photographS: ilan ossendryver; BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM
Who said moving is easy? A new, very
different culture. A new language. A new
side of the road to drive on. As my Australian friend who lives in Jerusalem told
me, “You have to remember that this is
the Middle East.” Yet, I’ve always felt that
Israel was my home. Whether we consciously know it or not, we, as Jews, all
have a relationship with Israel.
Israel is in my blood. Literally. I’m not
the first one in my family to make aliyah.
Both sets of my grandparents made aliyah
from Baghdad, with Operation Ezra Nehemiah in 1951. My father lived in Israel
from the age of three, my mother was
born there. They landed in harsh, postwar conditions, and 20 years later, my father – with the rest of his family – moved
to the other ‘promised land’, Sydney, Aus-
tralia. They built their lives there, in the
fair dinkum land of man-size beer. Where
nobody hoots on the roads and baklava is
as foreign as a beep-bopping Louis Botha
taxi. They learnt English, how to eat
scones with jam and cream, and the joys
of frothy flat white coffee. They chose to
be Diaspora Jews again, and brought with
them their Judeo-Arabic songs and
prayers of 2 500 years. They cried for the
rivers of Babylon that they had to leave,
they cried for the shores of Israel that
they left, but mainly, in true Australian
style, they got on with it.
I was born in Australia, after m 䁙