240 North American Jews Move to Israel Despite War 

Thursday, July 20, 2006 / 24 Tammuz 5766
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=107923

A record-setting year of North American Aliyah continued Thursday, 
with a plane full of immigrants touching down at Ben Gurion Airport. 
They were not deterred by the war and some are going up north.

In what organizers have billed "the ultimate solidarity mission," 
hundreds of Jews from North America chose to pack their bags and 
leave the comfort and stability of the United States and Canada 
for the rocketed State of Israel Thursday.

The olim [new immigrants to Israel] were greeted by former Prime 
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Efrat’s Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, 
who himself came on Aliyah more than two decades ago together 
with many members of his congregation, Nefesh b'Nefesh 
co-founder Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, and representatives of the 
Jewish Agency and the Absorption Ministry.

"Israel is not Disneyland. We don't just come to Israel when it is 
fun and sun," said Rabbi Riskin. “Israel is our motherland - 
we come to our mother when she needs us."

"Israel needs you," Riskin added, "but it is a two-way street - 
each of you also needs Israel. What anyone does in the Diaspora 
is a footnote in our history, what is being written here is the 
chapter heading."

Rabbi Fass recalled the Jewish tribes of Gad, Reuven and Menashe, 
who requested of Moses to be able to stay east of the Jordan River 
as the Jewish nation crossed into the Land of Israel. “They told him, 
‘We like our comfortable houses and we don’t want to go,’” 
Fass said. “And Moses asked them, ‘How can you break the 
hearts of your brothers and sisters in Israel?’ You olim who are 
standing here today have mended our hearts and are making the 
hearts of our nation complete.”

Knesset opposition leader MK Netanyahu pointed to the crowd, 
saying, “You are the best answer to Hizbullah!” He added that 
Aliyah is the very essence and lifeline of Zionism, “which never 
envisioned a world where people would stop attacking us, but 
a world where we would defend ourselves… build cities and 
create industry.”

Asked later by reporters about the security situation, Netanyahu 
said it is critical that the fighting in the north continue until all of 
Hizbullah’s rockets are destroyed, “so they do not fall on these 
new olim.”

Many of the immigrants are, in fact, moving up north. Two families 
are moving to the Galilee and one to Haifa, and several young 
people will be learning Hebrew and working as part of a gar’in 
(community nucleus) at Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi, near Rosh Pina.

Kfar HaNassi has been hit by Katyusha rockets in the recent 
bombardments by Hizbullah, but young idealists Keren Engoltz, 18, 
from Albany, Yair Koenig, 25, from Woodmere, New York, and 
Moti Tufeld, 18, from Boston refused to postpone their Aliyah and 
are eager to arrive in their new home. “I can’t wait,” said Liat, 
from Forest Hills, New York, who is also going to Kfar HaNassi. 
“We are going to be picking avocados, lychees and grapefruits.”

The way the core-group method of Aliyah works is that a number 
of people meet regularly while still in their home country to plan 
and develop a bond between themselves. Gar’in Tzabar (literally, 
the Cactus Nucleus, referring to native Israelis) comprises several 
core-groups, of which the Kfar HaNassi group is one. “We plan on 
studying Hebrew for three months while volunteering on the 
kibbutz,” Engoltz says,” after which we each go to our preferred 
service within the army.” After that, the group will see each other 
during furloughs and when they are spending Sabbath back at the 
kibbutz. “It is a great way to make Aliyah,” Yair says as he heads 
toward the bus bringing the new olim to collect their bags.

Arielle Listoken is making Aliyah to join her Israeli fianc? in 
Jerusalem. The wedding is in October and Listoken (soon to share 
the last name Achdut, meaning unity, with her husband) says that 
in the meantime, “all the Jews back in America should get their 
butts over here.”

19-year-old Laura Kessous came to Israel on a ten-day Birthright 
trip, after which she called her mother and told her she didn't want 
to come home. She eventually agreed to come back to finish 
high school. Now she is back for good and will continue her studies 
at Tel Aviv University. "My mother came to Israel on a visit from 
Morocco when she was younger, telling her parents the same thing. 
So I am just following in my mother's footsteps," she explains.

As usual, Wednesday’s flight heralded many family reunifications. 
Nachum Kligman came to Israel on the first Nefesh B’Nefesh 
flight in 2002. “My younger brother came a year later,” he says, 
“and today my parents are finally coming.”