Making Aliyah (Permanently moving to Israel)
Yesterday’s program was “immigrant day,” and it was incredible. At 8:30am we met in classrooms to talk about the Law of Return, in which anyone Jewish will be granted citizenship and rights. Is this law still needed? Is it useful today, 50 years after the country was founded? What do we think about immigration in Israel and how has it changed?
Afterwards, we all gathered in the Auditorium to hear from an Ethiopian Jewish immigrant. His story is amazing – he and his community of 500 lived in a small village in Ethiopia. Each family had 8 to 11 children, worked in the fields, and were dirt-poor. They thought of themselves as having been Jewish since some Jews migrated to Africa after the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. The Torah was orally transmitted since everyone was illiterate, and they observed Shabbat and other commandments. They pictured Jerusalem as the end-all-be-all of life; they didn’t know that there were separate cities in Israel, just “Jerusalem,” paved with cobblestones and looking like how it is described in the Bible.
Our speaker left Ethiopia when he was 10 years old with his family, walking across the desert for two months until they reached Sudan. The story he told of the journey was horrible – people dropping like flies, endless sand and no water in sight, a guide who stole all their money and left them stranded. When they got to Sudan, with the intention of walking further into Israel, they were kept in a refugee camp for years. Finally, in the 80s when Israel got a hold of the story, Israel sent planes to the Sudanese desert in “Operation Moses,” and took the immigrants on trucks to a plane which brought them to the Holy Land. As the speaker said, “There were toilets in the rooms! Food for everyone! Big buildings and trains that took you to different places! It was truly Jerusalem as we’d pictured it!”
But then the problems began. Israel did its best to integrate them, but it didn’t work; the children went to boarding schools and became increasingly Israeli, but then came home not being able to speak to their parents in Amharic. The family structure fell apart when their strict patriarchy was no longer respected. Jewish practice in Ethiopia was completely different than practice in Israel, and the immigrants felt that they had moved to a land not their own. Cultural differences were huge, and Ethiopians couldn’t, and in many cases don’t, understand Israeli customs and vice versa. Problems still abound, and much of the population remains unassimilated, even though new immigrants come every day and go through absorption centers.
After his speech ended, I went with a group to Moadon Ha-Oleh (“Immigration Center”), which is coincidentally where Jonathan had gone for ulpan. We visited an ulpan class and spoke with them about why they made aliyah, if they experienced culture shock, etc. We spoke Hebrew with them because the class was at Level 6 - unfortunately, the higher up you get in ulpan levels, the less diverse it gets. Jonathan had been in Level 1, and in his class was someone from Denmark, Chinese immigrants who had been sent to learn Hebrew by their companies, and others. This class was almost entirely Orthodox Jews who had made aliyah for religious theological reasons. They were much more interested in why women could be rabbis, and what we were going to do in the rabbinate, than they were in explaining their own situations. To them it was simple: they were Jews who felt outside the mainstream in their home country, so they moved here in order to be religious. It was rather unenlightening, to tell the truth; the class was mostly from the United States (lots from NY) and France (which are the countries known for their religious immigration today) and the conversations weren’t very surprising. The best was when I asked one Frenchwoman why she came to Jerusalem, and not Tel Aviv or Ashdod: “Tel Aviv is like Paris!” she exclaimed. When I laughed she quickly added, “Of course, we are all am Yisrael, one people Israel, so it really doesn’t matter.”
After the ulpan class we had lunch and went back for one last talk, this time by a Russian immigrant. So you know, Israel has absorbed over 1 million immigrants into its then-5 million population in the last 10 years; it’s a huge number and has completely changed the dynamics of the country. The issues faced by the Russian immigrants and by the Ethiopians are like night and day! The Russians came from a Westernized life, they were chemists, doctors, musicians, and so it wasn’t nearly such a huge change (in fact, so many Russian immigrants are musically talented, there’s a joke that if an immigrant from the former Soviet Union came off the plane without a musical instrument case in hand, they were obviously a pianist). Once the immigrants arrived en masse, they founded orchestras, theatres, Russian-language newspapers, and even their own political party. Most of them aren’t religious but totally secular, and many aren’t even halachically Jewish (Jewish according to Orthodox law); they came to escape persecution and to have a better life. They became quickly integrated into mainstream Israeli life. As the speaker said, the Russians are the only immigrant population that has refused to have a “desert generation” – e.g. instead of waiting for the generation of the children of the immigrants to feel like Israelis, ALL Russians want to be immediately Israeli (unlike in Exodus, when the Israelite slaves died off in the desert and only their children entered the Promised Land).
I could keep going, but you get the main gist. The day was very well put together and was quite insightful, and gave us a good look into both the marginalized, and the not so marginalized, aspects of being an oleh (immigrant) in Israeli society.
Afterwards, we all gathered in the Auditorium to hear from an Ethiopian Jewish immigrant. His story is amazing – he and his community of 500 lived in a small village in Ethiopia. Each family had 8 to 11 children, worked in the fields, and were dirt-poor. They thought of themselves as having been Jewish since some Jews migrated to Africa after the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. The Torah was orally transmitted since everyone was illiterate, and they observed Shabbat and other commandments. They pictured Jerusalem as the end-all-be-all of life; they didn’t know that there were separate cities in Israel, just “Jerusalem,” paved with cobblestones and looking like how it is described in the Bible.
Our speaker left Ethiopia when he was 10 years old with his family, walking across the desert for two months until they reached Sudan. The story he told of the journey was horrible – people dropping like flies, endless sand and no water in sight, a guide who stole all their money and left them stranded. When they got to Sudan, with the intention of walking further into Israel, they were kept in a refugee camp for years. Finally, in the 80s when Israel got a hold of the story, Israel sent planes to the Sudanese desert in “Operation Moses,” and took the immigrants on trucks to a plane which brought them to the Holy Land. As the speaker said, “There were toilets in the rooms! Food for everyone! Big buildings and trains that took you to different places! It was truly Jerusalem as we’d pictured it!”
But then the problems began. Israel did its best to integrate them, but it didn’t work; the children went to boarding schools and became increasingly Israeli, but then came home not being able to speak to their parents in Amharic. The family structure fell apart when their strict patriarchy was no longer respected. Jewish practice in Ethiopia was completely different than practice in Israel, and the immigrants felt that they had moved to a land not their own. Cultural differences were huge, and Ethiopians couldn’t, and in many cases don’t, understand Israeli customs and vice versa. Problems still abound, and much of the population remains unassimilated, even though new immigrants come every day and go through absorption centers.
After his speech ended, I went with a group to Moadon Ha-Oleh (“Immigration Center”), which is coincidentally where Jonathan had gone for ulpan. We visited an ulpan class and spoke with them about why they made aliyah, if they experienced culture shock, etc. We spoke Hebrew with them because the class was at Level 6 - unfortunately, the higher up you get in ulpan levels, the less diverse it gets. Jonathan had been in Level 1, and in his class was someone from Denmark, Chinese immigrants who had been sent to learn Hebrew by their companies, and others. This class was almost entirely Orthodox Jews who had made aliyah for religious theological reasons. They were much more interested in why women could be rabbis, and what we were going to do in the rabbinate, than they were in explaining their own situations. To them it was simple: they were Jews who felt outside the mainstream in their home country, so they moved here in order to be religious. It was rather unenlightening, to tell the truth; the class was mostly from the United States (lots from NY) and France (which are the countries known for their religious immigration today) and the conversations weren’t very surprising. The best was when I asked one Frenchwoman why she came to Jerusalem, and not Tel Aviv or Ashdod: “Tel Aviv is like Paris!” she exclaimed. When I laughed she quickly added, “Of course, we are all am Yisrael, one people Israel, so it really doesn’t matter.”
After the ulpan class we had lunch and went back for one last talk, this time by a Russian immigrant. So you know, Israel has absorbed over 1 million immigrants into its then-5 million population in the last 10 years; it’s a huge number and has completely changed the dynamics of the country. The issues faced by the Russian immigrants and by the Ethiopians are like night and day! The Russians came from a Westernized life, they were chemists, doctors, musicians, and so it wasn’t nearly such a huge change (in fact, so many Russian immigrants are musically talented, there’s a joke that if an immigrant from the former Soviet Union came off the plane without a musical instrument case in hand, they were obviously a pianist). Once the immigrants arrived en masse, they founded orchestras, theatres, Russian-language newspapers, and even their own political party. Most of them aren’t religious but totally secular, and many aren’t even halachically Jewish (Jewish according to Orthodox law); they came to escape persecution and to have a better life. They became quickly integrated into mainstream Israeli life. As the speaker said, the Russians are the only immigrant population that has refused to have a “desert generation” – e.g. instead of waiting for the generation of the children of the immigrants to feel like Israelis, ALL Russians want to be immediately Israeli (unlike in Exodus, when the Israelite slaves died off in the desert and only their children entered the Promised Land).
I could keep going, but you get the main gist. The day was very well put together and was quite insightful, and gave us a good look into both the marginalized, and the not so marginalized, aspects of being an oleh (immigrant) in Israeli society.
posted by Michal at 11:51 AM
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