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?

Salute to Israel Parade, NY, 1970

We've been pulling out old albums of late, and found these irreplaceable photos.

They are from the Salute to Israel Parade. Marching are members of the NCSY Dance Group which had performed in Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden that year. I was group leader. It was the first time the Israeli Folk Dance Festival had performed there.

Previously it had been in Carnegie Hall, which has, or had, an ambience all its own. But festival director, Fred Berk had been itching for a more genuine folk dance festival feeling. He hated the stage and curtains in the illustrious concert hall. When I took his Leadership and Choreography course in 1967-68, he always stressed that true folk dance required dancing onto the performance area and dancing off of it. NO CURTAINS raised and lowered.

At the 1970 festival we all sat around the performance area, getting up to dance on and off when it was our group's turn. Then at the very end of the show, all of the groups and dancers danced together in separate circles.

A couple of months later, at the parade, my dancers and I donned our costumes and danced up Fifth Avenue. We had sewn the skirts the year before for the 1969 festival, but then we added white trim on the bottom plus the "belts" in 1970. And we wore our own white blouses. For the festivals, we danced barefoot, but of course that wouldn't work on the NYC streets.

In 1970, NCSY was given a spot near the beginning of the parade, and Betar was towards the end. So, after dancing the entire way to the end, I quickly, literally ran back down Fifth Avenue to join Betar and march again. Being just a spectator was not for me.

Who else was at that parade?

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?

Becoming a "Real Israeli"

I've heard what I'm going to say from many people. The family of a Begin Prize winner said it, too:

There is something about losing a family member or friend to one of Israel's wars or Arab terrorism etc. and joining the masses of the Israeli bereaved that makes one become "a real Israeli." 

True, it's a terrible rite of passage into the Israeli culture and society.  It's a unifying trauma that happens to all stratum of Israeli society, rich, poor, religious, secular, new-comer (olim,) veteran and even some who aren't even Jewish.

Unfortunately, we did "joined the club" pretty early, only three years after our aliyah, when two friends from our American Betar days were killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Charles "Chuck" Haim Hornstein חיים (הרן) הורנשטיין הי"ד" and Eli Michael Solomon אלי סולומון הי"ד".

The tie between us and our remaining friends from the 1960's Betar New York seem to just get stronger with the years. We celebrate and mourn together throughout the year and over decades. When my son got married,  we were only able to invite one table of friends, so they were the friends. They are like family for us and our children, too. And unfortunately, those Betar friends who ended up remaining in the states seem to suffer terribly from their being so far from us. Israel and Zionism brought us together and keep us together.

Li'ilui Nishmatam, May their souls ascend even higher...
Charles "Chuck" Chaim Hornstein חיים (הרן) הורנשטיין הי"ד"
Eli Michael Solomon אלי סולומון הי"ד"

May their memories be a blessing, and may we enjoy more smachot (happy occasions) together rather than grave time.