Introduction

Israel is a young country established in 1948, with a current population of about 7.9 million citizens, of whom about 5.9 million are Jewish, 1.6 million Arabic and 0.4 million others (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012a). Israel is a multicultural society and the composition of its population reflects a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, religions and religiosity, languages and migration waves. For example, there were several waves of mass migration to Israel; the first was during the 1950s, immediately after the establishment of the state of Israel, and included holocaust survivors who left Europe and immigrants from Asian-African countries, in particular Southern Mediterranean countries. The second wave began at the end of the 1980s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and continued during the 1990s when about a million new immigrants arrived in Israel, of whom about 16 per cent were older people who currently compose 21 per cent of the total older population of Israel (Brodsky et al, 2012).

Israel is a rapidly ageing society and one of the Mediterranean countries with the longest life expectancies at birth, including Italy and France. Among the older population aged 65+ Jewish people make up the majority (88.8 per cent), 8.5 per cent are Arabs, who are either Moslems, Christians or Druze, and the remainder are not classified by religion. Among the older Jewish people 32.5 per cent were born in Asian/African countries, most of whom emigrated from Southern Mediterranean countries including Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, and also from Northern Mediterranean countries such as Greece, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. Yet the majority of older people (51.3 per cent) emigrated from European and North American countries, in particular from Eastern European countries such as the former Soviet Union countries, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and from Central European countries such as Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France (Brodsky et al, 2012). In terms of religiosity, the majority of the older Jewish population (54.5 per cent) defines itself as religious to some extent, ranging from traditional to ultra-orthodox. Among the Arab older people, 84.5 per cent define themselves as religious.