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Oct. 28, 2011
Choosing to make a life in Israel
Bumps in a modern aliyah story are smoothed with a dose of patience, a pinch of humor.
EMILY SINGER
There was a time when making aliyah meant traveling thousands of miles on foot or by boat, leaving behind family you might never see again and with whom you could only communicate infrequently, and exposing yourself to multiple life-threatening hazards, diseases and hardships. Today, a person can get on an airplane, be served a hot, kosher meal by friendly airline personnel, fall asleep to a movie and wake up an Israeli citizen. Upon arrival, one is offered an array of benefits, including housing and education subsidies, tax breaks, and even cash. Still, aliyah is never easy.
In this short series, Emily Singer shares her family’s aliyah experiences and stories from their first year in Israel, where they live on Kibbutz Maale Gilboa, a small religious community in the lower Galilee. She begins with the family’s flight from New York and their arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport, on Aug. 17, 2010.
After a long night of packing and tearful goodbyes, we arrive at 6 a.m. to a deserted parking lot in Baltimore, Md. As we board the chartered bus that will take us to our aliyah flight in New York, I am thinking about the kids, worried that they are sad about leaving what has been their home for the past four years.
Israel is hardly foreign to my family and me. Before Baltimore, we spent two years in Jerusalem, and we have traveled back every summer since. Still, the kids have made many friends in Baltimore, to whom they have become strongly attached. And we are not moving back to Jerusalem, where half the kids in their school spoke English, and you could buy bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese at the supermarket.
This time, we are moving to Kibbutz Maale Gilboa, a small community on a remote mountaintop in the north, with a population of fewer than 100 families. Situated 20 minutes from the booming metropolis of Beit Shean and more than a half hour from bustling Afula, its location can best be described, as our 12-year-old son frequently describes it, as “the middle of nowhere.”
Fortunately, we don’t hear any complaints on the bus, as the kids are too busy rifling through their bags stuffed with candy, cookies and chips, gifts from a well-intentioned friend who would not be traveling with my children for the next 16 hours. The kids make some crucial candy trades, eat some choice morsels, and sleep through the rest of the ride.
At the airport, we are greeted by a representative from Nefesh B’Nefesh, the organization that has supported tens of thousands of Americans making aliyah since 2002. We get a quick tour of where to get our tickets and how to check in. My husband, Ross, decides we can save time if he gets in the ticket line while I wait in line to clear security.
I am waiting approximately 73 hours in the line, pushing our 13 suitcases, 10 carry-ons and two gate-check bags (literally), with our four groggy, restless and sugar-saturated kids in tow. My turn finally comes, and a large and intimidating female security agent asks me where my husband is. I answer that he is waiting in the ticket line. I glance over, only to see that his line is miles long, curling out the front door of the airport. However, he is third in line. I explain this to the security woman, and she explains that if he is not here immediately, we will have to go to the end of our line and start again.
I go to retrieve Ross, stalling just enough for him to get the tickets and return with me. Scary Security Lady is not happy, but she reluctantly takes us next.
As the woman goes through her security shpiel, Ross and I are following the tried and true method of answering all the questions as simply and briefly as possible. Meanwhile, our son Shai is trying to help too, by filling in any details we may have missed, like:
Scary Security Lady: Did you pack your own bags?
Ross: Yes.
Shai: Well, my dad helped me, and we had a bunch of friends over, and some of them gave me notes to read on the airplane, and my friend Yanniv was pushing the suitcase together while I zipped it.
Or, Scary Security Lady: Are you bringing anything for anyone else?
Ross: No.
Shai: Well, there’s all the presents Abaye got for his birthday – do they count?
Or, Scary Security Lady: Do you have any weapons in your luggage?
Ross: No.
Shai: Well, there is our rifle, some rocket launchers and a pocket nuclear bomb. Do they count?
OK, so I exaggerate a little on the last one, but you get the idea.
After going through security, we rush to the place where, any minute, the big Nefesh B’Nefesh ceremony is set to begin at 11:45 a.m. The kids are starving, but we assure them that this will be a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and there will be plenty of time to grab lunch afterwards.
After much exhaustion, starvation and kvetching from the kids, the ceremony starts promptly (by Jewish standards) at 12:40 p.m. The mic isn’t working so the program starts and stops and then is really difficult to hear, especially over the lady who has wedged her way in between me and the speaker, and is screaming into her cellphone, trying to direct someone from another part of the terminal to our location. She then spots her friend on the floor down below and begins yelling to her and waving.
I am catching snippets of the speaker’s talk. He’s giving the rundown on how many people will be on the flight, how many are children, how many people have made aliyah since Nefesh B’Nefesh started, how many have made aliyah from this very airport, etc.
Meanwhile, this woman is screaming in my ear down to her friend, “Hey! I’m up here! Waving! Do you see me? No! Over here! Over heeeeeere!”
Then Ross and I make the first significant aliyah decision of our future – we quietly escape and go for lunch. We calmly eat our instant noodle soups at the empty gate, and we are one of the first families on the plane.
The flight is great. Our own days of screaming babies are over (not true of everyone else on the flight, but that’s OK; we don’t forget that we were once one of those families). The toddlers run underfoot as the flight attendants serve hot coffee ... and make repeated announcements over the loudspeaker that parents need to watch their children.
Then there’re the religious guys trying to figure out a way to congregate for prayer at the back of the plane, against the safety instructions of the airplane personnel. A woman down the aisle from me sarcastically mumbles something about how she hopes they are praying for a successful flight while they’re back there jeopardizing our safety.
After dinner, a representative from the Ministry of the Interior comes around and collects our passports. He processes our papers while we sleep (or, in my son’s case, as he watches Shrek Forever After … for the 13th time). When they wake us up several hours later with breakfast, they hand back our passports with a card declaring that we are Israeli citizens. We’ve just officially made aliyah!
Landing is great – everyone sings. When I first came to Israel in 1987, we all sang “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem” as we landed. Nowadays, you are lucky if you land in Israel and the people aren’t cursing at the flight attendants for not letting them smoke in the bathroom or for stopping them from congregating at the back for prayers.
To give us that pioneer spirit, I can only assume, we arrive at the old terminal, the very same area where I landed on a visit in 1987. This means stepping down from the airplane right onto the tarmac, picking up our gate-check items off the ground and waiting in the thick, humid, 100-plus-degree weather to board a shuttle bus that will take us to the arrivals terminal. It is so fabulously pioneer-y! (It also gives the press the opportunity to snap pictures of us coming off the plane after two hours of sleep and 16 hours of travel.)
Finally, the bus pulls up to the terminal, and we have the “real” ceremony for which we have all been waiting. Hundreds and hundreds of people, singing and dancing, are there to greet the flight, a number of whom are friends of ours. After the ceremony, we gather our 13 pieces of luggage, 10 carry-ons and two gate-check items, and go outside to find our private taxi home – our last free ride on this journey.
Our new home is almost two hours from the airport. We sleep most of the trip, but wake in time to watch the van climb the mountain to our kibbutz. As we drive along the winding road, we are treated to a breathtaking view of the Galilee below. There are cows grazing wild on our right and, on our left, looking down, we see the aerial view of the desert oasis of Sachne, where lush rows of palm trees shade the natural spring resort below. As we continue, Ross tells us what he knows of the history of the mountain, the spot where King Saul met his tragic end. We pass signs for hiking tours all along the way.
Finally, we reach the gate of Kibbutz Maale Gilboa. Through the closed windows and air conditioning of the car, we catch the subtle smell of the refet (the cow shed), the sweet scent of kibbutz. My mind takes me back to the time we had visited the kibbutz two years before, and the kids and I had witnessed the miraculous birth of a baby calf.
My kids break my reverie with, “Ew! Why does it smell like dog poop here?”
There is an expression around here that a true kibbutznik, when he is away from home, misses the smell of the refet. Well, I can’t say we are there yet, but we are ready to go through the gate and begin the next phase of our aliyah adventure.
Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. She is currently working on two books. Singer and her husband, Ross, were rebbetzin and rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation from 1996 to 2004. The Singers spent two years in Jerusalem and then moved to Baltimore, Md., where Ross was rabbi at Congregation Beth Tfiloh and Emily taught Judaic studies at Beth Tfiloh High School, until they moved to Israel last year. They have four children.
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