About Otiyot

Otiyot

Otiyot, meaning "Letters" in Hebrew, is a Hebrew-language children's magazine published in Jerusalem, in the Jerusalem District of Israel, for readers from the national-religious sector. It was founded in 1987 by the writer and broadcaster Uri Orbach, who was also its first editor, in order to give religious children a paper of their own. The clean batch record for this rollout lists its city as Jerusalem and describes it as a children's magazine for religious and general young readers, publishing stories, features and activities in Hebrew. Over nearly four decades the paper has passed through several owners and two mergers, changed its name first to Otiyot LeYeladim and finally to Otiyot VeYeladim, "Otiyot and Children," and it is today a biweekly, subscription-only magazine of 84 pages for readers aged seven to fifteen, published by the Mayim Tikshoret publishing company. Its history is one of the clearest case studies in Israeli media of a sector building its own children's culture, and of what that culture chose to include, and to leave out.

Founding in 1987: Uri Orbach and an unmet need

Otiyot was founded in 1987 by Uri Orbach, who served as its first editor. Its purpose, as recorded in the paper's history, was to answer the need of the young religious reader who wanted to avoid unsuitable or immodest content that appeared in other children's and youth papers of the time, such as Maariv LaNoar and Rosh Ehad. The founding was therefore an act of cultural self-definition. National-religious families in 1980s Israel were full participants in the country's Hebrew culture, but the general children's press was written from a secular standpoint and carried material many religious parents considered inappropriate for their children. Orbach's answer was not a sermon sheet but a real children's paper, dealing with general subjects alongside content intended specifically for the religious reader. That combination, general interest edited within religious boundaries, has defined the paper ever since. Orbach remained the first name on its list of veteran editors and among its best-known writers, and the paper he founded became the flagship children's publication of the national-religious public.

Content for a national-religious childhood

From its first years, Otiyot mixed the ordinary pleasures of a children's paper with material rooted in its readers' own world. Its documented contents included ideas on the weekly Torah portion, information about what was happening in the religious settlements, columns by counsellors of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and riddles and crosswords on Jewish subjects, alongside general topics. The formula respected the actual week of a national-religious child: school, youth movement, synagogue, settlement or religious neighbourhood, and the cycle of the Jewish year. Scholarship on the Israeli children's press has used Otiyot as the representative national-religious case: a widely cited comparison of three children's papers, Zarkor for the Haredi sector, Otiyot for the national-religious sector and Kulenu for the secular sector, published in the journal Panim in 2001, examined how each paper's language and sections expressed a different conception of childhood and of adult authority. Otiyot's own anniversary writing, preserved in the Ben-Yehuda Project's lexicon files, shows its editors thinking explicitly about that responsibility: the paper kept a weekly-portion section that approached the parasha through topical angles or through the eyes of a child's life, devoted a whole issue to the theme of miracles at Hanukkah, and at times entered disagreements inside the religious public itself, as when a Shavuot story about a girl who wished to deliver her bat mitzvah sermon in synagogue raised a sensitive feminist question for its readership. The editor who described those choices presented the paper's strength as attentiveness: the child reader feels the paper listens to the pulse of his or her life, and does not flinch when that pulse quickens.

Early financial trouble: Kulenu and Beit Orot

Sector papers live on narrow markets, and Otiyot's early history shows the strain. Around 1990 the paper ran into financial difficulties, was bought by Kulenu, itself a children's weekly, and was operated within its framework. Around 1992 the paper was bought again, this time by the Beit Orot institutions. The sequence is instructive: a paper created to serve one public was kept alive first by a general children's publisher and then by a religious educational institution, and it survived both transitions with its identity intact. Through these changes the paper continued to appear for its core readership, and the institutional backing of Beit Orot gave it a stable home for the following period. Otiyot's biography in these years parallels that of many small Israeli periodicals, whose survival depended on finding patrons or partners for whom the paper's mission justified its modest economics. What distinguishes Otiyot is that each rescue preserved the founding bargain of 1987: general children's content, filtered through the values of the national-religious home.

Editors and the shaping of a sector's paper

The paper's veteran editors include its founder Uri Orbach, Bambi Sheleg, Hayuta Deutsch and Liron Nagler-Cohen, names that map the paper onto the wider world of national-religious letters, since several of them were also prominent in that sector's adult journalism and literature. Under their editorships Otiyot developed its durable features: serialised stories, comics, puzzles, an English section, current-affairs material and opportunities for readers to appear in print. The editorship changed character in 2011, when Lia Rotner became editor. Rotner had begun her professional path as a youth reporter at the paper itself, one of the best-known products of its young-reporters system, and her appointment closed a circle between the paper and the generation it had trained. She edited the paper until 2014, and the circumstances of her departure, described below, became one of the most reported episodes in the paper's history. She was succeeded by Penina Gefen. After the later merger with the magazine Yeladim, the paper was edited by Adi Aharon and Nofia Bar-Nitzan, and its current editors are Hana Naki and Roni Botzer, whose names head the present-day sections table of Otiyot VeYeladim.

Merger with Makor LeYeladim in 2011

In 2011 Otiyot was merged with Makor LeYeladim, the children's paper of the Makor Rishon group, under the name Otiyot LeYeladim, "Otiyot for Children." After a few months the name was shortened back to Otiyot. The merger united the two children's titles of the national-religious press under one roof, and the paper in its new format was lighter in content and contained many pages of comics. The merger also combined the two papers' supplements: Sukariyot, "Candies," Otiyot's supplement for kindergarten to third-grade readers, which had appeared monthly alongside the paper, was merged with Makor LeYeladim's monthly Anakim under the Sukariyot name; in 2012 the younger readers' monthly was closed, and since then several pages for younger readers have been placed inside Otiyot itself. Between 2014 and 2018 the paper was under the sponsorship of Tchelet Tikshoret. The paper was then acquired by Mayim Tikshoret, the company that also owns the magazines Yeladim and Pnima, a change of ownership reported in the religious press in April 2018 under the headline that Otiyot was passing into new hands again. In 2019 came the second merger: Otiyot was united with the magazine Yeladim, its name changed to Otiyot VeYeladim, its frequency became once every two weeks, and its extent was set at 84 pages.

The Rotner dismissal and the boundaries of the paper

The January 2014 dismissal of editor Lia Rotner is documented in the paper's history and was reported at the time by the Srugim news site, which attributed the pressure behind it to hardline religious, or Hardal, circles. According to the paper's recorded history, Rotner was dismissed following the mistaken insertion of a comics page that did not suit the spirit of the magazine, because it featured a dinosaur speaking about a French kiss in a game of truth or dare. The episode is worth recording not as gossip but as evidence of how the paper's founding contract actually operated in practice. A children's paper that exists to give religious families material they can trust is policed by its readership's sensibilities, and a single page could be judged a breach of that trust with professional consequences. The same sensitivity, from the other side, had been part of the paper's editorial courage in earlier years, when its editors published stories touching on religious feminism and expected protest letters as the price of addressing young readers honestly. Otiyot's history holds both facts together: a paper created by boundary-setting, whose editors repeatedly tested where, inside its sector, the boundaries of a children's magazine should run.

Serial stories, comics and the paper's beloved columns

Otiyot's contents pages document a rich stable of serial fiction and comics, several of which outgrew the paper and became books. Serial stories by Zehava Kor, among them "Alilot Lot," "Abba BeHufshat Leida" and "Tzanhan VeHatzi," achieved great success and were published as books; the columns "Yuri Shover Shtika," "Falaji" by Moshik Golst, the book series "HaHaim Al Pi Yinon" by Nadav Naveh, the diary series "Meyomano Shel Abba (Shenase Lihyot) Sababa" by Yehonatan Rosenhek, the series "Eizehu Gibor" and the "Zuki" series by Shlomi Tzarka all grew out of features created for the paper. One long-remembered feature, "Miki HaMekarer," "Miki the Refrigerator," told a family's story through the notes its members left each other on the fridge door in the 1990s; the paper's history traces its descendants in later features built on text messages and, with the technology, on WhatsApp groups, including "Savionei HaShiv'a" in 2014 and 2015, "HaMikibobitzim" in 2016 and "Rehov HaTamar" in 2021. In comics, Shai Tzarka's strip "Baba," following a hapless anti-hero living in the days of the destruction of the Second Temple, became so popular with the national-religious public that it grew into a successful book series. The comics artist Uri Fink wrote for years in the paper, with "Toldot HaIparon," a history of the pencil that was also a history of comics, a comic explaining how to draw comics, and early instalments of "Zbangle," related to his "Zbang!" books for older readers. Recurring sections include the "Shabtzai" puzzles, games and thinking questions, a current-affairs section, an English section, opinion columns, the jokes column "Girafa BePijama," "The Giraffe in Pyjamas," and "Na'im Lehakir," "Pleased to Meet You," in which two readers introduce themselves in each issue.

Supplements: Sukariyot, Otiyot LaNoar and Madah VeTeva

Alongside the main paper, Otiyot developed supplements for the edges of its age range. Sukariyot served the youngest readers, from kindergarten to third grade, monthly, until its merger and eventual closure folded its audience back into the main paper in 2012, with pages for young readers retained inside each issue. In 2020 a new supplement, Otiyot LaNoar, "Otiyot for Youth," was added, aimed at teenagers, acknowledging that the paper's seven-to-fifteen readership spans two distinct stages of reading life. In 2023 a further supplement, Madah VeTeva, "Science and Nature," began to appear monthly with the paper, devoted mainly to nature and animals together with archaeology, science, medicine and technology; its sections table lists features produced with bodies such as the Biblical Zoo and the Israel Aquarium, and a "Secrets from the Bookshelf" feature prepared with the National Library. The supplements show the paper continually renegotiating its package: younger children served inside the parent paper, teenagers given a distinct supplement, and science given a monthly home of its own, all within the same subscription envelope delivered to national-religious homes.

Young reporters: readers inside the newsroom

One of Otiyot's most distinctive institutions is its annual competition selecting young reporters from among its subscribers to join the editorial team. The young reporters take an active part in the paper's work, writing articles, surprise quizzes, opinion columns and special projects. Within the national-religious sector they win considerable esteem, and the paper is regarded as a way for religious youth to write and express themselves in an environment suited to them. Among its earliest young reporters were the singer Sinai Tor, the writer Lia Rotner, who went on to edit the paper, the writer Haim Eckstein and the journalist Arnon Segal. The roster of the paper's writers across its history is correspondingly broad: it includes Uri Orbach, Hayuta Deutsch, Zehava Kor, Dorit Orgad, Avi Segal, Oshi Gross, Hagai Segal, Emuna Elon, Rabbi Haim Sabato, Tamar Hirdani, Orit Navon, Doron Sheffer, Miri Michaeli, Haim Walder and Nadav Naveh, with illustrators including Shai Tzarka, Jackie Yarchi, Uri Fink and Yossi Shahar. A children's paper that trains its own readers into its own writers, and can point to editors and authors who began as its child reporters, has built something rarer than circulation: a pipeline into a sector's literary life.

Otiyot VeYeladim: the paper today

Today's paper, Otiyot VeYeladim, is a national-religious children's magazine for ages seven to fifteen, distributed to subscribers only and published once every two weeks by Mayim Tikshoret VeHotza'a LaOr; the company's publisher of record is Avichai Boaron, the owner is Mayim Tikshoret, and the editors are Roni Botzer and Hana Naki. Each issue runs to 84 pages. Its present sections table lists dozens of regular features, from the editors' letter and serial adventures to drawing lessons, a photography competition, sports, halakha presented for children, an English corner titled "Ask Smartie," and reader-participation columns. The paper that began in 1987 as one editor's answer to a sector's dissatisfaction with the secular children's press has thus survived financial collapse, two changes of ownership in its first five years, two mergers and a change of name, and it remains what it was founded to be: the children's paper of Israel's national-religious public, written in Hebrew in Jerusalem, and delivered to the homes of readers whose parents chose it because its pages were made, deliberately, for them.