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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
My father, a Holocaust survivor, actually entertained the idea of emigrating to Israel, instead of America, at the end of World War II and his escape from the Nazis. He and his two siblings eventually moved to Cleveland, but many of his cousins found their way to Israel and still live here today. One of my first cousins moved here from New York nearly two decades ago and lives just two blocks from my home here. And one of our third cousins lives right down the street.
My dad never made it to Israel because his relatives convinced him America was the promised land for Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. I think he forgot about his youthful idealism when I told him that I would be leaving his adopted homeland to move to the Jewish state. More likely, I think he was disappointed that after he went through being an immigrant in a strange country, learning a new language, building his own business, all so that he could give a better life to his children, one of them would choose to go through the experience all over again.
I wouldn't have imagined it either, growing up in Cleveland, where I took money to my synagogue's Sunday school each year just before spring to pay for a tree to be planted in Israel. I had a pen pal over there (actually a distant cousin). I knew that the room had to be quiet whenever Israel was mentioned in a news report.
But when I turned 10, my parents sent me to a Jewish overnight camp at the urging of our rabbi. The camp had a Zionist orientation, and I learned more about Judaism and Israel in my four summers there than I had in years of Sunday school and two days a week of supplementary Hebrew school.
At age 16, I spent six weeks in Israel on a summer teen tour. While everything started out feeling foreign, things soon began to feel very comfortable. Ruins that were centuries old stood alongside memorials to soldiers who fell in the modern state of Israel's many wars. All the people around us -- the kind ones and the rude ones -- were "my people." As we hung out on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem on Saturday night and young people poured out of buses and taxis, I found a sense of belonging I had never felt before. I planned to return for other visits. I did not plan to spend my life here.
In college I affiliated with the campus Hillel, participated in activities in support of Israel, and contemplated a quarter abroad. I spent a quarter working at a newspaper in Wilmington, Del., instead.
My husband and I went out on our first date exactly one week after my graduation from Northwestern University and five days after I started working as a full-time reporter for the Cleveland Jewish News. Some time during our first date he told me he intended to one day make a permanent move to Israel. Did I ever see myself living in Israel? he asked. I liked the guy and wanted a second date. I said yes.
To his credit, during the first 10 years of our marriage, my husband always told me he would release me from my promise, and even as we planned our aliyah, he said that if I was unhappy personally or professionally there we could return to the United States. But we agreed that the best place for our children and grandchildren would be the Jewish state, where they would learn about their Jewish past, participate in their Jewish present, and prepare for their Jewish future. We would live in a place where the history they studied in school was Jewish history and where the national holidays we would celebrate together would be Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur instead of Christmas and New Year's Day. We would live in a place where our children would not worry about job discrimination because they could not work on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and where wearing a kippah, or head covering, was the norm. Instead of watching Jewish history take place through a CNN camera lens, we would live it.
America and its special brand of democracy are still very important to me. What Americans think about Israel is also still important to me. And looking at world events, I carry with me a great deal of what I learned and believed as an American and a Jewish-American. But when I see polls showing that most Americans believe Israel should withdraw from the settlements in exchange for recognition by Arab countries, I wince. My fellow Americans, I think, don't really understand.
