An Aliyah Journal

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 he would ever talk me into it, and then once he had, the move was contingent on him doing absolutely everything to make it happen, which no-one believed he would do, but he did. He went to the Aliya office, he did all the research, made all the phone calls, attended all the appointments, filled out all the paperwork, organised to have our home packed up and shipped over, booked the tickets and found a house for us to rent.

We arrived at Ben Gurion feeling like Maurice Saundeks ‘Max’ having ‘sailed through night and day and in and out of weeks’ and were promptly escorted to an office inside the airport where we were issued with Israeli ID’s and granted Israeli Citizenship right there and then - before we changed our minds. I was somewhat taken by the Ministry’s confidence that we were here to stay and in that simple defining moment for the first time in my life, I felt the stirrings of a sense of national identity. I think it’s true, that Israel experienced in ones youth ensures a lifelong attachment, but like Lorenz’s duck, I had imprinted Los Angeles on my psyche in the wisdom of my youth, and it was not until the motherland embraced me in her matriarchal arms, granting me citizenship without a moment’s thought, that I felt, in some strange way that I had come home.

I had no real expectations, but I knew (because everyone told me repeatedly) that it would be hard to make Aliya at forty something with five children and a substandard Jewish Day school Hebrew. Even so there was a flow to the events that lead us to believe that it was the right thing to do. The universe synchronised itself to make it easy for us. I don’t mean in a big way, I mean in a small way, like when you ask for a parking spot and you get one in a most unlikely place, that’s how it was.

From our rented house in Zichron, over suburban red rooftops we can see the Mediterranean in the distance. On our first morning we awoke to a street parade for soldiers who had completed their first level of training. Their spirits were high as friends and family joined their march to the base. I examined the young faces of these teenagers carrying guns and felt a great tug at my tenuous newfound national identity. This was a reality for which I was not prepared. When I told my cousin that I was ambivalent about coming to live in a ‘war zone in the middle east’, she promptly corrected me, “It’s not a war zone” she said, “its Israel”.

At night the streets are quiet but for the noise of neighbours doing evening chores and children speaking Hebrew at a speed I will never understand. A cool breeze blows through the house and the crisp evening air reminds us that in Israel it is not summer yet. We have given ourselves three years to decide if we can make it. Before we left, we attended the United Israel Appeal function in Sydney, where we heard Natan Shransky and Fentahun Assefa-Dawit’s remarkable stories of their return to Israel. I guess if you spent nine years in a Siberian Labour Camp or you walked across the Sahara by foot to get here, you cannot be so easily convinced to leave; we however had flown in from Sydney’s eastern Suburbs with a laptop and a credit card...I guess only time will tell.