A Taglit poster child on a Jewish journey

‘One night in middle school...I sat down by myself and made my own Seder,” Haim says of her connection to Judaism growing up in the diaspora.

By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLER
Ariela Haim (photo credit: Courtesy)
Ariela Haim
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Ariela Haim is the perfect poster child for Taglit- Birthright. Although priority is generally given to older participants, she used a little Vitamin P – “protektsia” – to join the trip at the tender age of 18, right after her first year of college at New York’s SUNY Purchase.
Her first-ever trip to Israel was coordinated by StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy organization based in her hometown of Los Angeles. Her father had a friend on StandWithUs’s board, and that connection opened the door to what would eventually launch Haim’s life in Israel.
In some sense, moving to Israel was in her blood.
Haim’s father, who was raised in Turkey and lived in various European cities, made aliya alone at the age of 19. With a deep commitment to the socialist goals of the young state, he spent 11 years here, serving in the IDF Paratroop Brigade and working on kibbutzim. He eventually returned to America at the age of 30, where he met and married Ariela’s mother, a more conventional Conservative Jew from Long Island.
Although her mother had observant family friends, when Haim was growing up her family never attended synagogue. Her entire Hebrew school education lasted all of two years, and was over by age eight. She was taught to chant the Torah portion by a local cantor, and had a Reform bat mitzva with a rabbi who was hired to officiate for the day. Her most significant Jewish memory from childhood is of her father who, although not religious, fasted each year on Yom Kippur.
Nevertheless, something in the Haim household’s Jewish cocktail was enough to keep the flame alive in Ariela. “I always had something in me. I loved the ‘What it’s like to be in Israel in your 20s stories’ from my father. I was always drawn to Judaism; I always had Jewish friends, even though I went to public school. One year in middle school, on the second night of Passover, I sat down by myself and made my own Seder.”
The Taglit trip with StandWithUs was an ideal match for Haim, who was inspired by all the powerful pro-Israel speakers to whom she was exposed. She was particularly influenced by Ran “Bario” Bar-Yoshafat, an IDF reservist who she says has “dedicated his life to portraying Israel positively to Americans.”
In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Haim and her Taglit group visited a senior citizens’ residence outside Tel Aviv and listened to stories of what the residents were doing when they heard the news of the declaration of independence in 1948. Haim vividly remembers this tale: “One woman from South Africa was nine months pregnant at the time, and she danced in the streets when she heard; she made aliya shortly after the birth of the child.”
When she returned from her Taglit trip in 2008, Haim confessed to her father at the airport, “I could make aliya tomorrow.” She didn’t do it quite so soon, but she did add a Jewish studies minor to her degree.
Today she reads the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, calling him “Zionist crack.”
Haim’s next visit to Israel was a six-month MASA program, in which she enrolled just after graduating from SUNY Purchase with a BA in dance. Through the World Union of Jewish Students, she interned at a kindergarten for non-Jewish children from Eritrea and the Philippines. Haim describes her Hebrew as “nonexistent” at that point, saying she learned the Hebrew words for colors, foods and numbers from the kids in her kindergarten.
For the duration of her time working with the children, Haim debated making aliya. Since her father held Israeli citizenship by virtue of his own aliya years ago, Haim reports that the Interior Ministry made it complicated to stay. In 2012, she returned to LA.
It took four months back in her hometown to cement her decision to return full-time to Israel, and another six months to implement the plan. Haim arrived on aliya in February 2013, and did her ulpan at the Ra’anana absorption center; she then did a year of voluntary army service, helping new olim through the draft process.
“I was an ulpan nerd; I would go to the library for four hours after ulpan to make flashcards. Afterward, I acquired even more vocabulary. The IDF runs in Hebrew, so it reaffirmed what I had learned so far and made me more confident in my spoken Hebrew,” says Haim.
”I’m in love with the language!” she enthuses. “It’s amazing that a 2,000-year-old language was revived. I think it’s really beautiful to take the shoresh [the root of the Hebrew word] and build a bunch of words off of it. When I speak in Hebrew, I think in Hebrew. When I was in the army living with an Israeli roommate, I spoke Hebrew all the time. Now, I have a few friends from the army, and we speak a mix – I speak to them in Hebrew and they answer in English, because they want to improve their English.”
Regarding her Hebrew at this time, Haim says, “My life has kind of gone backwards. I live in [the Jerusalem neighborhood of] Baka and study in English, so I’ve begun losing some Hebrew. But I babysit twice a week for Israeli kids, and they correct me; they aren’t afraid to let me know when I’ve made a mistake.”
While at ulpan in Ra’anana, Haim began to meet observant people. “I had a lot of religious friends in Ra’anana; I would dress conservatively for dinner with them. I dated a guy who was shomer negia [abstains from touching women who are not his wife or close relatives]; I wasn’t even shomeret Shabbat [Shabbat-observant] yet. While I was dating him, I kept Shabbat twice with friends. It didn’t work out with him but I kept trying, and realized I liked Shabbat. Today, I keep Shabbat and kosher and want to raise my children the same way.”
As part of her exploration, Haim enrolled in a yearlong course at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. She describes the program: “It’s 20 hours a week; men and women study together. It’s like yeshiva, very textual. It’s filling in the gaps of my Jewish education.
Pardes enrolls an extremely wide spectrum of students, though the teachers are Modern Orthodox and stick to text and tradition.”
With a strong desire to drink in every Israeli experience she can, Haim also works part-time for Taglit- Birthright, registering students for upcoming trips. On top of all that, she just began volunteering with the Lone Soldier Center in Memory of Michael Levin. Her work there as an adviser to lone soldiers is great preparation for social-work school, which she hopes to start this coming fall.
As she looks back on her journey from secular American Jew to observant, Hebrew-speaking Israeli, Haim is grateful for her parents’ support and offers this advice, “Two things I learned: You don’t know what life is going to give you, and never say no to an option until you try it out. I would never have imagined six years ago that I would be religious, have served in the army and be living in Israel!”