This time around, there is no more talk of giving up and going back – to New York, Cape Town or anywhere else.
By GLORIA DEUTSCHTHIS SOUTH African native traded a burgeoning career in fashion to focus more on her children, and is training to be a Pilates instructor.(photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
From fashion designer to Pilates instructor is quite a transition, but this is just one of the many ways Lauren Gez has had to adapt to living in Israel.Gez made aliya with her husband and two children in 2010, but had already made several attempts to live here before that – and each time, she didn’t want to stay.“I moved to Israel because of my husband,” she says, speaking of their first aliya in 2000.Today, Gez is happily settled in Ra’anana and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But it has been a bumpy transition.She was born in South Africa into the fashion industry. “My grandfather started the business and my father took it over,” she says. “We made leisurewear and clothes for camping, that sort of thing. I grew up in fashion and the talk at the dinner table was almost always about business.”It was clear from the start that Gez would also study fashion and after she completed her bachelor’s degree in English literature at Cape Town University, she decided to go to New York and study there.“I have a great-aunt living in New York and we were always very close,” she says. “She gave me the idea of studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology.I specialized in the buying and marketing side of the business.”For a time she worked in the prestigious firm of Kenneth Cole, which produces shoes and handbags, and enjoyed the glamour of it all.Meanwhile her future husband, Oren, was working as an El Al security guard and studying finance. They met and the romance flourished. The couple moved to Israel but it was the time of the second intifada, and Gez’s father insisted she come back to South Africa.She began working in her father’s company as a buyer, keeping in touch with her future husband who had stayed in Israel.She and Oren did long-distance dating, except for one romantic meeting in Prague in 2001.“He invited me to meet him in Europe and at first my family wouldn’t let me go, as it was soon after 9/11,” she recalls. “A few weeks later, they relented and I met him in Europe. He proposed to me in Venice and four months later we were married in South Africa.”They lived in Israel for two years, but she was still not happy.“I didn’t want to be here,” she says. “I didn’t get on with Israelis and I wanted to finish my studies in New York.”It was with the birth of their two children, a daughter and a son, that she realized she wanted to be in Israel.“When I saw that I had no one to share the children with and I realized that without family something was missing, I decided to come back,” says Gez. Her husband had been offered a good job in his field and in 2010 the whole family came back, renting an apartment and getting down to the business of living in Israel.“I began working for Gottex, designing bathing suits,” she says. “It was a real learning curve, and improved my Hebrew – and Russian – a lot. But after a time I felt it wasn’t the right job for me. The offices were far out and the hours were long. I would never be back in time to be able to spend much time with my children.”After trying another big fashion company, she came to the reluctant conclusion that she would have to give up her first love – fashion – and think of doing something else, at least until the children were much bigger.“It was back to the drawing board,” she says cheerfully.Gez had been doing Pilates for a while, and loved it. She suddenly had an inspiration: Why not study it formally and become a teacher? “I realized it’s a great profession for a mom,” she explains.With a year and a half of studying under her belt, she admits the courses have been quite challenging, especially as many of the lectures are in Hebrew. She took courses in anatomy at the Wingate Institute and then continued at Holmes Place, where she studied mat courses and carried on to gain a qualification teaching Pilates with machines.She hopes to complete her qualification within a few months and start teaching privately. For practice she holds classes for her friends in the lounge of her attractive home, where there is plenty of room to bend and stretch. Besides being a lot of fun, she is honing her skills as an instructor.Gez finds that to be a good instructor it helps to have an outgoing personality – which fortunately she is blessed with – and lessons in the Gez household are designed to be for fun as well as health.The children go to the Tali school, and she was happy to find an educational set-up similar to the one she grew up in in South Africa.This time around, there is no more talk of giving up and going back – to New York, Cape Town or anywhere else.
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