An Aliyah Journal

Waiting for an explanation as to how I could say such a terrible thing, my girl-friend looked at me horrified. She had said that after the Israeli courts decision to oppose same-sex couples adopting, she was thinking about leaving the country for good. For her it was the last straw on a high stack of daily injustices, frustrations and mishaps which come with life in Israel. For the record I openly state that I fully support same-sex couples adopting children, but my comment required some explaining. “I’m glad I live in a country where same-sex couples are not yet allowed to adopt.” I had said. And this is what I meant. In this day and age when the gates of liberalism have been flung so far open that there are no longer boundaries or constraints on almost anything, I am glad that in Israel, we still have healthy debate around important issues like adoption, abortion and gender pronouns. Almost daily I am shocked by what floats across my newsfeed. I am shocked that ...

Don't come out until you've been wearing your big girl undies for more than a week. My girlfriend, a mother of four, and I always joke about how compatible we would be if only we were gay. She doesn’t mind folding the washing, I quite like to cook and we get along like a house on fire. “We could just bring a gorgeous young Jamaican guy to come visit a few times a week,” she suggests playfully as we sip on our rose water tea and dream about our little shared shack on the beach. The thing is though, that I don’t really like men with Rastafarian dreads, and she doesn’t like them groomed and clean shaven. Pity about that. Though it’s taken me a lifetime of being in my big girl body to know exactly what I do and don't like. So when a twelve year old comes out to her family and community about being gay, trans or cyber-gendered, I would suggest she return to the drawing board of her fertile imagination and wait a few years until she really knows who she is ...

There is a clip I shared on Facebook showing the mother of the disgusting specimen of garbage who killed twenty three year old Hadas Malka in cold blood last Friday, saying, “I wanted him to succeed, in killing twenty, fifty, one hundred of them (Jews). Thank god, I am proud.…” A friend of mine commented on the post saying, “I feel nauseous”. The chasm between the two mind-sets is obvious. Though I am not generally one to talk in absolutes, this difference between them is as vast as that between good and evil itself. That the obvious has to be stated; that Jews and Muslims are neither good nor evil, speaks to the profound stupidity accompanying this generation of university and universally educated and their accompanying quasi-journalist. But what is fundamentally true is this, Jewish mothers feel nauseous at the very thought that any mother would be proud of her child for having killed an innocent human being in cold blood, because she believes he will be rewarded in the wo...

I admit to being a little arrogant when it comes to wearing the 'mother' archetype and I am entirely comfortable adding Jewish to the equation. Never more so than when I am out in public in Israel. Somehow I feel that every child is partly mine and while I'm not one to tell other mothers to cover their babies naked heads in the cold, I have been known to pat one or two as they pass by.  I found motherhood relatively easy. Actually that's a lie. I found motherhood excruciatingly difficult, even to this day. But it does come naturally to me. As a very young mother I was very confident. I was determined enough to breastfeed while many gave up easily, confident enough to handle my newborn without help and gutsy enough to go up against the established norms of the day declining mandatory immunization. My blood pressure was low enough for me not to be a helicopter parent and my faith high enough to trust that my kids were fine, even if the road was often and litera...

In my opinion and from my experience, when it comes to making Aliyah, it takes a family three years to get their bearings and seven years to integrate. Children do not pick up the language in a few months, unless they are two and learning to talk, and even with the assistance of Waze, after seven years I still get lost trying to negotiate my way through the complex and decayed socialist systems of Israeli bureaucracies in all their rotting glory. Spiritually speaking, I have taken a dive to the mirky bottom of hopelessness as I look towards a future where the gap between the have's and the have not's seems to grow exponentially larger, like the government debt collection agents punitive tax on those who have fallen through the cracks of a system seemingly designed specifically for that purpose. It is almost impossible to survive in this country without a foreign income, unless you are privileged and intelligent enough to work in the high tech sector, or are either a busines...

This March marks our family's four year Aliyah anniversary, and much as I hate to admit it, in some strange ways, Israel is starting to feel like home. As I drive from our home town of Zichron Yaakov down the winding hills through Binyamina and on to the flatlands of Pardes Hanah, I now recognise fields and landmarks as if I had grown up amongst them. I know how to avoid the morning traffic and still get to the bank on time. I know the shortcuts and the back roads, and I know the one way streets even though the inadequate signs are covered with overgrown foliage. That old familiar feeling of knowing an area well enough to give directions, in Hebrew, to strangers who suddenly stop in the middle of the road, oblivious to the seven car pile-up they have caused behind them, sits comfortably in my psyche. When I arrogantly dare step onto the pedestrian crossing and confidently march across the street, admittedly risking my life but more importantly disregarding the shock I inevitably ca...

You all know the story of the old man who walked along the beach picking up starfish that had been washed up onto the sand and tossing them back into the ocean. A young man stopped him and said Are you crazy old man, there are thousands of starfish along the shore, do you really think that your tossing them back into the ocean one at a time will make a difference? The old man bent down, picked up a star fish and tossed it back into the ocean. He looked at the young man and replied To that one, it just made a difference Natalie is sixteen. She lives with her boyfriend and his family in a 'block' in Pardes Hanah. A 'block' is an apartment building, but 'apartment' is too luxurious a word to describe where and how Natalia lives. There is no elevator in her building, no lights on the landings between the six flights of stairs that are littered with used clothes and electrical goods that no longer work. There are no paintings on the landings, no balconies, no plants...

The open concrete area under the block in which Yuri lives, is filled with large wailing women. They sit on plastic chairs between pillars in a large square clapping their folded hands over their chests in grief, lamenting the tragic and sudden loss of the father of my friend Yuri. In the cultural code of the Kazakhstan, they are all dressed alike for the occasion, wearing finely decorated black and dark blue summer dresses and patterned scarves to cover their heads. I am noticeably out of place in my jeans and my genes, dwarfed by their heavy bodies and swollen legs which show out beneath mid calf hemlines. They are, each and every one, magnificent, with eastern european faces that express a lifetime of experience; expulsion, war, famine, migration, poverty, loss, grief and suffering. These are not women who care about carbs, these are women who work two jobs a day to pay for their children's fake designer jeans and tobacco and Hash habbits. I have noticed these heavy set women w...

Sanitation was never my strong point. I mean of course I wash my hands after I go to the bathroom and sometimes even before, but I was never one of those moms who carried baby wipes in my bag and who bathed my children every day. I believe a little 'shmootz' is a good thing; it builds a healthy immune system. Still there are some places even I will not go. After a long day rushing around, I found myself in the supermarket late at night in desperate need of a change of tampon. A woman knows these things, not by the time on her mobile phone, but rather by the intuitive knowledge that if she does not get to a bathroom soon, even the most lax sanitary boundaries will have been crossed, and so it was that I found myself searching for the toilets in the ludicrously cheap King supermarket in the Arab Village of Urm El Farhem. A friend had told me about her husband's shopping experiences in the town and I was keen to find an alternative to the local Zichron supermarkets, the cheap...

Everyday I'm thinking, Thank G-d it's not yesterday. Robby was not getting any better and we realised if we left him in his hotel room in Tel Aviv alone over Shabbat he might just freeze to death, though the thought of moving scared him to bits. He was not well enough to make the drive and he could not pack up and check out but mostly he could not bare to be in our hot house with a million teenagers and air conditioning units that, much like us, worked some times, randomly and not at maximum efficiency. Still we had no choice but to save him and so we drove to Tel-Aviv, packed him up and brought him home against his better judgment. The house was clean, and we had run the air conditioning all day to cool it down. There was hot chicken soup on the stove. By Sunday morning he still had a fever so I took him to the doctor who sent him for an x-ray. "Ze iy efshar"- it's not possible, said the woman at reception, he has no details, no Israeli ID number, it can't b...

There's an Israeli comedian that tells how in Israel you have to take twenty eight driving lessons before you can take your driving test to get your licence. His punch line is aptly delivered in a simple "Why?" Our seventeen year old daughter has been working hard to pay for her own driving lessons of which she has so far completed half the required amount. She has also been studying the theory book in English and today I drove her to Hadera to take her theory test which she passed. Since I would be in Hadera with a few hours to spare I called my friend who is a police and traffic officer to meet for a coffee and a chat. Hadera is Golans beat; he walks through the streets and is greeted by all with affection. Once there was a time where he handed out tickets and fines, but now many years on he knows everyone and they all know him. He no longer hands out fines but rather warm greetings and small reminders for all to be on their best. He agreed to meet me outside the driv...

At this moment in time, Israel sits between that casual non affected place we all fell in love with in the seventies and a slick stylised future of the new century - hovering somewhere between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Kylie Mons 'locomotive'. Last weeks Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration was a case in point. Podiums designed to look like large blue underpants , a pompous staged military presence, endless formations of predictable Israeli symbols visible only to the camera's eye, and masses of dancers all doing the same thing over and over again to the backdrop of (I concede) some relatively impressive entertainment technology. I imagine some big Israeli names were called in to produce the event but still it felt staged and flat. Of course in the Tel-Aviv world of design Israel is well and truly up there with the best, as it is in the world of the arts, music and dance, but the rest of the country, is still very much stuck in flared jeans and gaudy fonts. D...

I am returning to Sydney to celebrate my parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary, but Meira didn't know that. All she knew was that I had lost my Israeli travel document (a temporary passport issued to Orlim who leave the country before one year). She looked down at me disapprovingly through the glass screen between us and waited for an explanation I did not have. The implication was clear. Yes, of course I understand that in a country like Israel, where security is of primary concern, the loss of such a document is no small matter. I did not need Meira to tell me that, though she obviously felt that I did. "It's very expensive to replace" she said, her eyes awaiting some kind of grovelling apology for my very existence. "It's 500 shekels". "Wow, that is expensive" I said adding to my growing debt-guilt, "but what can I do, I've booked my ticket, I'm leaving in three weeks." "Go over there and get a letter from that g...