Jerusalem — While Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was extolling the virtues of Israel’s economy during this week’s annual Herzilya Conference, an event that attracts the country’s top intellectuals, business leaders and security experts, Chani Ben-Eliyahu, a Jerusalem mother of five with another on the way, huddled in her dark, dank apartment in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood with all the lights off. Dressed in a sweater and a winter jacket at 10 in the morning during an unusually cold snap last week, Ben-Eliyahu flipped on a light switch only when Hershel Puretz, the founder of an organization called Warm the Needy, knocked on her door. Were it not for the fact that Warm the Needy pays $110 toward her family’s bi-monthly electric bill, “we wouldn’t have any heat at all,” Ben-Eliyahu, a diabetic who cleans houses to supplement small subsidies from her husband’s yeshiva and National Insurance, confided. Despite the influx of foreign investors and an abundance of luxury housing projects fetching anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 per square foot, Jerusalem is now the poorest city in Israel, according to the just-released Statistical Yearbook of Jerusalem, published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Read More