportion as less traditional.

The report’s authors cautioned against treating the study as a statistically representative survey of all Israeli teenagers.

JPPI analyzed responses from approximately 270 Israelis between the ages of 15 and 18 gathered through three survey panels.

Religious and ultra-Orthodox respondents were excluded, leaving teenagers who identified as completely secular, slightly traditional secular or traditional.

The institute said sampling teenagers makes it difficult to produce the same level of statistical reliability as its larger adult surveys, describing the results as indications of emerging trends rather than definitive measurements of the entire youth population.

The findings nevertheless mirror changes educators say they have observed since October 7, including greater interest in Torah classes, tefillin, Sabbath observance, challah-separation ceremonies and Jewish symbols.

Hazki Shoham, a Bar-Ilan University scholar and research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, cautioned against interpreting those developments as the beginning of widespread Orthodox observance.

“I don’t expect there to be a mass return to religion,” Shoham said.

Instead, he argued, many teenagers appear to be choosing individual elements of Jewish tradition while retaining a strong commitment to personal autonomy.

Taken together, the findings suggest that the most visible change among Israel’s nonreligious youth may not be a wholesale turn toward religious observance, but a growing willingness among traditionally inclined teenagers to publicly incorporate Jewish rituals and symbols into their daily lives — even as the most secular segment moves further away from them.

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