Celebrating YOM HA'ALIYAH Making One's Home in Israel, The Holy Land

 

For the past few years a "new holiday" has joined the Israeli Calendar, YOM HA'ALIYAH, a time to honor those who made aliyah-- immigrated to Israel. My husband and I made the move two months after our wedding in the summer of 1970. You can read about it here part 1 and part 2. 

YOM ALIYAH is celebrated around the Torah Portion Lech Lecha in which Gd commands Avram-Abram (before his name is changed to Avraham-Abraham) to get himself going to the Land Gd will show him.

בראשית י״ב  

לך לך

א- וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃

1- יהוה said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

Over the millennium many Jews all exiled over the world have felt these words from Gd personally and made their way whether by plane, boat, wagon or foot to the Holy Land, the Land of Israel, even before the modern State of Israel had been established. I was one of them.

I'll never forget how I broke the news of my plans to my parents, who had barely adjusted to my religious observance. You must understand that we were an ordinary American Jewish family, which lit Chanukah candles, had an abridged Passover Seder, were even members of a synagogue, Conservative-- which was the most popular and rapidly growing in the 1950s. But the kitchen wasn't kosher, and Shabbat and many Jewish Holidays weren't on our family calendar.

When I was thirteen 13 we moved to a different community, and the only synagogue actively recruiting new members was Orthodox, the Great Neck Synagogue. There I joined their Teen Club to make friends. It was a chapter of NCSY National Conference of Synagogue Youth, where I was introduced to "Torah True Judaism" which changed my life. Soon after, one of the local Jewish activists got me involved in Betar and Zionism, icing on the cake of my Jewish Life.

I didn't want any ideological, philosophical arguments with my parents about my plan to move to Israel, so I simply said:

"You couldn't stop me from keeping Shabbat and Kashrut. Living in Israel is just another mitzvah, and you can't stop me from doing that either."

It worked. They had no answer, though sometimes I wonder if they were happy to get me far from my younger siblings as not to corrupt them with my revolutionary life style. Within a few years, my mother enjoyed being the local expert in helping other parents with similarly "eccentric" children.

Obviously, Lech Lecha has always been my favorite Torah Portion of The Week. I live in a community, Shiloh, that is a fantastic stew of longtime Israelis and and much newer ones from all over the world. Our local region Mateh Binyamin, which is like an American county, is the same sort of mix. This year Mateh Binyamin made a big festive event to which we had been invited. I really enjoyed seeing so many people; some had been customers of mine when I worked in Yafiz. The highlight was an old-fashioned Israeli singalong. The choice of songs was just perfect.

It's the truth to say that I celebrate YOM HA'ALIYAH daily. I've never once considered that decision I made as a teenager to have been a mistake.

Mixing Fact and Fiction

Last night I reviewed Arise and Shine by Tzvi Fishman on my blog Shiloh Musings, a book I coined a Forrest Gump historical fiction novel. Arise and Shine is part of a series of books by Fishman which follows the lives and adventures of  Shalom Aleichem's iconic Tevye character. Fishman has Tevye and most of his family coming to the Promised Land after being banished from their home in Anatevka.



The novel takes place after World War One, and one of the important subplots concerns the internal politics of the giants of the Zionist Movement. Fishman creates realistic characters out of true historic figures, many who had still been alive when I became a Zionist and my husband and I made aliyah. Yes, we knew some of them in real life, though they were a generation or two older than us.

Many of our friends in the Betar Zionist Youth Movement knew them, too. Betar is the youth movement connected to Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor and the Zionist Revisionists, who had been marginalized by the more politically "adept" Labor Zionists.

While the Labor Zionists idealized socialism, kibbutzim, The Haganah and Palmach, Jabotinsky's Revisionists promoted free enterprise and founded the Etzel and its breakaway freedom fighters Lechi aka Stern Gang. All in their ways claimed to be doing everything in their power to establish a Jewish State in Mandated Palestine.

Considering all of the groups and factions there had been fighting the British and each other in those very early pre-State of Israel, I have no doubt that that we all found ourselves imagining which group we would have joined, if we had lived in those exciting and historically significant times. And many of us now very grownup young Zionists continue dreaming and wondering. That could be the seeds of many more books in the genre of Forrest Gump historical fiction. Where would you have been?

"60+ is Fun," Getting Together Talking About Wars

Salute to Israel Parade, New York, 1970
NCSY Dance Group
That's me holding the flag. (photographer unknown)

Here in Shiloh new genres of social activities are developing as we get older. One of them is the "60+ is Fun," which can also be called "empty-nesters." Few of us still have children at home, and the children who live at home are adults, too. The group includes retirees and those still working.

There are two reasons for these activities. One is that as the house empties, we find ourselves with empty evenings. And the other is that so many young families live in Shiloh now, we are no longer the "face of the community," meaning that our interests/experiences/needs are different from Shiloh's young mothers of today.

Some of our activities are also for men, but every month or so we gather around someone's table, which fills with nosh, for some discussion or other activity.

Last night we celebrated Yom Ha'atzma'ut, Israeli Independence Day by reminiscing about the 1967 Six Days War. About half of us were in late high school at the time, and we all had very clear and different memories of the war and the tense weeks leading up to it.

We also come from a number of places; half were raised in Israel. I brought these two pictures to show my friends in order to try to give them an idea of what it was like to be a "Jewish activist" and Zionist fifty years ago in New York.

It's a shame that the discussion wasn't recorded, since it had very serious historical value. It was led by a retired History Teacher.

Salute to Israel Parade, New York, 1970
NCSY Dance Group
That's me holding the flag. (photographer unknown)

Trump Didn't Paralyze Jerusalem

It was business as usual yesterday in Jerusalem. Even though lots of people kept insisting that it would be impossible to do anything at all in Jerusalem, they were wrong. Here and there a road was closed, and my husband had to wait over 15 minutes to cross the street, but  there was none of the paralysis people had been predicting.

I noticed nothing out of the ordinary in Machane Yehuda and the Center of Town. And the food was so irresistible. And I even used the  Women's WC there to see if I hadn't been "just lucky" when I used it previously for review. It was pretty clean, especially considering the traffic/use, but this time no soap. It still ranks in the middle plus as public toilets go.

We also had no problem walking to Sultan's Pool, under the Old City Walls for the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism.

I'm blogging more about the big event on my other blog. Hint! Hint!

New York's Salute to Israel Parade, 1969 or 1970

When I was going through pictures the other week, I came across two from the Salute to Israel Parade. Here I am with other members of the NCSY National Conference of Synagogue Youth Israeli Folk Dance Group, which I had led those two years.

Yes, that's me in the middle holding up the Israeli Flag.

Those were our costumes made for the big Israeli Folk Dance Festival, which had been run by the legendary Fred Burk. I have a feeling it was the 1970 parade, because I think we added the white trim on the skirts that year. We wore them without the trim in 1969, if I'm not mistaken. I led the group both those years, before I got married and made aliyah.

In 1970 I marched the parade twice. First I marched/danced with NCSY and then ran back to close the beginning to catch Betar and march with them, too.

I participated in all the parades until our aliyah, from the very first. And in 1977, we visited New York in the spring and marched again with Betar if I remember correctly. I know we were there. It was the end of our two year shlichut, doing Jewish Zionist youth work in London, and we visited family in New York before returning to Israel.

Does anyone else have great memories of those early Salute to Israel Parades?