By SUSAN DE LA FUENTEDaughter of US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman makes aliya (photo credit: SHAHAR AZRAN)
It was perhaps predictable that Katie and Yoni Lazarus noticed one another among the throng of students doing three-year doctoral programs in Hunter College’s physical therapy school. Firstly, they were among the few religious Jews in the program. Another coincidence was that both roomed uptown in Washington Heights, New York. Although they were not in the same class, their paths frequently crossed and they spent a lot of time together. Once the couple realized they had much in common, their marriage soon followed in 2012.Katie’s great-grandmother had been one of the first Jews to arrive in West Virginia. Katie herself grew up first in Virginia Beach then in Norfolk, VA, which had an Orthodox community of around 100 Jewish families. She and her identical twin sister and their two siblings attended the community day school there through eighth grade. As there was no Jewish high school in the area, they went to a private prep school for ninth and tenth grades, after which they spent 11th and 12th grade in an Orthodox day school in Maryland. Both studied in Stern College, NY, the undergraduate women’s college of Yeshiva University. Though the sisters were so similar that people frequently mixed them up, their ways diverged slightly when Katie opted for a career choice of physical therapy and her sister for occupational therapy. Both work in pediatrics, however.Yoni, a sixth-generation American and the oldest of nine children, grew up in Monsey, New York to a family that had lived there for 70 years. He had an Orthodox Jewish education through high school.“I didn’t have a Zionist background,” he says, “but I became enthusiastic about Israel when I attended a year’s program at Sha’alvim Yeshiva. I did my undergraduate degree at Fairley Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.” Katy had also spent a gap year in Israel in a seminary.Katie and Yoni decided to move to Jerusalem with their nine-month-old child during Operation Protective Shield in 2014. The family of three viewed their aliya as a fitting response to the kidnapping and murders of three teenage boys that took place that summer in Gush Etzion.“We felt that was the trigger,” Yoni remarks, while Katie adds, “One of the strongest ways to truly protect our country is to counter the terrorists and bring more people in to live here, give to Israel, to grow and cause growth.” Some of their family members were supportive, others less. “Some tried to convince us not to go, but all are reconciled and supportive now,” Yoni says.While renting an apartment in Jerusalem and attending ulpan for their first five months, “We felt a little lost,” Katie says, “and we worried about our future. However, within half a year both of us found jobs.” She had already worked in New York in her specialty of pediatrics, childhood development and autism. “In Jerusalem I worked at Aleh aiding children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities.” Though at first she found it hard to cope with Hebrew documentation and sat for hours over the forms, she soon passed that hurdle.In 2016, the Lazaruses moved north to Migdal Ha’emek and now have three preschool children. Katie works two days a week locally in an early childhood center and a community resource for early intervention, in addition to her work in two preschool programs in Afula treating children with autism.She helps the kids with autism “adjust better to the day-to-day demands of the world. As a physical therapist, I help them improve their body awareness, gross motor skills, and motor planning skills so they can succeed in school and play like kids their age.”She cites examples such as sitting at circle time, participating in school trips, improving climbing skills and “working with them outside in a playground. Additionally, we can take something like throwing a ball and make it social, something that is particularly challenging for children with autism. For the kids who are delayed developmentally, we help them crawl, stand, walk, run and jump and give a lot of guidance to parents as to what to do at home.”In Migdal Ha’emek, the Lazaruses are actively involved in a religious Zionist group of young families, known as the garin torani.“We found a really nice community. We love this location in the lower Galilee, close to employment opportunities and not too far from the center. We’ve had a warm welcome from the garin torani, which is especially important to us, as we have no first-degree relatives in Israel,” Katie comments.Yoni, who is skilled in the area of endurance sports and sports medicine, works some 20 hours weekly for the army in Haifa.“Although I did not have the opportunity to serve in the IDF because of my age at aliya, I get satisfaction in knowing that I can directly improve the lives of the soldiers and thereby contribute to the success of the IDF,” says Yoni.In addition, he recently opened his own physical therapy practice in Migdal Ha’emek, where his focus will include a niche market of endurance athletes, such as runners and cyclists. He generally runs 15 km a day and has been spotted sprinting home from the railway station and running the occasional marathon.Though the Lazaruses have successfully coped with some Israeli challenges such as “learning Hebrew, finding jobs and a community,” naturally they still miss their families. Besides becoming more established economically, their present goals are “to raise a happy, well-grounded family, inspire others to move to Israel and to strengthen the community that we joined two years ago.”
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