And a Hero Comes Along

When we conjure up images of bravery, we think of valiantly strong, often armor-clad individuals. I've been thinking about bravery a lot today, and I'm pretty convinced I've discovered one of the bravest people out there.


Tonight, Nefesh B'Nefesh's first charter flight leaves the US carrying a plane full of new immigrants that will please G-d land tomorrow morning bright and early. The trip ends with a huge ceremony welcoming these new Israelis home. It's a very large to-do, and you can watch it live (or later) on the NBN website. Tomorrow my good friend from high school arrives on the flight and I can't wait. I've been signed up (together with 2 of my kids) for a month, and I have been thinking about it all day. We ourselves didn't get the opportunity to come with NBN (either time!) and I'm very much looking forward. 


So back to the bravery part: this friend of mine is one of the sweetest, most wonderful people you'll ever meet. She's the girl who decorated every classmate's locker for their birthday, and is still the first one to remember my birthday to this day (without the help of FB, thank you vedy much). She is a tremendous baalat chesed and is a very integral part of her NY community. It's a wonder to many of us that she is still single.


So, when she told me last year that she is making Aliyah, I was beyond words. Make aliyah by herself, was she crazy? Did she not know how hard it is and what it entails? I came with an Israeli husband, a pre-fab family and in-laws built in, and still I struggle.


And then she said something to me that I'll never forget, and that made everything suddenly crystal clear. She said, "Listen, I always wanted to make Aliyah. I just figured I would get married, and then make Aliyah in that order, but obviously Hashem has it worked out differently, so why should I wait any longer to follow my dream? And yeah, if I move there and find my bashert, it's an added plus. But it's not the reason I'm going. I'm going because I love Israel and I've always wanted to live there."


There you have it; tremendous bravery. She's doing what she wants to do even though she knows there may be struggles ahead. She's far from naive; she's actually one of the most organized, calculated people I know. She isn't jumping blindly into this, far from it. She's smart, she's courageous and she is tremendously brave, and I'm very proud to call her my friend. 


You know who you are, have a safe flight and we'll see you on the ONLY side! 

Arrived Safe and Sound

So, we arrived to our new home and I had expected to start making beds, go shopping, get the apartment cleaned, etc., and could not imagine how I was going to do that while feeling SO tired. Imagine our (MY!) excitement when we came in and saw that Saba and Savta had set up the whole place, complete with borrowed (made!) beds, pillows, table and chairs and the best part: a stocked fridge! It was such a relief to come in and just be able to relax, BH!

After exploring their new surroundings inside and out everyone who was not already asleep collapsed into a bed and slept for a few hours. When we woke up very groggy, but happy and excited to be here (“Imma, I have finally come to terms that we are moving here, and I like it!!”) we decided to walk up to the “merkaz” (center of town) and see what we could see.


Our house is a good 5 min walk from the main stores (banks, grocery, bakeries, toy stores, restaurants, etc) but it felt like an hour in the 97 degree weather.  BAW and I were trying to be cheerful (“look at how brightly the sun shines in Beit Shemesh!” “Wow, good weather for a tan!” “See, it’s good that the ‘dood shemesh’ doesn’t work yet, cold showers when we get home! “) but we weren’t fooling nobody. It was HOT. We got there and went to Café Bagels to get ice coffees and cold drinks for everyone. Upon hearing that we had just made aliyah, the owner brought us all ice coffee on the house. Then we thoroughly enjoyed a GREAT meal, compliments of the Chaburah ladies!! Thank you!!! 

After walking around a little more, we got home and cooled off with some ices and more cold drinks. It was then that I noticed that Little Red wasn’t quite cooling down like everyone else, and I was worried that maybe he had sunstroke. For those of you who don’t have any direct dealings with the Red Headed Species, they are SUPER sensitive to heat and sun. The real problems started when I changed his diaper. The boil on his leg had somehow managed to become a huge infected sore, and was hot and hard to the touch.  He screamed if anyone came near it, and after a bath and some motrin did nothing to calm him down we started to get serious.  There is an emergency care center about 8 minutes from our house, so TPH ran over to borrow Saba’s car (remember, NO CAR!) and we left the rest of the sleeping kids in the capable hands of Uncle S. 

Out of the LOOP!!!

So, it's almost a week later, and we are FINALLY up and running with phone and internet... I can't tell you how pathetically hard it was to be that long without being connected!!


I did, however, keep blogging even though I couldn't post.... so here they come.... I'll upload them in order I guess! Happy following!! :)

I guess the best place to start this "Journal of my Journey" is with the pilot trip that I took two weeks ago. I guess maybe labeling it a pilot trip isn't the most accurate, as a pilot trip is usually when you go to see if/how/when this can all work. We'd pretty much decided that we were going to make the move (once and for all, with no going back!) and all we needed to do was get an apartment, and look into schools.

With 6 kids ages 15 months to 11 years, my biggest concern was the schools. My kids are currently in a small co-ed out of town day school where the largest (mixed!) class is currently 13 kids. The school is great in so many ways, and really goes out of it's way to cater to every student (hey, how hard can it be when there are so few, right?). My biggest fear of Aliyah (or in our case Chazara) is the schools. How will my kids transition to a new place, a new school, in a new language?!

So, goal #1 for my trip: locate and choose non-terrifying schools for my 5 school age kids.

Goal #2: Find a reasonably priced 4 - 5 bedroom apartment to fit our family. Shouldn't be too hard, right? We're only coming from almost 3,000 square feet with an enormous (front and back!) yard on a shady tree lined street. Seriously, how hard could it be?

Well, after much begging my mother to come with me, it was clear that she wasn't going to be able to make the trip with me this time. So, I turned to the next best thing, a very dear friend. She herself has been planning on coming to Israel to learn, and this upcoming year with Hashem's help, she'll finally be able to make the trip. She agreed right away and made her ticket as soon as she could. I won't bore you with the details of the logistics of a mother of 6 and teacher in TWO schools to actually get it together to be able to leave for a week. We'll leave those scintillating details to your own imagination. After much planning, and travel time, we were finally off!