Posted on 03/27/25
| News Source: JPost
Jerusalem, Israel - March 27, 2025 - . Overnight, between Thursday and Friday, Israel will move its clocks forward by one hour, marking the start of daylight saving time.
Dr. Oleg Popov, head of time and frequency measurements at the National Physics Laboratory within the Economy and Industry Ministry, shared insights on the timing shift and its global context.
Israel’s seasonal time change is set by the Time Determination Law of 2013. Daylight saving time begins on the Thursday-Friday night before the last Sunday in March and ends on the last Sunday in October.
The clocks move forward one hour—jumping from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m.
The National Physics Laboratory determines Israel’s official time using four atomic clocks. The national standard, marked as UTC (INPL), aligns with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international system used to synchronize clocks worldwide.
Each country uses local time based on its position within one of 24 global time zones, measured from the prime meridian in Greenwich, near London. Israel is two hours ahead of UTC.
Adjusting clocks at 2:00 a.m. helps maintain synchronization with global timekeeping standards. At that moment in Israel, the time in Greenwich is midnight. Many countries make the switch at 00:00 UTC to ensure consistency across borders.
The concept of daylight saving time dates back to 1784, when Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US, then serving as ambassador to France, proposed that Parisians wake earlier in summer to conserve candles. The idea was not implemented.
Germany became the first country to adopt daylight saving time in April 1916, during World War I, as a coal-saving measure. Britain followed a month later for similar reasons.
Today, most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America have abolished seasonal time changes. In the United States, there is an ongoing debate over whether to end the practice. In 2019, the European Parliament voted to let each member state decide whether to remain on standard time year-round or adopt daylight saving time permanently.