Adam Bodenstein graduated from U.C. Berkeley in December. No sooner had he finished his last exam than he packed up his entire apartment. After spending a week with his family in Los Angeles, he boarded a flight to Israel.
This was no ordinary post-college trip to the Jewish state. Bodenstein does not have a return ticket. The next time he comes to the United States, it will be only for a visit.
When Bodenstein, 21, landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, he had with him the appropriate paperwork from the consul general of Israel here declaring that he is a oleh hadash, or a new immigrant, rather than a tourist.
The Los Angeles native is one of 91 people from the Bay Area who made aliyah in 2004. That’s compared to 27 from the region in 2003. The Hebrew term aliyah means not only to move to Israel, but to ascend.
Since 1994 the overall number of new immigrants to the Jewish state has been decreasing. However, the numbers of North Americans moving to Israel are higher than they have been in decades.
One reason for the spike is being attributed to the creation of a New York-based organization called Nefesh B’Nefesh (Jewish Souls United), whose only goal is to increase the numbers of North Americans making aliyah. The organization was founded in 2002, and not only charters flights entirely for olim, or immigrants, but offers them financial aid as well as helps them navigate the bureaucracy they must deal with once they arrive.
The numbers of immigrants coming from places such as Russia are consistently dropping. But almost 3,000 North Americans made the move last year, according to Michael Landsberg, head of the Jewish Agency’s aliyah department in New York. Landsberg hopes that 2005 will see even higher numbers.
He has been visiting the Bay Area because it has been partially responsible for the boon.
Boaz Nol, the Bay Area aliyah shaliach, or emissary, said that in July 2004, the Bay Area saw 19 new immigrants move to Israel. Looking at other cities that same month, there were 24 from Los Angeles, 35 from Chicago and 24 from Boston. “But there are much larger Jewish communities in those places,” said Nol, who works out of the Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. “Our numbers are close to communities like Toronto, and even almost Chicago, which has a Jewish community twice as big as ours.”
What distinguishes those making aliyah from the Bay Area as opposed to their counterparts from around the country, is that most of them are younger than the national average. Many of them are straight out of college. Others are young couples with no children, and they are waiting to start their families there.
And then there are those who are moving their families.
While making aliyah in one’s early 20s is one thing, doing so with a family is another. For Jonathan Ross and Orit Cohen-Ross, moving to Israel — back to Israel for Orit — will mean uprooting their American-born children.
The couple met in college; Orit, a Haifa native, had come to attend school in the United States. She was at Temple University and Jonathan was at the Wharton Business School in Philadelphia, when they met during her last semester. Her plans to return home drastically changed.
“It was a condition of our marriage,” said Cohen-Ross. “We have it videotaped on our wedding video that after seven years of marriage, we will move to Israel. We wanted to pay back student loans and establish a career path first so we’d be better prepared.”
Ross had spent a year abroad in Israel, and therefore was completely open to the idea of living there. When the couple had their second daughter, about two years ago, it forced Cohen-Ross to think about the situation anew.
“It made me think about how long can we stay here, and I didn’t want to wait too long because then the older one will be able to express too much disagreement to the move. At some point, they get too close to their friends.”
Their older daughter already has been saying she wants to stay in the United States.
Cohen-Ross said she read a study last year that showed that one’s happiness can be measured according to one’s relationships with family and friends.
“After you achieve material success, you realize, hopefully early in your life, that the one thing that makes people really happy is their friends and family,” said Cohen-Ross. “I figured I would rather earn less money but be with people I really care about. Jonathan’s family are all on the East Coast, and it’s not like we see a whole lot of them.”
Though the family feels they will eventually move, their date keeps changing. Last year, when they were certain they would leave within months, they sold their house, moved into a rental apartment, put their belongings in storage and readied themselves to go. But then Jonathan got a new job opportunity too good to pass up. Orit has since found a job, as well.
“We were looking at what we thought we would be able to do from an economic standpoint,” Jonathan later said. “We were going to be going without any jobs. We thought if we waited, we’d be able to go more comfortably.”
Now the family’s plans are on hold.
There are exceptions to the young pioneers. One is Carol Heller, who left Vallejo for Israel in December. Heller, 59, is only following the rest of her family, as her brother and his wife moved there in 1991, her mother and sister in 1993, and her daughter a few years later. Most of Heller’s family have become increasingly more religious too, and so when she visited her brother in Safed, she found it to be “this very intense spiritual vortex.”
Heller’s daughter married an Israeli, the son of American parents. She will share a duplex with the couple in Jerusalem.
Heller’s decision to move had to do with her becoming more religious and feeling more at home in Israel than anywhere else. Her reasons are more like those moving in the ’70s and ’80s. Those moving now are not so ideological, said Nol, they just seem to feel that Israel has a lot to offer them.
Landsberg and Nol spoke like directors of a slick marketing campaign, and one that is nothing like the way shlichim used to sell Israel in the past. The old talk about fulfilling the Zionist dream and all of that ideology is simply no longer part of the discourse.
“There’s really been a whole attitude change,” said Nol, who is 27. In the old days, the Jewish Agency for Israel used to operate using guilt, he said, with this attitude of “‘Israel is the Jewish state and every Jew has to be here.’ But no more.”
Those coming to see him to begin the aliyah process have different sentiments too, about wanting to live there, Nol said. “You used to hear that they wanted to move because of politics or because they were educated to believe they should be there or because their rabbi believes it is the right place for them,” he said. “But now it’s because they really believe that it is the best place to raise their children and have a great life.”
Certainly Bodenstein, who is now studying Hebrew at an ulpan in Jerusalem, is one of those people.
Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Bodenstein first visited Israel as a teenager on a United Synagogue Youth trip. He went a second time while in college, on a trip organized for college student activists by the Israel Center.
That trip really began to solidify his decision to move there, and he began doing research by talking to people who had made aliyah, people who had lived there and come back, and Israelis who moved to the United States.
And while he was already on that path, he happened to meet and fall in love with an Israeli woman, whom he met while she was in the United States. They are to be married this summer.
For Bodenstein, who has been on a spiritual journey of his own since his teen years — he now identifies as Modern Orthodox — “It just feels right. I want to raise a Jewish family in the Jewish country, where they have the best possible chance of growing up Jewish and staying Jewish.”
Bodenstein emphasized that he was thinking of making aliyah even before Tamar happened into his life, but meeting her only solidified his decision.
“It was sort of like, ‘Yeah, Adam, you’re really supposed to be doing this.’ As opposed to a life goal, this is like God dropping a big old sign in front of you saying ‘Yeah, this is what you’re really supposed to be doing.'”
Another exception with Bay Area olim is that many of them have a special classification: “returning minor.” That refers to children of Israeli parents who either left Israel at a very young age, or children of Israeli parents who were born abroad.
“Because of the large numbers of Israelis living on the Peninsula, we have the largest garin [group] of these second-generation Israelis moving back,” said Nol, who pointed out that even though they are already Israeli citizens, they get all the same rights as new immigrants. Nol added that they have the additional benefit of having their extended family there already to offer additional support.
Yael Hirsch is one such immigrant. Hirsch, 22, of Palo Alto, also just graduated from U.C. Berkeley. She was three when her parents left Israel. Both engineers, they thought they would work for some time in the United States, and then go back. Like so many Israelis living on the Peninsula, they decided to stay.
“Initially, before college, I thought of doing college there,” said Hirsch. “Then I went to Berkeley and, while there, I faced so much anti-Semitism or anti-Israel activity. I began thinking that maybe it’s time for me to support my country by being there.”
Hirsch, who was to leave this month, said she has the full support of her parents.
“They’re thrilled. They’re glad to see that even though I was raised here and am very much American, I feel really connected to Israel, too. They visit a lot, at least once a year, and it’s still their home too. They know I have lots of family there so I’ll be OK.”
The fact that Hirsch’s parents are so supportive is not lost on her. Many olim are not so lucky.
Bodenstein said that his Los Angeles-based parents were taking his decision as best they could but it still wasn’t easy for them.
“From a natural parent’s point of view, they are sad that their son is going to be living across the world, sad that their future grandchildren will be living across the world,” he said. “They have been as understanding as I can ask but it’s been really hard for them.”
At the same time, Bodenstein said, “They understand that this is what I’m going to do with my life, and always wish the best for me. Psychologically, it’s been pretty hard for them, and while I would have liked for them to be more gung-ho about it, I can see where they’re coming from.”
While Cohen-Ross always appreciated the diversity of the Bay Area, she said that whenever they do leave, “I will miss it very much. But Israel is one of the few places where complete strangers can become friends in no time. That kind of bond is a lot easier to have in Israel than anywhere else in the world.”
Which is the kind of reason that Nol, the shaliach, loves to hear.
“Israel is the Jewish state, but more than anything, it’s a great country that has so much to offer,” he said. “If we’re talking about a supermarket of the countries in the world, Israel can stand proud compared to all other countries. It really has a lot to offer.”
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