Six Months? Really? (Article #36) 1/11/2007

As I sat down to write this week’s Aliyah Chronicles, I was stumped for the first time. As I was telling a friend recently, we have finally settled into a mini routine; the kids go to school and their activities, Goldie does her ulpan and I go to work. We have a schedule and an expectation of how our week will go.

Of course, we are still olim. With that, we have the basic understanding that we have no clue what is going on at any given time and are hoping that we get things close to right a majority of the time. Homework is still done with dictionaries in hand. There are school strikes we don’t expect. The bank calls us regularly because we haven’t diverted our small positive balance to some investment fund of theirs (they are actually horrified that we keep a positive balance and don’t use their generous and expensive overdraft).

Yet, it seems a bit quieter during the average run of the mill weeks. School. Ulpan. Work. Shopping. Cooking. Homework. Emails. Phone calls. All the average everyday trappings of middle class life. We have begun to anticipate some of the speed bumps and feel more prepared for them.

The Hebrew issues get smaller each week as well. The kids are all admitting that their Hebrew is much better. Even Mordechai has begun (with a lot of grammar mistakes) to speak in Hebrew to the Hebrew only kids in his Gan.

The past week was more of the same. It started with a family melave malka with two of our cousins who visited from Chicago to learn for the week in Kollel in Yerushalayim. We took the opportunity to get my brother and sister and some of our kids together at our house and visit. I always say it is a real treat to get to visit with family and friends and this was no exception.

Aliza had another entrance exam last week, this time at Ulpanat Sha’alavim (Middle/High School for Girls). She had an interview as well, and was complemented on her Hebrew.

Chaya met with her Principal, head teacher and us to discuss expanding her curriculum obligations now that her “getting to fit in” period has ended and we have begun to map a course for her to get her High School Diploma.

The other kids had their assorted activities, programs and of course illnesses (we seem to get sick a ton here) throughout the week. One flu, a couple viruses, a lot of coughing and a strep throat will sure make the week crawl by when you are a parent. Thank G-d for no copays and a $3-6 prescription fee.

Actually, I was discussing the astounding amount of illnesses with my sister in law who mentioned to me that many olim get sick often during their first year here. She explained the theory that olim have tolerances and resistance to the viruses that are common in the USA but not the Israeli viruses. When an oleh suddenly comes to Israel and is exposed to a whole new set of viruses, off to bed he goes.

I actually see that in the Yeshiva as well. There are some guys who are literally sick for weeks, getting one bug after or another. So there seems to actually be a little sense to that theory.

With such a boring week, I didn’t think there would be much to write about. Yeah, we still have repair issues outstanding in the house here. We are still dealing with our home there. We have to find new school programs for three kids this fall. Yet, these are all old problems and old issues that we will work out over time.

Then I realized that a significant moment had passed us by and we hadn’t even realized it at the time.

On Shabbat, we (should have) celebrated our six month anniversary as citizens of the State of Israel. July 6 – January 6. Amazing.

It is hard to imagine that we have been here six months already. We were so excited when we first got off the plane. Every day was a new adventure and the summer was like a terrific summer vacation except for our housing problems and all our belongings getting sent to Greece (remember that?).

We moved into a new neighborhood and had to learn so much about living here. Where should we shop? Which Hashgachot are acceptable? How do we pay our bills? There were so many different issues to handle.

School started and we were suddenly faced with six kids all essentially going through first grade at the same time (or at least having to learn, like first graders, how the school system worked for them). Hebrew became a sudden crisis and we struggled to understand what we needed to do to make the kids successful.

We hit the Yamim Noraim, IN ISRAEL, our holy land and had such amazing experiences exploring the land and being Jewish in a land where we aren’t a frowned upon minority. Succot built near the mall food court. Succot in all the attractions and tiyulim. Kosher food everywhere.

One day Yamim Tovim! Enough said.

Then we started the real struggle. Longer school days. Ulpan began. The honeymoon ended and we all had to start dealing with fitting in and becoming a part of the society and the country.

Underneath it all? Contentment. The kids were so quickly adapted to their new social lives and friends that we were astounded. Kids are so resilient. They made friends and acclimated to their environments in ways their parents probably never will.

We had an ideal for ourselves and we began to see that it was achievable. People told us in advance that the beginning would be difficult. We thought we were prepared, but there really was no way to prepare for how hard things would get. Yet, we could see (somewhere off in the future) a time where things would be easier.

With each success our confidence grew and we began to get more and more comfortable with ourselves and where we were in life. Not every note home was a crisis. We didn’t have angry, crying kids wandering through the house, wishing they were somewhere else.

We each traveled to America, visiting friends and family and focusing on work. We were able to restock our supplies (although we have run out of printer ink and they don’t sell the cartridges we need here) and remind ourselves just why we were ready to move.

We’ve lived through a war. Imagine that. Within two weeks of our arrival we were bombing our neighbors. This wasn’t like bombing Canada. This was like bombing Connecticut (or Wisconsin for the Midwestern readers). I was in Haifa on Tisha B’av and the sirens went off twice – an extremely terrifying experience, especially when two weeks later a rocket landed on a road where I had driven.

There were the Charedi riots and the gay parade psychos. We had terrorist threats and murderers promising to kill us at every opportunity. We’ve had strikes to contend with and boycotts and name calling back and forth between the religious and the non religious.

There is so much to integrate in making a new life that at times we were quite literally exhausted at the end of each day. Yet, each morning we’d get up and go back at it because we knew that there was a goal in sight and milestones along the way where things would be easier and the joy we have felt in being here since day one will be all the more gratifying.

Six months was one of those milestones. We had been so looking forward to this point that when we finally reached it, we were so absorbed with our daily living that we totally missed it. There are other things we missed as well.

We missed our good friends’ Shalom Zachor last Friday night. David and Shira Wiseman had their third child and second boy, and we would have been right in the middle of the festivities had we been there. Instead, we had to content ourselves by ordering a tray for the Shalom Zachor.

We missed our neighbor Nechama Kamenetzky’s Bas Mitzva as well. Sure we keep in touch, but the sharing of our every day joys and especially our simchot makes our friendships all the more dear and when we miss things it hurts.

Our girls certainly make sure to call to wish Happy Birthday to their friends and they skype videoconference as well, but it isn’t the same as being there with friends they have known for the significant portion of their lives.

We’ve missed a lot of things these six months. Simchas, shivas, those significant events that we share with those close to us that makes our bonds even stronger – and we aren’t there to share them. These are the events we used to take for granted, and now in our (gasp) middle age, have to recreate for ourselves and reconnect with a totally new group of people.

Yomim Tovim in a new place. Parent/teacher conferences in a new place with hardly anyone to shmooze with since we don’t know anyone. Grandparents far away. Anything and everything familiar to us, just gone. Teachers. Neighbors. Pizza stores. Supermarkets. Newspapers. Even the mailman (who can’t seem to leave the mail in the same place every day).

We have a cousin’s wedding this summer to attend to, and we might miss it if we can’t figure out a way to make a summer trip to the USA a reality. We haven’t missed a cousin’s simcha in years and we are beside ourselves in distress over the potentially missed event.

We have really felt welcomed by the community in Sheinfeld, yet we go to shul and are mostly casual acquaintances with the rest of the members. We live in the homeland for the Jewish people and we came here to be “home”, but it still isn’t “home”; the people still aren’t the friends and family who we have shared so much with in building our lives and our family.

It will get there in many ways, eventually. Some ways it will even surpass the life we had, which was our motivation for making the move. We have come a long way, but we aren’t there yet.

The kids don’t talk about it, neither do we. They are actually pretty happy and it is a rare night when you hear, “I wanna go back to America.” That doesn’t mean that they (and we) don’t know how much easier it would be for us had we stayed and how much more comfortable we would have felt in our old surroundings.

Channuka without their grandparents. No spur of the moment trips to Bubbee for Shabbos. No birthday dinners at a special restaurant. No picking out thirty books at the library to last for a week at home. Things are definitely different and who thought that we would be in this position as we closed in on forty.

Yet, we have attended simchot here; I had a great time at the Shalom Zachors and we appreciate every simcha invitation. We have been invited out with regularity here and we have begun to make new friends.

We have siblings and cousins here who we haven’t been able to see and with whom we finally can build relationships. We have new challenges and new horizons that we couldn’t have dreamt we would be exposed to in a meaningful way.

We have been and will continue to be visited by Bubbees and Zaidees. We have our VOIP phone and our SKYPE and are therefore in contact more than olim have been at any previous time in history. Our kids have friends and they fit in.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we miss you, and that is a price we have to pay for being here. We knew going in that these would be exactly the things we would miss the most, so we aren’t really so surprised. This is exactly how we expected to feel. These were major factors we considered in our decision to make the move. However, all things considered it is a price we were willing to pay and so far the price has been right.