Ethnic inequality is present in every country. National statistics play an important role in the construction of ethnic categorization on the one hand, and measurement of inequality on the other. My paper offers a critical review of ethnic categories used by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and focuses on how the census categories affect opportunities to track ethnic inequality. By analyzing the CBS`s "Statistical Abstract of Israel" from 1950 till 2020, I will point out the national statistics` contribution to the construction of intra-Jewish ethnic categorization during the first formative decades of the Israeli state, parallel to the construction of the ethnic stratification. The CBS split the Jewish population into two distinct ethnic categories based on the continent of origin: Asia-Africa and Europe-America. But, in accordance with the Zionist ideology which strived to create the “new Israeli Jew”, free of ethnic affiliation other than “Israeli”, the CBS set an expiration date to the ethnic categories – two generations after immigration. Consequently, in the last two decades, third and fourth generations have become untraceable by official statistics. Around the time the ethnicity categories were about to expire, the CBS published new inequality indexes; "the socio-economic cluster" (1987) and "the peripherality index" (2008), which links inequality to socio-economic and geographical dimensions. These inequality indicators “bypass ethnicity” can be seen as an act of depoliticizing and omitting a part of the history which created Jewish ethnicity through the process of unequal distribution of good by the state. The removal of the ethnic categories from the CBS’ inequality measurements carry crucial implications for any attempts to demand recognition, compensation for discrimination by the legal system or social change by using statactivism