June 8, 2005

Alison on Aliyah:  Aliyah is Hard to Do

            Aliyah is not an easy thing to do.  It is pretty much gut-wrenching to make the decision to uproot yourself and leave your family and friends and everything familiar in order to build a life in a foreign country with no guarantee of success and a fairly high possibility of failure.  It is terrifying to set foot on that plane, with that ominous one-way ticket clenched in your shaking hand.  It is downright exhausting going through the process of “rooting” yourself in your new home, with thousands of hours of bureaucracy staring you in the face and the ever-present, looming threats of homelessness and joblessness and pennilessness.  And it is close to impossible to make all of this work together, month after month, year after year, and find the peace and happiness that you thought for sure existed here.

            Which is why most of us don’t make it.

            There is currently a 33% “failure” rate among new immigrants from America, in their first three years as citizens here.  That means that one out of every three of us just can’t hack it.  That means that one out of three of us leaves here heartbroken.  That means that of the 1,000 North American immigrants that Nefesh B’Nefesh (an American organization that has devoted itself to the cause of boosting immigration to Israel) brought over here last summer, boasting that it was the highest statistic in this category in a decade, over 300 will be back in their land of origin before the check has barely had time to clear.  That means that on a daily basis, there are a lot of people here who are either really struggling, or who have already made their decision to leave.

            I see it all the time.  There is an online listserv for English-speakers in the Jerusalem area, with well over a thousand members, on which people buy and sell things, ask for advice, and seek support for all things aliyah-related.  Every day there are at least five postings with the subject line, “Leaving the country!  Must sell house contents!”  Young couples who just furnished an entire house, set up their children at their new schools, bought a new car, tried to make it work, and will be gone within the month.  Women in their mid-thirties who limped through for a few years but are frustrated by their lack of success at finding a husband.  Middle-aged people who came with such passion and ideological drive, along with their advanced degrees, who can’t find employment other than house-cleaning and telemarketing.

            Some of us just get overwhelmed by how difficult it can be here.  The red tape is infuriating, the lack of work is discouraging, the political and security situation is downright intolerable at times, and the inability to find even the most basic of American items we came to rely on in the US is terribly frustrating.  We buy books at Amazon.com and beg our friends and family to bring them over to us.  We stock up on Ziploc bags, our favorite chips, outlet clothes, and electronic equipment by the duffle bag on every visit back to the “old country.”  But it’s never enough.  Things that we could buy at any strip mall in the States take days of searching and begging and translating here.  And when we can find our favorite brand of candy, or dog food, or hair conditioner, it is double the cost and always just a little bit “off.”

Some of us get worn down by the “system,” some find that they just miss their family and friends too much.  Others get offered jobs back in their home country that are just “too good to pass up.”  Some of my older friends are finding themselves contemplating leaving for the first time in decades, as they are watching their elderly parents back in the States struggle with caretaking issues.

And others of us love everything about it here but are pushed into a corner by circumstances out of our control.  One of my closest friends here is in an existential anguish the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in someone my own age.  He desperately wants to stay here, and hates the US with a passion akin to my own feelings.  He knows this is the only place he will ever be happy and truly at peace, and yet he just can’t support himself here.  He is watching his savings dribble away day by day, unable to use his college degree because of his lack of Hebrew, and unable to work at anything other than below-minimum-wage telemarketing because of his lack of work experience.  He doesn’t have enough money to take Hebrew classes, and his resume isn’t ready to apply for graduate school.  He is truly stuck, and terrified that he will have to leave the country that has become both his home and his worst enemy.

            And I find myself smack dab in the middle of this battle, stuck in a different way.  You may have noticed that I used the word “us” when describing the plight of the new immigrant here, and this is because in many ways I identify strongly with this predicament.  Some of my best friends here are engaged in this struggle, and I am reminded every day how close I could be to this fate.  But I have something else on my side:  a powerful drive to succeed here, the building blocks of an Israeli education that will allow me to accomplish my goals, and a great deal of good old-fashioned luck.  The former is fairly common among most of us; the middle slightly less so; and the latter unfortunately quite rare.

            I know how lucky I am, and I feel it every day.  The friends that I have made, the support system of adoptive families around me, my rapid success in my Hebrew classes, my ease in finding apartments in two cities now, and the shocking decision of my graduate program to accept me before they even knew if I would understand the lessons—all of these coincidences and lucky breaks and personal accomplishments have coalesced into the construction of a life that just might work here after all.  God willing, I will be one of the two of us who make it.