What does one week of groceries cost in Beit Shemesh, and what does the same week cost in Teaneck?

To keep this concrete we built one household and moved it across the ocean. Two parents, four children, one week that ends in a Shabbat with three meals on it. The shopping list runs to twenty-five weekday lines and twelve Shabbat lines, and every line is written as a physical specification rather than a brand: milk at three percent fat in a one litre carton, size L eggs by the dozen, a whole fresh chicken by the kilo. Each line is then filled with the cheapest item in that store which meets the specification, which is roughly what a family on a budget does on a Tuesday.

The Israeli prices come from the files that every large chain has been required to publish since 2015, one per branch per morning, listing every item the branch sells with its barcode, pack size and shelf price. We used the file for Yesh Chesed (יש חסד, "there is kindness"), the haredi banner of Shufersal, at its branch in the Beit Shemesh commercial centre, on the morning of 25 August 2026. The American prices come from the live catalogue of Glatt Express on Queen Anne Road in Teaneck, taking the regular price rather than the sale price. Shekels convert at 3.0016 to the dollar, which is almost exactly three to one. Thirty-two of the thirty-seven lines found a match in both stores.

The chart below puts the two weeks next to each other. Each column is one week of shopping for this family, and the height of the column is dollars. The lower dark block is the twenty-three weekday lines. The rust block sitting on top of it is the nine Shabbat and yom tov lines.

Watch what happens to the rust block when the family crosses the ocean.

The two weekday blocks differ by $51.78. The two Shabbat blocks, which carry a quarter as much money, differ by $32.23.

Here is the same week broken back into its thirty-two lines. Each bar is one line. The vertical rule down the middle is parity, the point at which a unit of that item costs the same in both places once the shekels are converted. Bars run right when Teaneck is dearer and left when Beit Shemesh is dearer, and the length of the bar is how many times over.

Notice how many bars run left. Nine of the thirty-two items cost less in New Jersey than in Israel.

The table below takes the two ends of that ladder. The five rust rows are the lines where Teaneck is dearest, in the order they appear at the top of the chart. The five dark rows are where Teaneck is cheapest, read up from the bottom. The last column is the same ratio, so a number above one means Teaneck costs more.

Read down that last column.

Three of the five dearest lines are things a household buys because it is a Jewish household. Challah, checked lettuce and herring are made in America for a small market by a small number of producers, and in Israel by producers selling to everybody. The other two dearest lines are table salt and carrots, which have nothing Jewish about them at all.

A whole fresh chicken is the single most expensive weekly line on the Israeli list, at 28.90 shekels a kilo, and it is one of the few things that is cheaper in America. Empire kosher broiler at Glatt Express works out to $8.58 a kilo against $9.63 in Beit Shemesh, a gap of eleven percent in New Jersey's favour.

Our reading, which this data cannot settle on its own, is that scale runs the other way on poultry. American kosher slaughter serves a national market from a handful of large plants, and it buys feed, freight and labour in the same market as an enormous conventional poultry sector. Israeli poultry is a protected sector with import barriers and a small domestic market. The product most people assume carries the heaviest American kosher tax turns out to carry none.

Every branch of the chain publishes its own file, so we priced the same list at four of them: the haredi Yesh Chesed in Beit Shemesh and its sister branch in Ramat Shlomo in Jerusalem, a Shufersal Deal discount store in Ofakim in the south, and a Shufersal Sheli in the middle of Tel Aviv. Thirty-two lines are common to all four.

Each bar below is that thirty-two line list priced at one branch, in shekels, so a shorter bar is a cheaper basket. The two dark bars are the haredi branches. The grey bar is Ofakim and the rust bar is central Tel Aviv. Notice which bars are shortest.

Format beats geography. The cheapest way to buy this list in Israel is not to move to the periphery, it is to shop at the banner built for large families, which runs twelve percent under the city centre store and comes in below the discount chain in Ofakim.

Chicken runs the other way. A whole fresh chicken costs 28.90 a kilo at Yesh Chesed in Beit Shemesh and 21.90 at the Tel Aviv Sheli, a premium of thirty-two percent for mehadrin slaughter. An Orthodox family in Israel pays that premium on the meat counter and takes it back on almost everything else in the aisle.

Israel supervises the price of a small number of basic foods, among them milk, white cheese, cottage cheese, butter and bread. Five of those supervised items are on our list. The chart below shows, for each line, how far the price travels between the cheapest of our four branches and the dearest, as a percentage of the cheapest. Each dot is one line of the basket, and the further right it sits, the more that price moves between branches. Dark dots are the five supervised lines and rust dots are the twenty-seven that are free to move. Look at how far apart the two rows sit.

Averaged across the basket, the supervised lines vary by 6.0 percent between the cheapest and dearest branch. The unsupervised lines vary by 45.9 percent, which is to say that where you shop in Israel is nearly eight times more consequential for an unregulated item than for a regulated one.

So, what does one week of groceries cost in Beit Shemesh, and what does the same week cost in Teaneck? About forty percent more in New Jersey, $215.72 against $299.73, and the extra sits in the Jewish part of the cart. The weekday half of the list costs thirty percent more in Teaneck. The Shabbat half costs seventy-two percent more, which is more than twice the gap on ordinary food.

For a family weighing aliyah, the practical version is narrow. An $84 weekly difference is small next to the tuition and mortgage lines in the rest of this series, so the grocery bill will not decide anyone's move. What the basket shows is where the money changes character. In Teaneck a family pays a premium at the checkout for being Orthodox. In Beit Shemesh, for most of the cart, being Orthodox is what the shelf already sells.