The Last Watchmaker of Karmiel

A few days ago, I returned from a family trip to Switzerland.

You can’t spend much time in Switzerland without noticing the watches. They are everywhere. Storefront after storefront displaying famous Swiss brands, including watches that cost more than some cars. My wife developed something of an obsession with one very particular watch that was nearly impossible to find, so we ended up spending quite a bit of time wandering through watch stores.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered an old watch of my own. A few months after we got married, a close childhood friend, received a beautiful watch as a gift from his wife. My wife liked it, so I bought one too. It cost about 400 shekels. At 25, that seemed like an astronomical amount of money to spend on a watch. So I wore it only on Shabbat. Over the years, I gradually discovered that, contrary to what my 25-year-old Jerusalemite self had believed, in the wider world a 400-shekel watch isn’t exactly a luxury item. Perhaps the opposite. It can look like an attempt to wear an elegant watch without actually owning the real thing.

Eventually, I stopped wearing it. For about a decade, it sat in a drawer. The battery died. The strap faded. At some point, my wife spotted it and remembered how much she liked it. With the resourcefulness reserved for career women who somehow also manage a household, she found a replacement strap online and ordered it.

And then another two years passed. Until Switzerland. Something about seeing all those watches reminded me of a very simple truth: a watch doesn’t have to cost thousands of euros to be beautiful. If I like the way mine looks, why shouldn’t I wear it? And that is how, a day after returning to Israel, I found myself looking for a watchmaker in Karmiel.

A watchmaker. Yes, an actual person who repairs watches. We found him in an old shopping mall that has seen better days, surrounded by shuttered storefronts and the kind of small shops that seem to belong to another era. Inside one tiny store sat a watchmaker, perhaps 60 years old, with kind eyes. He was happy to hear that we had specifically come looking for him, but immediately warned us that he might not be able to help. In a Russian accent, he explained that he was in the process of moving to another location and wasn’t sure he still had all the tools he needed.

He had worked in that mall for 30 years. Once, this mall had been the place. Not just in Karmiel, but across the Galilee. For 30 years, he had served customers there. With the tiny magnifying lens of his trade pressed to his eye, he took watches apart and put them back together. He replaced batteries, straps and hands, working with tiny mechanisms most of us never think about. A lovely man. A hardworking Jew who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union and built his life here.

Thirty-five shekels. That was what he asked for replacing the battery and installing the new strap. Thirty-five shekels for the battery, his work and his time.

Something about that simple encounter moved me more than I expected. I was genuinely happy that, in some tiny way, I had been able to give business to a hardworking man who had spent decades practicing his craft.

But it also made me sad. Because our world is changing at a dizzying pace. I looked at him sitting in his tiny shop in an aging mall, surrounded by miniature tools, and wondered how many people like him are left. How many ordinary watches are even left? Almost everyone seems to be moving to smartwatches. Watches that count our steps, measure our heart rate, display our messages and remind us when we have been sitting for too long.

And when they break, we usually don’t take them to a watchmaker. We replace them. Maybe this isn’t really a story about watches. We increasingly live in a world where things aren’t repaired. They are replaced. Devices. Stores. Professions. Places. Sometimes, perhaps, even people.

The world is becoming faster, more efficient and more technological. In many ways, it is becoming better. But something is being lost along the way.

I walked out of that little shop with a nearly 20-year-old watch ticking on my wrist again. The watchmaker stayed behind in the old mall in Karmiel, preparing to move to his next shop. I don’t know how many more years there will be watchmakers in this world. But this morning, I was very glad there was still one in Karmiel.