The morning after the elections at Ulpan Etzion

It was a perfect antidote for anyone who might have been discouraged by the election results. And for those who were elated, it was precisely the sort of encounter needed to reinforce the conviction that we were doing something right.

 

The morning after the last of the ballots in our national elections had been cast, chance would have me at the Jewish Agency’s Ulpan Etzion, visiting with the 250 young immigrants from 40 different countries resident there, who had arrived in Israel only three months before.

 

Their enthusiasm over their new home was infectious, and the model Seder I was their guest at was a particularly moving experience. For some it was the first time they were participating in any sort of Seder at all, and they were eager to share with me how an emotional experience it would be for them to recite the words “Next year in Jerusalem” while actually being here.

ANTON WAS among the Passover newbies. Though he’d been brought up in Moscow fully aware of his Jewish heritage, his home had been devoid of Jewish practice, and his upbringing – by his own account – bereft of meaningful Jewish content. What, then, brought him here?

 

It was almost an accident, he told me. He came on a 10-day Taglit-Birthright Israel trip about a year ago, more out of curiosity than anything else, and it was that which launched him on a trajectory that landed him in Jerusalem.

 

Digging a little deeper, though, I learned that he already had a sister here as well as an aunt and uncle. Now his parents are considering joining him as well, suggesting there is something a bit more profound than happenstance underlying the sudden and dramatic surge in the number of new immigrants from Russia this past year: 10,500 came in 2018, a whopping 45% increase over the previous 12 months.

 

In any case, he’s thrilled to be here and is looking forward to settling in with a job that will allow him to make use of the Chinese he’d mastered at university.

GABRIELLE HAS a completely different story. She grew up in Glasgow, surrounded by far fewer Jews than Anton but with a lot more Judaism. Her community has only some 3,500-4,000 members (compared to the 180,000 in Moscow), “but I loved growing up there as a Jew. It’s a really nice Jewish community. Everybody knows everybody.”

 

“Unfortunately, though, it’s shrinking,” she said. “Young people like me are leaving in search of jobs and Jewish mates, so it’s an aging population,” she observed, noting that the Jewish primary school she attended as a child recently found itself having to share facilities with a Catholic school due to low enrollment. For older children, there is no formal Jewish education at all.

 

But as much as she laments the demise of the community that gave her her love for Judaism, she is eager to start a new life in Israel.

 

“I’ve been here seven or eight times,” she told me, “and I’ve always loved it.”

 

Two years ago, completing her master’s degree in microbiology, she landed a month-long internship at Sourasky Medical Center’s Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

 

“They totally embraced me,” she said. “They couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive. They told me if I ever wanted to come back, I’d have a job. So I did, and I do. There’s a position waiting for me as soon as I finish the ulpan.”

LUISA ALSO has a job waiting for her; she just doesn’t know where. She’s a doctor, and when she finishes the ulpan, she’ll be conscripted and start working wherever she’s told. That’s the arrangement now between the army and the Aliyah and Integration Ministry, which is fine with her. It’s a move she’s been planning for years, but not one that would appear obvious to anyone observing her from a distance.

 

Luisa grew up in Slovenia, where there is a total of only some 100 Jews. Where was she going to stumble across the idea of aliyah? It turns out that her father is Israeli, and she said she got a good Jewish and Zionist education at home. She also told me that Trieste, Italy, was only a 10-minute drive away from home, and it was the Jewish community there that her family was active in.

At 17, she moved to Italy and finished high school, and then moved to London for medical school, where she was also involved with the Jewish community.

When she finished her exams, she sought an opportunity to apprentice at the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva, and had the same sort of welcoming experience there as Gabrielle did at Ichilov. That was all she needed to finalize her plans to make Israel home.

UNLIKE LUISA, Erol didn’t have to travel out of the country where he was born to find a Jewish community, nor did he have any problem getting a solid Jewish education. His was so good, in fact, that seven years ago he placed ninth in the prestigious international Bible contest for youth held annually in Jerusalem on Independence Day. That’s not to be taken for granted for someone coming from Turkey.

 

His family, he told me, was traditional but not strictly observant. He became more religious on his own, participating in an Orthodox youth movement and studying with a rabbi, who was to become a truly formative figure in his development. That led to a short stint at an Israeli yeshiva, after which he’s continued his studies over the Internet.

 

He’s been to Israel several times, including as a counselor for other youth, and moving here was for him a natural progression.

He’s not alone. Between 200 and 400 immigrants arrive from Turkey each year, and Erol thinks the number will increase. He said there are about 10,000 Jews left in the country, but 7,000 of them are over the age of 40, and many of the young people, he said, are looking to leave.

 

That’s also the situation where the last of those whom I met came from. But hers is a story I can’t tell, for fear of repercussions for her family and the community she left behind. She’s one of the 154 olim who arrived in 2018 from undisclosed countries in the Middle East who made their way to Israel this past year with the assistance of the Jewish Agency in ways that will one day make a good movie.

 

In the meantime, though, it should be noted that, before she left, she had a good job with an international computer company and got along well with her co-workers, who knew she was Jewish.

 

Her family and many members of the community, she told me, are well off, and she personally never experienced any antisemitism. “But,” she told me, “we did live with the constant awareness that the government knows everything about everyone in the Jewish community. Though they are able to attend synagogue without being harassed, she said, “it was impossible to be seen in public with any sign of being Jewish.”

 

Any connection with Israel is also problematic. After visiting here a few years ago in a roundabout sort of way, she had her passport confiscated when coming back into the country. It cost her to get it back.

 

THERE ARE another 245 journeys to be shared at Ulpan Etzion, which has been Israel’s premier Hebrew-language institute since opening its doors in 1949. This year, it houses its largest contingent ever. All are academics between the ages of 22 and 35, who, at one and the same time, have very little and very much in common. They’ve grown up in countries with as few as 100 and as many as 6,000,000 Jews. Some have had no formal Jewish education, while others are graduates of Jewish day schools, youth movements and summer camps. Some came of age under the most oppressive of regimes, others in the heart of democracy. A significant number grew up in Jewish communities they don’t believe will exist in another generation; others in those they believe are sound and stable. Some are not Jewish by halachic standards; others are strictly observant. Not to mention that they speak at least 24 languages.

 

But for those at Ulpan Etzion, these differences do not divide. “We might not all be friends,” one of them told me, “but everyone is friendly. It’s incredible here – the whole atmosphere, the staff. They love us. They’re all excited for us, and we’re all excited about starting our new lives here. We may have left our real families behind, but now we have this big new family. It feels like home, like we belong here.”

 

And for good reason. Reaching into the past, as we do at the Seder, they discover in the Haggada that they all left Egypt together and then stood as one at Mount Sinai. And by having chosen to enter the Promised Land, as these new arrivals did – regardless of how dissimilar the wanderings that brought them here – they have now committed to a common future.

 

Asked to reflect on it all, one of them mused, “It’s almost not real.” The others nodded. “It’s like a dream.”

 

Indeed it is – the Zionist dream. And these upbeat, optimistic new immigrants, having just voted for the first time for their representation in the Knesset, feel privileged, as should we all, to be shaping it. This year in Jerusalem.