Israel
at 67
Going home
So we’re making aliyah. We haven’t done it
yet, and despite this, Paula has asked me
to write an article about making aliyah.
So I decided, why not explore and explain
what aliyah means to me, what the process is, and why we’re going to give it a
jolly good bash.
Aliyah is such a loaded word. Literally,
‘aliyah’ means to ‘go up’. There’s only one
country we ‘go up’ to and that’s Eretz Yisrael – the land of Israel. We traverse the
world upwards physically in search of
something ‘spiritual’; something that
can’t be defined. Something that’s completely irrational. And we’re not alone.
Last year, 26 427 people made aliyah
worldwide. Around 180 of them were
from South Africa and an equal number
to that were from Australia. Jews from all
over the world are emigrating upwards.
How do you make the
decision to make aliyah?
People ask if we’ve been planning our aliyah for a long time. The truth is that it
was both a spontaneous, quick decision
10 JEWISH LIFE n ISSUE 83
and something we’ve been planning all
our lives. We’ve often caught the Israel
bug, and this time it stayed in our system.
What is the Israel bug? It’s quite a dangerous virus, so everyone should be
warned. It takes place on an innocent holiday to Israel and manifests as a deep gut
feeling that takes over one’s heart and
mind upon missing your return flight to
Johannesburg. This viral incursion is only
cured if you catch your plane and return
home. After a few weeks, it eventually
dissipates into a vague memory of ‘it
would have been nice’ as you relax into
your beloved, familiar comfort zone.
We’ve been bitten by the Israel bug a
few times, to the extent that we’ve visited
possible cities that we’d like to live in (Zichron Yaakov, Jerusalem); we’ve interviewed schools; and reviewed houses.
We’ve explored going but we never made
that final decision, until now.
What’s changed? We’re older, which
doesn’t mean that we’re wiser, but it does
mean that our children are older. We
knew that ideally we didn’t want to move
teenage children. Last year, my husband
visited Israel and came back saying, “It’s
doable. We should go have a look, we
should move to Jerusalem.” I asked him
what was he smoking! I had finally settled
down in Johannesburg after 13 years. To
move again and leave everything I’d built
felt devastating. “Let’s go for our summer
holidays,” he said. So we went, and we
were smitten with and bitten by the Israel
bug once again. We realised that because
our oldest child is 11, it’s now or never (or
at least until our youngest child finishes
high school).
I recognised that if we didn’t give it a go,
I’d regret it for the rest of my life. How
many opportunities have I missed because
of pussyfooting through life and going
with the flow, rather than following my
heart and dreams? Of course, aliyah is a
utopian dream, which often pans out very
differently in reality. Having emigrated
once before, I know it won’t be simple.
We came back to Johannesburg in January, to our flourishing, mint-green garden
which is bigger than most Jerusalem
parks. And we mourned what we were
leaving behind. “We live like kings,” I announced to any Joburger who would listen. “Do you realise that we live like
kings?” I couldn’t stop repeating this, as I
thought of the cramped Jerusalem apartments, the symphony of Jerusalem streets
which is a beeping, honking cacophony of
assertive (read: frustrated, sleep-deprived)
drivers. The children who run wild in the
corridors of Israeli schools; the dog poop
that is never picked up until you step in it.
The shopkeeper’s cries in very fast Hebrew
at the shuk, which makes it impossible to
understand him, so you buy whatever he
gives you, even if you don’t need half a kilo
of Indian tea.
photographS: ilan ossendryver; BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM
Aliyah is my journey of a thousand miles I By Sarah Sassoon