El'ad, (), is a city in the Central District of Israel. In the 1990s, it was built for a Haredi Jewish population and to a lesser extent, it was also built for a Religious Zionist Jewish population. Located about east of Tel Aviv on Route 444 between Rosh HaAyin and Shoham, it had a population of in . El'ad is the only locality in Israel officially designated a religious municipality. The name El'ad means "Forever God", but it is also named after a member of the tribe of Ephraim, who lived in this area (1 Chronicles 7:21). History During the 18th and 19th centuries, El'ad was the site of the Arab village of Al-Muzayri'a. It belonged to the Nahiyeh (sub-district) of Lod that encompassed the area of the present-day city of Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut in the south to the present-day city of El’ad in the north, and from the foothills in the east, through the Lod Valley to the outskirts of Jaffa in the west. This area was home to thousands of inhabitants in about 20 villages, who had at their disposal tens of thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land. The building of El'ad started in the late 1990s, following a government decision in 1990 to build a series of settlements along the seam line with the West Bank under then-housing minister Ariel Sharon, and provide immediate housing for 50,000 residents. The town was built from scratch as a planned community according to urban planning paradigms not unlike Modi'in and nearby Shoham. While those towns were designed to suit a mixed population of secular and religious Jews, El'ad was originally planned to suit a mixed population of Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist Jews and ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews, offering a solution to the acute shortage of affordable housing for Haredi families. The majority of the population are Haredi Jews. Accordingly, El'ad is built in a way that suits their religious lifestyle, with a larger selection of housing options offering larger than average apartments to accommodate religious families, who tend to have more children than the average national population. Another characteristic is easy access and short walking distances to local education institutions to avoid the need for school transportation costs. The city was built partially over the ruins of the Palestinian Arab village of Al-Muzayri'a, whose population fled in 1948. By 1998, El'ad had already achieved local council status; in February 2008, El'ad's official status