Lisa Cain Hammerman still remembers the moment she realized she belonged in Israel.
She had arrived as a volunteer on a kibbutz in 1979, shortly after the untimely death of her father. Assigned to work in the nursery because she spoke Hebrew fluently, she spent her days caring for children and absorbing the rhythms of Israeli life. Within a week, something unexpected happened.
“I felt more at home in Israel than I ever felt in the US,” the 72-year-old recalls.
Forty-six years later, sitting in her home in Mitzpe Yericho, surrounded by artwork, family photographs, and the life she built through persistence, faith, heartbreak, and improbable miracles, Cain Hammerman sees that realization as the beginning of a journey that transformed everything.
“I was anchorless, rudderless, and at sea,” she says. “I was ready to do whatever it took to find myself and feel grounded in this world.”
Cain Hammerman grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, in a deeply Jewish home. Her father was the cantor of a large Conservative congregation of more than 1,000 families. In the community, he was admired and respected.
“He was an important person,” she says. “People looked up to him tremendously.”
Her Jewish identity was formed early. She attended a rigorous Hebrew school program five days a week plus Sundays. The school emphasized Hebrew language and Zionism.
She remembers being captivated by photographs of sun-tanned kibbutzniks in shorts and kova tembel hats. Yet despite her Hebrew education, she was not particularly ideological.
“I wasn’t a Zionist,” she says. “I just spoke the language.”
Like many teenagers of the 1960s, she rebelled against authority. She questioned what she perceived as inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the world around her. She secretly ate non-kosher food with friends. On Shabbat, she slipped out of the house to take the streetcar to choir rehearsals.
The rebellion deeply pained her father. “He wanted me to grow up to be a good Jewish girl,” she says.
Everything changed on January 1, 1979.
Her father died unexpectedly when she still relied on him as her emotional compass. “I was 25,” she says. “He was my anchor.”
His death left her disoriented. “I literally went adrift.”
Seeking a way back to Judaism after father's death
AT THE TIME, she was beginning to find her way back toward Judaism. Seeking direction, she decided to visit Israel for the first time. What was supposed to be a short volunteer experience became a turning point.
At the time, she was struggling as a young artist in America, uncertain about her future and unable to establish herself professionally. Israel offered something different. “Here I was with my people,” she says.
Unlike many immigrants, she arrived without lofty expectations. “Israel didn’t have to live up to any Zionist ideals or religious expectations for me,” she says.
That, she believes, became one of the secrets of her successful aliyah.
Cain Hammerman made aliyah in 1980 and settled in Jerusalem.
The early years were anything but stable. She moved frequently, shared apartments, and worked wherever opportunities appeared. Yet employment came surprisingly quickly. “Practically from day one,” she says. Within two years, she was married and teaching art.
Over the decades, art education became her professional home. She taught in a wide range of programs, often juggling positions at multiple institutions simultaneously.
Alongside teaching, she built a successful career as an illustrator. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, publishers regularly commissioned her artwork. She also painted extensively and exhibited in shows, including exhibitions specifically for new immigrants.
YET LIFE’S MOST profound challenges were not professional.
They were personal.
Cain Hammerman married an Argentine immigrant who spoke little English. Shortly thereafter, she faced the devastating news that she was infertile. “I can’t describe the kind of pain I was in,” she says.
The couple adopted a baby girl from Colombia in 1985, and motherhood sparked a spiritual transformation. Seeking to facilitate her daughter’s conversion, Cain Hammerman gradually embraced greater religious observance. She began observing Shabbat and kashrut, and sent her daughter to religious schools.
Then came another milestone.
During the Gulf War, when Rebbetzin Chana Henkin founded Nishmat, Cain Hammerman became deeply involved in Torah study.
Her Jewish education from childhood resurfaced. “I found myself remembering scripture I had learned in Hebrew school,” she says. “My observance kept getting more important to me.”
Her first marriage ended in divorce when her daughter was very young.
Several years later, she remarried, this time to a Russian immigrant. Together they pursued fertility treatments, including IVF, but every attempt failed.
That marriage also ended painfully.
Then came a chance encounter that opened the door to a series of miracles.
She was on her way to file divorce papers when she shared a ride with a man named Asher Cain. About a month later, they found themselves invited to the same Shabbat meal. “That’s how we got together,” she says.
The relationship brought unexpected complications.
Asher, who had children from a previous marriage, had undergone a vasectomy years earlier. When the couple was ready to wed, they learned that, according to Jewish law, a man who has undergone a voluntary vasectomy is generally prohibited from marrying a woman who is Jewish by birth.
Their case eventually reached Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then the Sephardi chief rabbi. His ruling allowed the marriage to proceed on the condition that Asher undergo a reversal procedure.
The couple married shortly after September 11, 2001. What followed would become one of the most remarkable chapters of their lives.
Doctors agreed to reverse the vasectomy on the condition that the couple would attempt to have a child together. Through referrals from Machon Puah and a complex series of treatments, they embarked on IVF.
Cain Hammerman was already 50 years old and postmenopausal. Against overwhelming odds, she conceived.
At 51, she gave birth to a second daughter.
“The day [she] was born,” she says, “all the strife and struggle of being infertile evaporated.”
Cain Hammerman describes the birth as nothing less than miraculous. “A massively hi-tech miracle.”
The age gap between her daughters was significant. The daughter she adopted in 1985 was already 20 years old when her baby sister arrived.
Motherhood was not the only way the Cains expanded their family. Early in their marriage, they approached an agency specializing in difficult foster-care cases.
Over the years, seven foster children passed through their home. Some stayed for only weeks. Others remained much longer. Their home became a place of refuge, healing, and stability.
Their young daughter has grown into a quiet but determined young woman. “She runs very, very deep,” her mother says. She excelled in athletics from an early age, participating in gymnastics, soccer, and tennis. In high school, she specialized in physical education.
When military service approached, she aimed high.
Very high.
Today she serves as a combat soldier, after she completed training for an elite IDF unit.
For Cain Hammerman, whose aliyah journey began with uncertainty and loss, watching her daughter defend the Jewish state carries profound meaning. And from her older daughter, she also has two grandchildren, one of whom is approaching army age.
The immigrant who arrived alone has become the matriarch of a multigenerational Israeli family.
Becoming rooted
Cain Hammerman reflects on what might have happened had she remained in America. The picture she paints is stark.
“I would have wound up unmarried, childless, and rudderless,” she says. “I would have become a bitter Boomer.”
Instead, Israel gave her purpose.
“The minute I landed here, I felt there was something that mattered about my life.”
She believes another key factor in her success was eventually putting down roots. She has lived in the same house in Mitzpe Yericho since 1999.
“If you can somehow get yourself a home, it makes such a difference,” she says. “You feel rooted.”
Today, retirement has allowed her to return to her artistic passions (heart-of-israel.com). She continues painting, hopes to secure new illustration commissions, and dreams of holding a one-person exhibition. At the same time, she remains committed to learning and personal growth.
After nearly half a century in Israel, Cain Hammerman offers simple but hard-earned advice to prospective immigrants: Lower your expectations.
Many olim, she says, arrive carrying rigid religious or ideological visions and then become disappointed when reality inevitably falls short.
“The less you expect Israel to conform to your ideals, the happier you’ll be,” she says.
She also stresses the importance of learning Hebrew and adapting to Israeli society, rather than demanding that Israelis adapt to you. “Learn the language,” she says.
The young woman who arrived in Israel alone, feeling adrift, eventually found exactly what she was searching for.
The writer is a freelance journalist and an expert on the current non-Jewish awakening to Torah. She is the editor of three books: Ten From the Nations, Lighting Up the Nations, and Adrift Among the Nations.