🏛️ ההיסטוריה של השקל — ממשקל כסף עתיק ועד המטבע של היום

More than 3,000 years ago, in the ancient Middle East, there were no round coins like the ones we use today. If someone wanted to buy a sack of wheat or pay a worker, they used lumps of silver and weighed them on a balance scale. The basic unit of weight was called a 'shekel' — about 8 to 11 grams of silver, roughly the weight of a few large coins today. The word 'shekel' itself comes from the Hebrew root that means 'to weigh.' The ancient shekel is even mentioned in the Bible, whenever a price or payment is described by weight. Many centuries later, when the State of Israel was founded in 1948, its currency was called the 'Israeli lira.' In 1980, the country decided to bring back the ancient name and replaced the lira with the 'old shekel.' But then a big problem hit: during the 1980s, prices in Israel rose incredibly fast — something called 'inflation' — until by 1984 prices were nearly doubling every year! A bag of milk that cost one shekel in the morning could cost much more by evening. To stop the crisis, the government launched a major economic plan in 1985, along with a brand-new currency: the 'New Israeli Shekel,' marked with the ₪ symbol. Every 1,000 old shekels became just one new shekel, and that helped bring prices back under control. This New Israeli Shekel is the exact same money we use today, almost 40 years later — proof that a well-designed economic plan can rescue an entire economy.