About Meidahon
A financial reference for the years Israel still feels like a translation.
Meidahon is a Hebrew-language financial education platform. This English section is built for Olim navigating Israeli pensions, taxes, banking, mortgages, and insurance from outside the language those systems were written in. It is free, independent, and written by a person who puts their name on it.
Ido Weiss
Founder · Meidahon
I spent years in Israeli hi-tech and the markets. I've personally managed the pensions, insurance, and investments for myself, my family, and friends, while leading an active investor community for many years. Every entry on Meidahon is translated directly from Israeli law and regulation into plain language, so the next document arriving in your mailbox actually makes sense. Even at 10:30 at night.
- Investing
- Pensions
- Insurance
- Mortgages
- Tax
- Banking
- Financial Planning
Why this section exists
Israeli finance is hard enough in Hebrew. Done in your second language, it eats evenings.
Most Olim arrive having already managed money perfectly well in another country. What collapses in Israel is not financial competence. It is access. The pension statement uses Hebrew acronyms with no English equivalent. The bank assigns you a kupat gemel without asking whether you understand what one is. The Bituach Leumi letter quoting a four-digit number with no context decides your next phone call and the rest of your week.
Translating a single document with an LLM gets you ninety per cent of the way and leaves the load-bearing ten per cent missing: the part where Israeli law diverges from anything an American, British, French, or South African Oleh has seen before. The Olim section of Meidahon is built for that ten per cent: a glossary that actually explains karen hishtalmut, articles that walk a U.S. citizen through PFIC traps, calculators that price an Israeli mortgage without pretending it works like a thirty-year fixed.
We started in Hebrew because that is the surface area of the problem. We added English because the questions Olim ask are different enough, and important enough, to deserve their own writing rather than a translation layer. A pension article written for a fifty-year-old Israeli who has been paying into the same kupah since their first job does not answer the same question as a thirty-year-old American who arrived three months ago and was auto-enrolled into something nobody explained.
The result is a section of the site that treats the Olim experience as primary, not secondary. The structure is built around what arrives in your post: a pension statement, a property tax bill, a credit-card fee notice, a Bituach Leumi letter. Each one gets walked through in the order an actual person would read it, and the unfamiliar parts get named in plain English with a Hebrew anchor for when you need to repeat the term to a banker.
How content gets researched
The four rules every page on this site has to pass.
Finance writing is only as useful as it is current and verifiable. Below is what stands behind each entry. If a page on this site does not meet these standards, it is a bug. Write to the editorial address at the bottom of the page and it will be fixed.
Every entry traces back to Israeli statute, the Capital Markets Authority, the Bank of Israel, the Tax Authority, Bituach Leumi, or the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. No screenshots of forum threads, no rumours from immigrant Facebook groups dressed up as fact.
Where the law treats new immigrants differently (the ten-year tax exemption on foreign income, foreign-currency mortgage rules, U.S.-citizen pension caveats), the difference is named explicitly and dated, not buried.
Numbers stay in shekels. Where dollars or pounds clarify intuition, both are shown with the conversion date attached. We do not quietly convert and let the figure rot once the rate moves.
Each entry carries a last-updated stamp. When tax brackets, social-security ceilings, or pension regulations change, the affected pages are revised before the next quarter. Stale finance writing is worse than no writing at all.
What is not on this site
The four things Meidahon does not do, on purpose.
Trust on a finance site is not a vibe. It is a list of behaviours the writer has committed to refusing, in writing, in advance. Here is ours. If any of the following is ever true of a page on this site, that page has failed our own standard and the editorial inbox below is the place to flag it.
- 01
Paid placements masquerading as advice
No bank, broker, pension fund, or insurance company pays to be recommended on Meidahon. If a product is named, it is because it is genuinely useful in the situation being described. - 02
Affiliate referrals that bend the verdict
Where affiliate links exist (they help keep the site free), they never decide the recommendation. The verdict is written first; the link is added only if it points to the same product the verdict already named. - 03
Hebrew articles run through a translator
The Olim section is not a mirror of the Hebrew site. Each article here was researched and written for an English-speaking newcomer in Israel, with the questions Olim actually ask, in American/British English that does not read like a translation. - 04
Personal advice or product recommendations
Meidahon is financial education, not regulated advice. Nothing on this site is a substitute for a licensed Israeli pension consultant, tax advisor, or attorney when your situation calls for one.
How to reach the people behind this
Two addresses, both read by a person.
One inbox is for general questions, partnership enquiries, and the obvious human-being category of correspondence. The other is for editorial corrections: a number that has gone stale, a regulation cited from the wrong year, a sentence that misreads how the law actually works. Editorial mail is read first.
Editorial standards
Our full editorial policy (sourcing, review cadence, independence, comparison methodology, correction process) is published in long form on the main site.
Read the full editorial standards