Israel Emoji & Symbols

The Israel flag emoji 🇮🇱 shows a white field with two horizontal blue stripes and a blue Star of David, the Magen David, in the centre. The design goes back to the flag of the Zionist movement in the 1890s, and its stripes recall the stripes of a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. Israel adopted it as the national flag in October 1948.

The emoji is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇱, the country code IL. Phones and Macs join the pair into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the two letters instead, which is why the Israel flag emoji can appear as IL on a PC. There is no Israel heart emoji as such: people write the colours, 💙🤍, or put a heart next to the flag, 🇮🇱💙, and 🔵⚪🔵 draws the flag in dots where flags do not show.

Israel symbols and meanings: ✡️ Star of David, 🕎 menorah, 🪬 hamsa

The ✡️ Star of David emoji (U+2721) is the six-pointed star made of two triangles, the best-known Jewish symbol of modern times and the centre of the flag. People searching for the "star of David emoji with dot" mean 🔯, the dotted six-pointed star: it came into emoji from Japanese phone sets, where it marked fortune-telling, but it is often used as a Star of David too. 🕍 is a synagogue and 📜 the nearest emoji to a Torah scroll.

The state emblem of Israel is a seven-branched menorah, the lamp of the ancient Temple, between two olive branches, with the word ישראל (Israel) beneath. The 🕎 menorah emoji is a different lamp: it has nine branches, eight lights and a helper candle called the shamash, because it is the hanukkiah lit at Hanukkah. 🫒 and 🕊️ stand for the olive branches of the emblem and for shalom, peace, which is also the everyday word for hello and goodbye.

🪬 is the hamsa, the open hand with an eye in the palm that is said to keep away the evil eye. It is shared by Jews and Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa, and in Israel it hangs at front doors, in cars and on necklaces. The hamsa joined emoji in 2021.

Hebrew letters and the ₪ shekel sign

Hebrew, the main language of Israel, is written from right to left in 22 letters, from א alef to ת tav. They are all consonants and there are no capitals, but five letters take a final form at the end of a word: כ becomes ך, מ becomes ם, נ becomes ן, פ becomes ף and צ becomes ץ, as in שלום (shalom). Vowels are written as small dots and dashes under and over the letters, called niqqud; everyday Hebrew leaves them out and keeps them for children's books, poetry and prayer books, while ו and י often stand for vowels. Hebrew was brought back as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after many centuries of use mainly in prayer and study.

Hebrew uses the same full stops, commas and question marks as English, plus a few marks of its own. The geresh ׳ marks abbreviations and sounds Hebrew letters lack: ג׳ is j as in ג׳ינס (jeans) and צ׳ is ch as in צ׳יפס (chips). The gershayim ״ goes before the last letter of an acronym, as in ת״א for Tel Aviv, and of a number written in letters: the Hebrew year 5787, which began in September 2026, is תשפ״ז. The maqaf ־ is the Hebrew hyphen and sits high on the line. On ordinary keyboards most people type ' and " instead.

The ₪ shekel symbol (U+20AA, ₪) is the sign of the new shekel, Israel's currency since 1985 (code ILS); it joins the Hebrew letters ש and ח, the initials of sheqel ḥadash, new shekel. Prices appear as ₪49.90 or 49.90 ₪, and Hebrew text often writes ש״ח instead. Phone keyboards set to Hebrew have ₪ on their number and symbol page; in Word type 20AA and press Alt+X. To write Hebrew itself, add the Hebrew keyboard on Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android and switch to it with Alt+Shift, Ctrl+Space or the globe key.

CLDR estimates count about 9.4 million Hebrew speakers in Israel, close to the whole population, and road signs are written in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Arabic, spoken by Arab citizens of Israel, is counted at about 1.9 million, with about 1.6 million for Levantine Arabic; Russian is spoken by about 1 million people, many of whom arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s; Yiddish lives on in Haredi communities (about 280,000) and Amharic among Ethiopian Israelis (about 55,000). Each has its own collection here: the Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Yiddish and Amharic pages hold their full alphabets.

Jewish holiday emoji: Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah and Passover

Shabbat begins at sunset on Friday, and the Shabbat shalom emoji are its table: two candles 🕯️🕯️, wine for kiddush 🍷 and challah 🍞, sent with שבת שלום (Shabbat shalom) to family chats every week. At Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year in September or early October, apples are dipped in honey for a sweet year, 🍎🍯 with שנה טובה (shana tova); 📯 is the nearest emoji to the shofar, the ram's horn blown in synagogue. On Yom Kippur, the fast on the tenth day of the year, almost no one drives, and children take over the empty roads and motorways on bicycles 🚲; the greeting is גמר חתימה טובה (gmar chatima tova).

At Sukkot families eat in a sukkah, a hut roofed with branches 🛖, and wave the lulav, a palm frond 🌴, with the etrog, a citron for which 🍋 stands in. The Hanukkah emoji are 🕎 for the eight nights of candles, 🍩 for sufganiyot, the jam doughnuts that fill every Israeli bakery in the weeks around the holiday, and 🥔 for levivot, potato latkes. Purim is costumes and masks 🎭 and the reading of the Megillah scroll 📜.

Passover brings matzah 🫓, four cups of wine 🍷 and the roasted egg 🥚 on the seder plate, and the frog 🐸 is a favourite joke for the ten plagues. Shavuot is the dairy holiday 🧀🥛 and the festival of the wheat harvest 🌾; Tu BiShvat, the new year of the trees, is 🌳; Lag BaOmer lights bonfires 🔥 all over the country. Independence Day opens in the evening with fireworks 🎆 and spends the next day in the parks at the mangal, the barbecue 🔥🥩. On Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day the country stops for a siren and people post a memorial candle 🕯️; keep festive emoji out of those posts. Good news at any time of year gets מזל טוב (mazal tov) 🎉, and a toast is לחיים (l'chaim, to life) 🥂.

Israel emoji for food, places and sport

Falafel 🧆 stuffed into pita 🥙 with hummus, tahini and salad is Israel's street food, next to sabich, pita with fried eggplant 🍆 and hard-boiled egg. Breakfast is shakshuka, eggs cooked in a pan of tomato sauce 🍳, and the finely chopped Israeli salad of tomato and cucumber 🥗🍅🥒. 🍊 recalls the Jaffa orange, for decades the country's best-known export, and 🍇🌾🫒🌴 are among the Seven Species of the Bible, the wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates of the land of milk and honey 🥛🍯.

For travel posts, 🏙️🏖️☀️🌊 are Tel Aviv and its beaches on the Mediterranean (the city's "White City" of Bauhaus buildings is on the UNESCO list); 🧱 is the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where visitors push folded notes into the cracks; 🧂 is the Dead Sea, more than 400 metres below sea level, so salty that bathers float; ⛰️🏜️🐪 are Masada and the Negev desert; 🤿🐠🪸 are the coral reefs of Eilat on the Red Sea; ⛪ and 🕌 are the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth and the El-Jazzar Mosque in Akko.

⚽ and 🏀 carry most of the sports talk: Maccabi Tel Aviv has won basketball's EuroLeague several times. 🥋 is judo, which brought Israel its first Olympic medal when Yael Arad won silver in 1992; 🏄 depicts surfing; windsurfing brought Israel its first gold through Gal Fridman in 2004; 🤸 is gymnastics, with golds for Artem Dolgopyat and Linoy Ashram at the Tokyo Games. 🏓 is the nearest emoji to matkot, the wooden-paddle ball game heard on every beach, and 🎤 is for the Eurovision Song Contest, which Israel has won four times.