• Rosh Hashanah is upon us, and with it a fitting stack of good news to carry into the new year — a bit of everything this week, from the skies to the hospital wards.
• The skies over Ben Gurion are getting busier again. United Airlines landed its first Newark-to-Tel Aviv flight since February on Wednesday, ending a suspension that began with Operation Roaring Lion, with a third daily flight due by November. Delta resumed its JFK route just two days earlier, and further afield, SAS is bringing back Copenhagen-Tel Aviv service next month while Wizz Air adds five new European destinations. Slowly, the airlines are coming back — a quiet but real sign that the skies over Israel are reopening for business.
• Google is putting down deeper tech roots here, assembling a new Israel-based team to design AI chips for robots and autonomous systems. The unit is being built around Guy Kaminitz, a former Hailo executive, alongside Ido Bukspan, the former CEO of Pliops, who will lead data-networking chip development. Neither the size of the team nor its exact location has been disclosed yet, but it's another vote of confidence in Israeli hardware talent from one of the world's biggest tech companies.
• Turpaz Industries CEO Karen Cohen Khazon marked the completion of a NIS 70 million donation this week, with Sheba Medical Center inaugurating its new Institute for Obstetric and Gynecologic Imaging in memory of her late parents. The gift, split between Sheba, Beilinson and Soroka, was announced last year as 1% of Cohen Khazon's family shares in Turpaz — proof that some of the country's quieter philanthropy is only now, a year on, cutting the ribbon.
• And ahead of the holiday table, plenty of Israelis are making sure no one else's is empty. With demand for food aid up 32% this year, the charity Latet has enlisted household names — Osem-Nestlé, Strauss, Harel, Bank Yahav and others — to help pack and fund more than 30,000 food packages for families and elderly Israelis this Rosh Hashanah, with the public pitching in through Shufersal, Bit and Wolt as well. A hard year for plenty of families, met by a very large number of people showing up for them.
• Proof that Israel contains multitudes: next weekend, the Khan Gamalia oasis at Ein Yahav in the Arava turns into a three-day mini-Woodstock, as the long-running Grateful Dead Gathering returns for its fifteenth-plus year of desert tie-dye and tribute bands. Ten live acts are booked, including The Hardest Daze, Israel's own Dead cover band, and The Rusties, doing their best Neil Young. Somewhere in the desert between the Dead Sea and the Jordanian border, the sixties, it turns out, never actually ended.
• And in Rosh Hashanah news you can actually eat: bakery chain Ne'eman marked its holiday collection launch by revealing that Israelis are buying 15.5% more honey cake than they did last year — a trend it's celebrating by making the classic loaf both bigger (550 grams up to 600) and a shekel cheaper (down to NIS 39), alongside a new premium line featuring a pistachio-kadaif torte and a chocolate-espresso kugelhopf. Even the ancient honey cake, it seems, needed a glow-up.
• Whatever this year brings, it arrives on the back of a country still building, still welcoming visitors home, and still looking out for its own. Shana tova to all our readers — may it be a good and sweet one.