No regrets

‘Even the bad things that have happened to me were not bad in the end,’ Kaner says.

By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLER
Yael Kaner (photo credit: Courtesy)
Yael Kaner
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Meeting Yael Kaner is like getting an electric jolt.
She’s an energetic, optimistic woman with a long history of making life-changing decisions in a split second and never, ever looking back with regret.
She grew up in a series of small towns in New England, where hers was the only Jewish family. The local minister’s son was her first serious boyfriend.
“My boyfriend’s father and my father had an unbreakable pact that we would not end up together. My boyfriend’s father, Rev. Ellsworth D. Comins III, gave me a copy of The Chosen and told me to go find my people,” she laughs.
She had no real contact with other Jews until she was in high school. When she was 13 or 14, someone from Young Judaea reached out to her.
“Young Judaea rocked my world. All of a sudden, I found out about Israel, about Soviet Jewry. I wore my official ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ bracelet with Natan Sharansky’s name on it,” she says.
By age 16, she recalls, she’d had enough of living in a small town.
“I left the farm and took myself to Bradford College. I got admitted through sheer chutzpah. If you want something bad enough, you make it happen, including aliya. Clark College in Massachusetts had Jews, so after a year, I set my sights and got admitted to Clark at age 17. Through scholarships, work-study and some help from my parents to pay tuition, I made my way.”
She recounts that “the first Yom Kippur I ever observed was at Clark. The services were very theatrical, and I knew it wasn’t for me. A few days later, a guy in a suit came up to me on campus and invited me to shake a lulav. I didn’t know what that meant. I asked him to explain everything.
He was a Chabad representative, and he introduced me to Succot and Simhat Torah.”
Meanwhile, one of her roommates had just come back from Young Judaea’s Year Course, “and I made her tell me everything about her experience in Israel.
I started out that year not knowing the alef-bet, and by the end of the year, I was a student leader in Hillel.”
Kaner has always moved at the speed of sound. A week after graduating from Clark, she relocated to Manhattan. She met her first husband, Hayyim Kassorla, the next day. Kassorla was a rabbinical student and an intern at the historic Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, working under Rabbi Marc Angel. They got engaged quickly.
Although she told her fiancé, “I have to live in Israel,” the couple never did make aliya. Instead, she learned to cook Sephardi foods from Angel’s wife, Gilda, a noted Sephardi cookbook author, and began her career as a professional chef.
Married for 24 years, the rabbinic couple specialized in taking communities to the next level. In 1984, they came to Jerusalem with a group of teens. Between taking care of her six-weekold baby and cooking in the dorm’s industrial kitchen, Kaner didn’t get to see much of Israel. It didn’t bother her, though, because she fully expected they would be making aliya the next year.
As it turned out, her aliya dream wouldn’t come true for another 27 years.
For 15 years, she and her husband served the Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Maryland. Many of Magen David’s congregants were Israelis. Her daily life was infused with Israel.
“Every Wednesday night, I served my kids falafel and we watched Israeli movies.
I wanted to instill a love of Israel in them. Two of my sons studied in Israel after high school. But I was so busy raising kids and doing heavy-duty entertaining and community-building, that coming back to Israel just didn’t happen for me.”
In 2001, the couple moved to a new congregation in New York. Shortly thereafter, the Kassorlas’ marriage ended.
She moved back to Maryland.
“I thought, ‘Who wants a used rebbetzin with three teenage sons?’ So I set back to work and bought an apartment.
Ironically the sale of that apartment financed my eventual move to Israel.”
In 2004, she met Yosef Kaner.
“Everything that happened on our first date delighted me. I insisted we needed to meet each other’s children before getting engaged. We never had any drama with our kids. They all get along, and we’ve had a dream blending. We got married eight weeks and two days after we first met. I married a man who had lived in Israel for 17 years. His whole heart was here. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to live in Israel.”
In the meantime, she says, “with all my experience in the kashrut industry, I found a great job in Baltimore. I loved the work. I bounced out of bed every morning. But it wasn’t Israel. I worked in a retreat center, and we stayed in one of the cabins for six weeks. We hung up our Israeli flag in that cabin. All the big Zionist groups passed through the retreat center, and every Wednesday I made Israeli food. While cooking, I listened to [radio host] Yishai Fleischer and Rabbi Lazer Brody on Arutz 7, always talking about the importance of making aliya.
I thought I was going to faint when Sharansky came to our retreat center. I showed him the bracelet I had worn all those y e a r s before. I told him I was coming to Israel, and he was very encouraging.”
When the moment came, it was a quick decision.
“[US President Barack] Obama’s election really helped us make up our minds. Within about three months, we decided to go. We packed up the house, gave away many of our possessions, and we just went. It wasn’t a hard decision at all. We were so ready to leave.”
Indeed, she states, “I have not had one day when I questioned what I did, when I cried. I do miss the kids, but I don’t doubt my decision. My certainty says a lot to them. I have no regrets.”
When she first arrived, she attended ulpan. “Then I spent 18 months learning in seminary and getting closer to Torah.
I don’t have a car, so anytime there’s a bus anywhere to tour Israel, I’m on it.
Every single step I take drills me down into this land. My body and soul are reunited.
I really feel God picked out this place just for us. There’s a lot of negativity out there, but not in my little patch of Israel. I just try to be worthy of it.”
She says that “for the last year, I’ve been learning the business of doing business in Israel. How do people make a living here, and how do they make a life here? All the years of being a rebbetzin prepared me to teach others how to network. I help people find their missing piece. It’s my way of building Israel. I’m a 360-degree networker, helping people find their place here.
People can connect with me on Facebook or at yaelonfire@gmail.com.”
Her optimism apparently runs in the family.
“My upbeat personality comes from my father,” she says. “Even the bad things that have happened to me were not bad in the end. It’s all for your good. At this stage in life, I can see that. I just feel like I could break out in song all my life.”