Anyone who has made aliyah can recall the challenges leading up to the actual day of the flight, as well as those post-aliyah, adjusting to a new country, culture, language, and of course, the never-ending bureaucracy.
Even after living in Israel for three years myself, I can personally attest that I am tested daily, as I’m sure many olim will concur. There are days where I just want to wring my hair out, as I wrestle with yet another hot-headed bureaucrat or get launched across the bus. It certainly isn’t easy; but I never question why I chose to live here. And I’m sure that many olim will also tell you of the great joy and meaning that living in Israel has brought to their lives.
Now, more than ever, during one of Israel’s most tragic periods in Jewish history, as our country battles an existential threat, it is terrifying and often isolating to be Jewish or Israeli, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora. In light of these trying times, I feel that it is important to remember as olim, why we moved here, and specifically why we choose to stay, holding onto the threads of light, silver lining, and strength that can be found interspersed in our daily lives.
For this reason, I will be sharing the stories of olim, including the challenges, culture-shock, and humorous incidents they experience living in Israel.
The story of Heshy Engelsberg
This week’s first edition tells the story of Heshy Engelsberg, from New York. A single man, whose parents had already passed on, Heshy was a senior computer programmer for a hospital in New York for about 34 years.
After retiring in November 2020, Heshy shared how the growing violence and antisemitism he saw throughout the United States - such as the shooting at a Chabad synagogue in San Diego, in which several people were killed, and the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which Jew-haters screamed that Jews could not replace them - got him thinking seriously about making aliyah.
Around this time, he came across a new project of a building complex that was to be built in central Jerusalem, advertised in a local paper. Heshy immediately felt drawn to the building, because of its convenient and accessible location, being only a 20 minute walk from the old city, and approximately a 5-10 minute walk to Ben Yehuda and Mahaneh Yehuda.
Heshy responded to the ad and thus began the arduous process of making aliyah. However, beforehand, Heshy was told that he needed to apply for a birth certificate and that he would get a response within three months. Yet, two weeks after submitting his application, it was rejected. Confused, Heshy checked his original birth certificate, and realized that there, his name was spelled Hirsch.
So following instruction from Nefesh B’Nefesh, Heshy went to the local courthouse where he lived, in order to get his name officially changed. But when he got there, the woman behind the desk informed him that he hadn’t filled out the form correctly as he had left out a box saying: “do you also want to change your sex?”
Bewildered, Heshy responded, “Well, actually I’m kind of happy being a man so let’s say no. I just needed to change my name.” After completing the forms, Heshy had to return to the court to verify that all his information was correct. There, the judge officially announced that from this day onward, Heshy would no longer be referred to as Hirsch but as Heshy - although this is what he’d been called his whole life in any case. It was only nine months later that Heshy finally received his birth certificate and was able to start the aliyah process.
Two months post-war, in December 2023, Heshy finally landed in Israel. Despite praying for an easy aliyah, he described the many challenges he encountered upon his arrival and even now, after living here for over a year.
In fact, his very first day on Israeli soil started off on a bad note, as arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, he was told that he couldn’t get access to his apartment, due to complications and delays caused by the war. So on his first night in the Holy Land, Heshy found himself in a hotel.
When he was finally given the keys to his apartment, he found it empty - save for a singular couch - as his furniture shipment had not yet arrived from abroad. It took three weeks, in which Heshy slept on the couch, developed a terrible inflammation in his hip, and was in tremendous pain, until his mattress finally arrived, minus the bed frame. Unfortunately, he then developed a sinus infection and fell ill.
A new oleh, Heshy did not yet have a doctor and didn’t know where to go. By the time he had managed to find a doctor, he arrived at the clinic at approximately 4 p.m and was told that he was too late, by 30 minutes. The clinic told him to come back the following day, so this time Heshy arrived early at 8.30am so that he could be the first in line.
Instead, he found himself waiting for hours, with no doctor in sight. After some time, a man happened to see Heshy, and asked him in English who he was waiting for. Much to Heshy’s chagrin, the man informed him that the doctors were all there, but that he was supposed to just walk into their office. Coming from the US, Heshy described that this was unheard of, as patients instead wait to be called in.
Finally seated in front of a doctor, the doctor asked him if he’d taken his temperature, to which Heshy responded that he hadn’t, “because my thermometer was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic,” but asked the doctor to take it for him. To Heshy’s horror, the doctor responded that he didn’t have a thermometer - “which doctor doesn’t have a thermometer?” he laughed, as he recounted the story - but instead checked Heshy’s lungs and gave him some medication, and sent him on his way.
All this occurred within Heshy’s first month living in Israel - and it doesn’t end there. Several days after moving into his new apartment, a service man came to install a gas stove. After several minutes of poking around in the kitchen, the man told Heshy in Hebrew: “You don’t have gas.”
Baffled, Heshy responded “What do you mean? It’s in the contract. This apartment has gas.” The man simply repeated, “No, you don’t have gas” and angrily stormed out. Exasperated, Heshy called up the contractor who assured him that the apartment was indeed supposed to have gas and that there should be a yellow wire under a cabinet in the kitchen.
The contractor even came to the apartment himself but couldn’t find the wire either. After checking the floorplans, it turned out the wire was hidden somewhere in a wall. Someone had to be called in to extract the wire from the wall, before a service guy was sent in again to come install the gas.
Upon hearing a knock on the door, Heshy described his shock when opened it to see a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) man standing there. It took Heshy a moment to realize that this man had come to install the gas, and was not in fact asking for tzedakah (charity). The man looked around the kitchen, and once again, announced that there was no gas, and walked out, despite the wire being right there in plain sight.
After many phone calls and investigation, it turned out that the issue was deeper: the main valve in the building had a puncture so the pressure wasn’t reaching Heshy’s apartment. An outside company had to be called in to fix the puncture before someone finally came to install the gas. The whole process took several months until Heshy was actually able to cook in his own apartment.
Describing his aliyah, Heshy recalled: “There were a great deal of challenges. The main challenge is the language. If I walk in the street and ask someone a question, I have to preface it with ‘excuse me, do you speak English?’ It’s very very frustrating.” A native English and Yiddish speaker, Heshy now attends ulpan three times a week in order to learn Hebrew.
Despite the challenges of daily life in Israel, with his apartment, and the culture-shock of adjusting to a new country after being “used to a certain way of life,” Heshy stressed that he is appreciative of living here and has no regrets “considering the alternative of what’s going on in the rest of the world.
“I really can’t believe that I actually own an apartment in the heart of Jerusalem. Sometimes I just walk around and pause and say to myself, take a look at where you’re walking and what you’re seeing. It’s unbelievable to imagine that I’m actually living here.”
“Just look around where you’re living, the history you’re living amongst, and having the opportunity to walk to the Old City, to the Jewish Quarter, to the Western Wall, to all these other historical landmarks, and not have to worry about being on a tour and only having 10 minutes if you’re on some tour. I can go there whenever I want, as long as I want, and simply walk back to my apartment, which is priceless.”