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Coming Home: The Story of an American Immigrant to Israel
By Avi Hein

The American dream is the idea that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve prosperity.

I was raised on a different American dream. I grew up on stories of a Milwaukee schoolteacher who later became the prime minister of Israel. Golda Meir, the only American citizen to become prime minister of Israel, was a name I was familiar with long before I heard about many prominent American politicians. I also grew up on stories of the daughter of an American Conservative rabbi who later founded a woman’s Zionist organization that created two Jerusalem hospitals and helped young immigrants to Israel, where she herself spent her last decades. In fact, through Henrietta Szold’s Hadassah, my grandmother met Golda Meir. Meir and Szold were the role models in my house. Yet, this was taking place in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

My grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution and the growing threat of pogroms in Poland to come to America. My great-grandmother didn’t like America, viewing it as the treyfe medine—a non-kosher country. She returned to Poland where she was murdered by the Nazis in Treblinka. My relatives who didn’t leave Europe were massacred by the Nazis, and today, they have no graves. The ones who escaped—as far as I know—made a life in America, raised successful children—my parents, aunt, and uncle—and lived the American dream.
By accident of choice they ended up in America—mostly Washington, DC. They could have just as easily ended up in Israel—as several of my distant relatives did. In fact, my wife’s grandparents almost ended up on the Exodus—the famed ship carrying Holocaust survivors to Israel that was refused entry by the British—although, with the ship already full, they ended up in Indiana instead.

To my family, Zionism meant writing a check, and support for Israel meant paying attention to the news whenever the newscaster broadcast the latest happenings from Israel—the end of the first intifada, the renewed Oslo process, and the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin. While my cousins visited Israel with their Israeli fathers (and American mothers), I grew up hearing of my mother’s two trips to Israel in 1967 and 1973, even hearing how she had considered—in naïve youthfulness—permanently immigrating to Israel. But, in the end, she stayed in America and raised a family without returning to Israel for over thirty years.

Growing up hearing about the importance of Israel, its place as the Jewish homeland, and supporting it financially and politically, I had begun to feel more and more loyal towards Israel—yes, call it “dual loyalty, ”loyalty to both Israel and the United States. With a skyrocketing economy and the information economy making communication across oceans easy and cheap, I began to feel hypocritical supporting Israel from afar and not fulfilling the Zionist dream of aliya.

In the previous past years I had visited Israel three times—my first time, at 17, for two months during high school; my second time, at 19, volunteering in a West Bank settlement, being exposed to regular folk in a volatile climate, and again at 21, during the height of the second intifada, spending a year studying in Jerusalem. While spending two months on a fabulous high school program in Israel, I learned history that I had never known before. But it was not merely Israel’s history; it was my history too. Stories of the Greeks and the Romans never had any meaning to me in public school—this was someone else’s history. George Washington’s life and the Civil War occurred before my family came to America—while most American Jews were in Poland, Russia, or Iran – not the United States. Israel’s War of Independence and the Six Day War felt far more personal to me than even Vietnam or Watergate. Masada was mine, while Pearl Harbor was someone else’s story. My ancestors in Judea were fighting the Romans, although I didn’t know that until my time in Israel—not admiring the Romans as we did in high school in America.

In more recent history, I had come to know that Tel Aviv’s first city hall, regarded as one of the city’s most beautiful buildings, and the first building for the Haifa Technion had been designed by a great-great-uncle of mine. Another distant relative, Zvi Rosenblatt, had been falsely accused in the murder of Labor leader Chaim Arlozoroff, an important part of Zionist history, and much of his family had been affiliated with the Betar movement in Europe, a group that I discovered in high school. I had no similar relationship with American history. The story of America was not my story. My family—albeit distant—helped build Israel, sometimes literally.

While in college, I had become active in pro-Israel activism (hasbara) and served as campus liason to AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby. Yet, in my years of campus activism, I realized that I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew, couldn’t name one Israeli movie, and didn’t understand why these groups claimed to support Israel but never spoke of Zionism, Western aliya (Israel was always the place of “last resort” and not “best resort”—rhetoric that did not match my experiences and friendship with American immigrants to Israel), or Israel’s many accomplishments and achievements. Even as I lived in Jerusalem during the height of the intifada, and even as my girlfriend, then spending her junior year abroad at the Hebrew University, left the school’s cafeteria less than thirty minutes before a terrorist blew up a bomb there, murdering nine—including her chaperone to Israel and friends of friends—I felt safer in Israel than the United States, where random acts of violence are daily occurrences.

Despite the traumatic events that occurred in Israel that year, I proposed to my girlfriend at the Western Wall, symbolizing the hope and history of our people, and we committed ourselves to returning to Israel for good a year later.

A year later, June 13, 2004, I got married under a chuppah of an Israeli flag that my wife and I bought at the Mahane Yehuda shuk (market) in Jerusalem—the first time the rabbi had ever performed a wedding under the Israeli flag, he said. The words we sang from the prophet Jeremiah, Od Yeshama b’Arei Yehuda u’beChutzot Yerushaleym, Kol Sasson v’Kol Simcha, Kol Chatan v’Kol Kallah (again may be heard in the cities of Judah and the Streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of groom and bride) were coming true. In just one more month we would be living out the words of our ancient prophets. But, surrounded by family and friends, doubts still lingered.

July 12, one month later, my wife and I spent our last night in New Jersey, visiting our families, before flying home. That afternoon, my wife met my elderly great-aunt, who was over 90 years old. Frail and elderly, she had recently moved into a nursing home and was unable to make the trek to our wedding. In her hospital bed, she was older and frailer than I had remembered, but still mentally alert. When we told her that we were making aliya—moving to Israel—in less than 24 hours, this old woman’s eyes lit up. My aunt immediately told her son to bring over an old photo album. Opening it, we saw pictures of her at the Western Wall in Jerusalem over 30 years ago. My aunt, who had come to America from a village in what is now the Ukraine, said that it had long been her dream to live in Israel.

At that moment, I realized that I was making the right decision. Upon seeing my great-aunt for what would be the last time, who had escaped life in Eastern Europe to build a life in America, express the dream of the Jew to live in Israel, I knew that I was doing the right thing—for myself, for her, who died two and a half years after I came to Jerusalem, and for the entire Jewish people. I would not be Moses, who could only dream of the Promised Land but was unable to enter it. In our daily prayers, we pray to return to Zion. For two thousand years it was only a dream, but today it is a possibility. I had to do what my great-aunt and all my ancestors before me for two thousand years could only dream of. I realized that despite the speed of assimilation my family had been in America for less than a century, but the Jewish people had dreamt of returning to Israel for two millennia.
When Shmuel Yosef Agnon became the first Hebrew writer to win the Nobel Prize, he made an important point in his Nobel speech. Shai Agnon, born in a town not far from where my great-aunt and grandmother were born, said: “As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” It was an accident of history that the Jews were exiled from their land by the Romans. Otherwise, I would not have been born in America. My grandparents would not have been born in Europe. Rather, we would all have been born home, in Israel—where Jewish history was lived and ever since exile, where we have prayed to return to.

In 1948, sovereignty was restored to the Jewish nation after millennia of exile. In 2004, I could not bear to not be a part of the future of the Jewish nation. After a short plane ride, on July 14, 2004, I came home and, like Agnon, returned to Jerusalem, Israel’s spiritual and political capital.

While many of my countrymen came to Israel out of fear or persecution, fleeing poverty or oppression, like Meir and Szold before me, I came willingly and of my own free will, leaving behind in America what may be the Jews’ most comfortable exile throughout our long history. Like Meir and Szold, coming to this wondrous land that I had heard about growing up in Washington was the fulfillment of my American dream.

While I was not born in Israel, I moved here because it is where I belong. Not out of fear or out of persecution but because the history of Israel is my history. The future of Israel is my future. And the hope of Israel, the hope of the Jewish people that is expressed in Israel’s national anthem HaTikvah (the hope), is my hope.