D.he customer is fiddling in her handbag, then she has her cell phone at hand and the app with the barcode open. The lady at the reception takes a quick look, and off you go. The “Space” fitness studio in Tel Aviv has also reopened on Sunday afternoon after ten months of pandemic-related closure. And with the so-called green passport, the green certificate from the Ministry of Health, every vaccinated Israeli can go to the sports studios again. The document can be downloaded from the app by anyone who has been vaccinated with both doses for at least a week or who has been infected with corona in the past and has proven to recover. Since the ministry stores the population’s vaccination data centrally anyway, approval can be activated by entering the telephone number, ID card data and the date of birth. It is valid for six months plus a week from the last vaccination.
Jochen Stahnke
Political correspondent for Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan based in Tel Aviv.
There are still only a handful of people who train in the space studio in the basement. Nader Samara spends his lunch break on the weight bench. The engineer works for the Intel group, but has been working from home for months. Nothing about that will change for the time being, he says. Samara was infected with Covid last summer, as were more than 750,000 Israelis. That is why Samara now has the green passport and does not have to participate in the discussion about vaccinations. Since most of the employees at Intel work from home, there is still no directive from the management to be vaccinated, he says.
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