Jewish Life Digital Edition April 2015 | Page 14

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