An Aliyah Journal

Under the arch at the top of the midrachov in Zichron is a little shop that sells hippy-Indian clothes, where my three oldest daughters can often be seen rummaging through the over stocked store in search of something easy and cool to wear for the summer. The owner is used to us by now and knows that his patience will pay. He lets the girls treat his small shop like their own private dressing room while he fusses about trying to look busy and helpful. At the end there will be a sale of a few hundred sheks and a small mound of clothes to put back on the racks. He will have something to do, my girls will feel loved and I will rest guilt-free for the remainder of the week knowing that my princesses have something to wear to the ball. Our last purchase at his store totalled four pieces of coloured cloth weighing all of 75 grams and barely stitched together at all. He folded them slowly, meticulously calculating the addition of each out loud. “Three hundred and fourty shekels” he said, wait

I never once saw my mother, my African nanny nor our gorgeous Czechoslovakian cleaning lady Angela throw a bucket of water on the kitchen floor and mop it by attaching a shmatta to a stick. The first time I saw this extraordinarily primitive cleaning technique was on a visit to a friend in Mullumbimby where his new Moroccan Israeli girlfriend was cleaning his house perhaps for the first time ever. Since then I have only ever seen the bucket-shmatta-stick method used by Israeli’s or their partners. It completely fascinates me. In this day and age when we can practically call home from our mobiles on Mars, how is it that Israeli woman are still mopping the floor with a shmatta and a stick? For most of my adult life the cleaning lady in my house was me. Perhaps it had to do with a certain uncomfortable feeling I had from having grown up in South Africa, or perhaps it was because I married a man sorely lacking in an MBA, but by the time our fifth baby came along, I was ready for some help

Recently I was stopped by a woman who kindly pointed out that I was parked illegally. “Slicha”, I said apologetically, “ b’Englit ?”. “Sure,” she said, in a broad East Coast American accent “I can do it in English too” and she repeated her diatribe of abuse for the horrendous crime of my having parked half up on the curb outside my own house in the dead end quiet backstreets of Zichron Yaakov. I was confused. I thought that my newfound Israeli Citizenship entitled me to drive, if not park like an Israeli. Still it came as a bit of a culture shock, the way Israeli’s drive, and after my first month here I declared to all that I was never leaving my home town of Zichron again, a vow my husband annulled immediately, and thank G-d for that for a few days into the Pesach break I was ready to venture out again. Israel’s roads are notoriously badly signed. Decisions made at break neck speed must contribute to the toll of lives if not to the toll on Israeli nerves, and so it was that we found o

The taxi driver threw his hands up in the air in excitement and greeted us with a big warm smile when he heard we had just made Aliya from Australia. “Australia”, he said, ‘I love Australia! I’ve been to Australia! I want to live in Australia” He tossed our bags and our children into the back of his dusty sheirut and off we went making our way up north on the No.2 freeway to a small town just north of Natanya called Zichron Yaakov. “The No. 4 is better “he said “but I never take it, too many fines” meaning you couldn’t get away with speeding the way he was. He told us about his travels to Sydney, to the Opera house and the Blue Mountains and how he dreamed one day of living in Australia. “I had to come back to look after my father “he said, “but you how could you leave the best country in the world to come to Israel? “ I had to admit, it was a damn good question. Even though my husband had been threatening for years no-one believed we would ever actually do it. Firstly no one believed