A colleague returning from a sabbatical in Jerusalem waxed enthusiastic about phone service in Israel. Everyone, he said, had at least one cellphone, and most homes had Internet phone lines, all at a fraction of Canadian rates. Israel, he said, is phone heaven, and we’re light years behind.

You might say the advances in phone technology and phoning habits are one measure of changing economic and social practices, national character and ideas of community. Some phone memories give a sense of that evolution.

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When I was a student in Jerusalem, decades before the advent of mobile technology, hardly anyone had landlines. Rates were impossibly high, and wait times for installation were two to three years. Social habits reflected the absence of phones. It was common to pop in to visit people without warning. North America students made “phone dates” to speak to parents thousands of miles away – a specific time we’d wait by a designated public phone, or they’d wait for us to place a call from the post office. Long distance conversations were hurried and breathless.

Public phones required an asimon, a special token roughly the size of a Canadian nickel, shaped like a flat doughnut, with a hole in the centre. The longer the conversation, the more asimonim needed. Many Israeli students knew how to tie a thread through the hole, to hold onto the asimon as it slid down the coin chute. That way, the token wouldn’t fully drop, but would register as new as time passed, so that even the lengthiest call would cost only one asimon. The truly adept could tug on the thread just as they replaced the receiver and retrieve the asimon for future calls.

My husband remembers queuing at the only working public phone at his Hebrew University dorm while another student made call after endless call. Finally, the other student finished and deftly yanked the thread to reclaim his token, but his timing was a shade off, and he lost it. Furious, he kicked the phone and broke it.

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Several weeks before my husband and I were married, a ringing phone woke me up in the middle of the night. It was Bilal, a merchant whose tiny shop in the Jerusalem’s Old City held a dazzling array of stunning fabrics. A Jerusalem friend and colleague had introduced me to Bilal and his wares years earlier, and between rounds of mint tea and Turkish coffee and conversations about family, many of his fabrics found their way to my home in North America.

For our wedding, my husband and I decided on a chupah made of fabric from Jerusalem. I asked my friend to purchase the fabric on my behalf and send it to me. But as it turned out, my emissary and the merchant couldn’t agree on the fabric. Hence, the call, on a newly installed, crackly phone, at 3 a.m. (my time). She described her choice, he described his. With today’s technology, I would be able to see both fabrics. But we had no such options then, only their descriptions of the colours, patterns and sheen of the two fabrics.

They hung up, and I waited for my “surprise purchase” to arrive. In time for the wedding, I received a package containing two bolts of fabric – one, a wedding gift from my friend and the other a wedding gift from Bilal.

I sometimes think back on that late-night call and to the lines of community drawing together an Israeli Jewish ethnographer of Yiddish culture, an Israeli Palestinian fabric merchant and a sleepy-eyed Jewish woman in faraway galut. 

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I’m not nostalgic for the technologies of yesteryear. The rapid changes in Israeli phone culture are less precious to me than the tightness of social networks that operate without, through or despite technology.