Journey to the Promised Land By Sam Ser August 4, 2004 When the clapping began, it was not only for the plane's gentle touchdown at Ben-Gurion Airport, but also for the young man blowing a shofar in Row 31. The tension that had been building among the passengers during the 10-hour flight from New York was beginning to crack; soon, it would erupt into an ecstatic celebration of mass aliya. Marilyn Feldman was so overcome with emotion that she cried several times during the Tuesday night-Wednesday morning flight. She cried walking down the ramp at JFK International Airport and upon seeing the markings on the El Al plane designating this as a specially chartered, Nefesh B'Nefesh aliya flight. She cried again upon arrival. And she cried while onboard, just because an Interior Ministry clerk called her name to fill out some paperwork. "The thing is, she was calling my Hebrew name," said Feldman, "and it was like I was putting Marilyn behind me and walking into a new life as Meira Ruth. I just started crying, because I was letting go of the person I was and actually becoming a new person." Marilyn and her husband Ira had, in her words, just "dismantled their lives" in Los Angeles. It isn't that they had destroyed anything, so much as boxed up and put away an old identity while their new one was still uncertain. The lives they "dismantled" took a long time to construct. Over the past 20 to 30 years, Ira has invented a prefabricated succa (he recently set up the accompanying Web site sukkahkits.com), and designed children's products for Disney, among other accomplishments. He's a talented woodworker, too, and is interested in volunteering his time to teach the skill to youth at risk. As for Marilyn, she developed a successful psychotherapy practice. Both grew up on the East Coast before moving to California. But Israel has called to the Feldmans for a long time. Ira still recalls fondly the period of extensive travel through Europe "many years ago," in which he learned love of the land while working in the apple orchards of a kibbutz. And Marilyn says she has been thinking of aliya in some form since she was seven years old. They want their 11-year-old son David to feel he's "part of the Jewish people coming home." A lot is riding, then, on the duplex they've purchased in Hashmonaim. All they've seen of it until now is a few digital pictures e-mailed to them by a neighbor, but they're glad that there is a baseball diamond in the town (David is a promising youth league pitcher, they note with pride). And the boy - engaging and confident, with a skateboard in the overhead compartment and mindful of the family's puppy stowed below deck - has already made friends with some of the kids in the plane. A hundred and fifty of the couple's friends threw them a party before they left, Marilyn says. While sad to see the Feldmans leave, she said, their friends also understood how much a successful aliya means to them. "Don't take this the wrong way," said one especially close friend, "but don't you ever come back here again!" The Botbols' aliya also has them torn between extreme joy and no small amount of concern. It is clear that they are happy to be on the flight: Isaac and Ralene had wanted to make aliya ever since they met, in Israel, in 1987. Instead, they lived in Dallas, which was already a new setting for them both - Ralene had moved there from South Africa, Isaac from Toronto. She was raising her children, and he was building a leadership development consultancy business. He was also putting a band together, and they were both very involved in building a synagogue that became for them a "second home." There never seemed to be an appropriate time to uproot themselves again. "Aliya was a dream for us, and it was fading," says Isaac. "After September 11, we put that dream on fast forward. [The terrorist attacks] really made us think... we want to be in a place that means something to us. We want to be in a place we can call home." Now they are on their way to an apartment in Ra'anana and, despite a good deal of uncertainty ahead, Ralene is "overwhelmingly emotional" that the couple's dream has come alive for them. At the same time, she admits, she feels guilty for leaving her children - although both are grown and living on the East Coast - behind. Couples, however, are not the only ones who have such experiences. Larry Gerstenhaber is a middle-aged single man who has taken a rather circuitous route to Israel. After what he called a "Conservadox" upbringing by Holocaust refugees in New York, Gerstenhaber left for a rebellious, drug-filled, "almost anti-Semitic" college period in Michigan during the 1960s. At a Hindu ashram in Pennsylvania, Gerstenhaber said, "Swami Rama told me, 'You need to go learn Kabbala.'" So he returned to New York, met up with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and Rabbi Zalman Schachter, and got involved in the Jewish Renewal movement. He also trained as a psychotherapist, living and working in Seattle and North Carolina. When he joined an arts project in Arad recently, something "clicked," and he decided to make the move he had been considering for the better part of two decades Before the flight, Gerstenhaber had kept a calm, easy demeanor. But at takeoff, when the significance of the flight suddenly hit him, his face lit up in a huge smile. "Wow!" he said. "That was a lot more emotional than I thought it would be!" The motivation to make aliya is, for these people and many others, not merely a nationalistic one. It is a profoundly personal experience, a journey that brings each one to a Promised Land they have sought and envisioned for many years. Before taking off for Tel Aviv, the Feldmans visited the graves of their family members in New York and Boston. After visiting her parents' graves, Marilyn says, she stopped at the grave of the woman for whom she was named - a woman who Marilyn recalls principally for her untiring collection efforts for the Jewish National Fund over many years. "I just wanted to tell her," Marilyn says, "that I'm doing what she dreamed of doing. I'm collecting those sparks - I'm going home!"