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Lessons Learned Along the Road to Aliyah
to Judaism until I connected
with Israelis and their culture.

At the time, I was certain I’d
return to Israel, but I just didn’t
know exactly when.

Finally, that moment
arrived, following
my immigration to Israel with
Nefesh B’Nefesh on July 21.

From starting a business to
navigating a pandemic, the
road to aliyah was paved with
pivotal life events — and at each
BY ELI COHEN
juncture, I gleaned lessons that
FOR MORE THAN 20 years, I believe can help inform the
I never had any inclination to journey for prospective olim
visit Israel. Yet during a Shabbat (immigrants to Israel).

dinner at Temple University,
the Chabad emissary on Understand that Israel is
campus asked me, “Why don’t different
Before visiting Israel, I
you give it a shot?”
Rabbi Baruch Kantor’s didn’t identify culturally or
suggestion activated an idea religiously as a Jewish person
that was already in the back in the United States. I never
of my mind from conversa- had exposure to people who
tions with family and friends were Jewishly observant but
as well as others during my were also culturally ingrained
childhood. I went on to sign in their broader community.

Israel is different — it’s not
up for a Birthright Israel trip
America. It’s important to be
before graduating college and,
eight days after completing my open-minded and accepting
last exam in August 2019, I about Israeli society if you’re
going to make the move, and
embarked on the tour.

Being in Israel for the first then you need to take respon-
time helped me understand sibility for your own life once
who I am on a much deeper you land.

While growing up, I had
level. I hadn’t felt a connection
exposure to the observant
Jewish community in the U.S.,
but not much exposure to Israeli
culture. My Birthright trip
opened my eyes to that culture
and helped me understand
its differences with American
society, and that knowledge is
making my aliyah experience
more comfortable today.

Identify your value
Some olim say they moved
without a plan, and then
lament how it didn’t work out.

This pitfall can be averted by
first identifying the value that
you want to bring to Israel.

I co-founded my e-com-
merce business, Ageless Natural
Beauty LLC, after graduating
from business school at Temple.

We work with Israeli companies
(web advertising platforms like
Taboola and Outbrain) and use
Israeli advertising technology
to effectively target and reach
more potential customers over
the internet. I made aliyah
knowing exactly how I wanted
to contribute to Israel and its
economy: scaling my company
by eventually hiring Israeli
employees and building a team
here. This made aliyah a match
made in heaven. Not only is
Israel a hotspot for my profes-
sional specialty of internet
marketing, but the Jewish
state’s existing workforce is
also a fertile ground for exactly
the type of talent that’ll help
me scale the business. This
is a win-win scenario for my
business and for Israel, as I
arrived with a built-in way to
contribute to the economy.

No entrepreneur grows a
venture alone. There’s an entire
team of people behind any
successful brand. I moved to
Israel knowing that it was the
ideal place where I could share
and spread opportunity and
have other people succeed with
me. Let go of the notion of perfect
timing After my trip to Israel was
canceled in the summer of 2020
due to the pandemic, I decided
to double down and just focus
on growing the company. I
started the aliyah process in
the fall of 2020 and now, in the
summer of 2021, I’m here and
the company is growing. At the
moment, we don’t have Israeli
employees (yet), but over time
we’ll grow the team here.

With no clear end in sight
to the pandemic, the choice
surrounding aliyah was clear:
now or never. I believe my decision
resembles the story behind the
state of Israel’s creation: If you’re
going to do something, you do
it now. You dive in headfirst and
don’t look back.

There’s never a perfect time to
move halfway around the world,
but if you want something, you
seize it. There are elements to
life that’ll always be outside your
control; don’t fixate on altering
those circumstances. The
pandemic is precisely the time
to ask yourself: What can I do to
get closer to who I am and what
I want to do?
Aliyah makes complete
sense for where I’m at in
life right now. I’m bringing
opportunity to Israel, but also
benefiting from the various
opportunities that this country,
its economy and its culture
have to offer. These are oppor-
tunities that I wouldn’t have
anywhere else. I’m choosing
to live life in the driver’s seat.

I decided to make aliyah, and
there was no looking back. l
Eli Cohen, a native of Philadelphia
and a graduate of Temple
University’s Fox School of Business,
made aliyah from Las Vegas on
July 21.

Remembering Ilan Naibryf, Jewish Surfside Victim
BY JOSH SATOK
I’M WRITING THIS from
Miami, 10 minutes from the
beach. There are many reasons
to be here — the beach, the
sun, the culture. And there are
many reasons not to be here.

As my grandma keeps
calling to tell me, COVID rates
are skyrocketing in Florida,
and maybe it’s not the best
place to be right now. But none
of these considerations really
mattered to me. I came for a
reason nobody should have to
come for: to be at the shiva
of a former student of mine,
14 AUGUST 12, 2021
Ilan Naibryf, who was one
of the victims of the Surfside
building collapse.

I came to see his sister
Tali, another former student
of mine, to be able to give
her a hug, and to show up to
synagogue as his sisters and
parents said the Kaddish, the
mourner’s prayer, for Ilan. I
came to remember Ilan, to
provide some tiny modicum
of comfort to his family, and
ultimately, to remember what’s
really important.

From 2014-2015, I spent
a year working at a Jewish
boarding school in Greensboro,
North Carolina, the American
Hebrew Academy. The school
no longer exists, but for a year,
I lived on the campus, doing
a little bit of everything as a
“fellow.” I’ve worked with lots of
Jewish teenagers in my life,
but there’s something special
about the bonds you create in
spending an entire year living
on campus with students.

Ilan was, simply put, a good
kid. Even as a freshman, he was
a star soccer player and a laser-
fast runner. His smile lit up the
room, and he was kind, curious
and had boundless energy.

JEWISH EXPONENT
After the year we both spent at
AHA, Ilan finished high school
in Hawaii and then went to the
University of Chicago, where
he was the student president
of Chabad and would have
entered his senior year this fall.

Ilan was in the Surfside
building with his girlfriend
Deborah, in her family’s apart-
ment, to go to the funeral
of someone they knew from
their time at Camp Judaea in
North Carolina. He was the
kind of kid that anyone who
works with teens is lucky to
get to meet, to teach, to spend
time with. And so is his sister
Tali, who was the madricha
(senior who lived in a house
with younger students) for the
house of 11th grade girls right
next to my 10th/11th grade
boys house. My heart breaks
that he’s gone at only 21, way
too early.

From the moment I heard
he was missing, I felt a compul-
sion that if the worst came
to pass, if I could make it
work, it felt like I needed to
go down to Surfside. If there’s
one important lesson I’ve
learned in my 30 years of life,
it’s that when you can, if you
can, always try and show up
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for people, especially in their
moments of pain.

Being there for someone
— whether they expect you,
whether they know you well,
no matter how far the distance
— matters. It was clearly a
lesson Ilan himself had already
learned, being there in the
Surfside building in order to
pay his respects to a fellow
member of his community.

Especially after our last
year and a half, when so many
have been separated from the
people we care for, unable to be
physically present with them in
their joys or in their sorrows, I
couldn’t stop thinking that just
being there, even for a brief
moment, mattered.

And I hope it did. I saw Tali
for the first time in seven years.

I got to give Ilan’s parents and
his other sister, Mica, a hug,
and say something about how
special Ilan was, how much of
an impression he left on me.

And I got to walk to Surfside,
to see the empty space where
the building stood and the
memorial to the victims now
is. It was a lot. It was intense.

And it was important.

Let me be clear: I’m not the
protagonist in this story. Ilan
is. This is about Ilan and the 97
other victims who were in the
Champlain Towers. It’s about
his sisters, Mica and Tali, his
parents, Carlos and Ronit, and
all the other families who had
to endure the horrible limbo
of not knowing if they’d see
their children or their parents
or their husbands or their
wives or their brothers or their
sisters alive again. Who held
onto hope when not much
remained, and who, at least
now, have some closure and the
ability to properly mourn their
loved ones.

What can we take away
from this unthinkable tragedy?
I hope we can be a little more
grateful for what we have, that
we can hold onto our loved
ones a little tighter, that we can
give our grandmothers another
call, send our friends another
text to see how they’re doing.

So many have lost so much this
past year, and it’s important
to put it in context. The fact
that I missed out a year of
going on dates or traveling to
new places or going to movies
is tiny compared to losing a
person, especially one so
young, forever.

So let’s be there for each
other, through the good, and
especially through the bad.

And let’s remember Ilan, a
shining star taken from us way
too soon. l
A version of this article originally
appeared on Alma.

Rabbis Are Supposed to Offer Hope on the High Holidays.

What if I Can’t?
BY RABBI RACHEL BARENBLAT
I WAS A WRITER before
I became a rabbi, and High
Holiday sermons usually come
easily to me. Some years I
have so many ideas and teach-
ings and hopes to share that
I accidentally write more
sermons than I need to give.

Not this year. This year
I haven’t felt able to begin
writing at all.

The enormity of what’s
broken in the world feels
paralyzing. In recent weeks
we’ve seen unprecedented
heat and wildfires in the
Pacific Northwest, a flaming
oil spill turning part of the
Gulf of Mexico into an inferno
and extreme flooding across
Europe. “Who by fire, who
by water,” the words of the
Unetaneh Tokef prayer, land
differently this year. Dayenu,
that could be enough to still
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM my pen — but there’s more.

Last year, leading High
Holiday services via Zoom
from home, I spoke about our
obligation to take care of each
other by staying apart. I turned
to the rabbi of the Warsaw
Ghetto for his teachings
about hope during adversity.

I imagined Rosh Hashanah
5782: Surely we would be vacci-
nated and safely back together!
The past 18 months of
pandemic were hard even
for those of us who have it
easy (a job, a place to live, no
illness). For many the isola-
tion of sheltering in place was
crushing, or numbing. For
many without stable income or
a roof overhead, the pandemic
has been unimaginably worse.

So, too, for frontline workers
and those whose jobs are
“essential” and often unseen.

When vaccines became
available, my heart soared on
wings of hope. But I hadn’t
reckoned with the power of
social media influencers lying
about the putative risks of the
vaccine, or claiming the virus
is a hoax or “not that bad.”
The simple truth that vaccines
save lives became perversely
inverted — and weaponized.

Now vast numbers of my fellow
Americans are refusing vacci-
nation, claiming “personal
freedom” at the expense of the
collective good.

I keep thinking of the parable
of the guy in the boat drilling
a hole under his own seat. He
doesn’t seem to notice that his
personal freedom is going to
drown everyone else. As a
parable, it’s tart and a little bit
funny. In real life, it’s horrifying.

Dayenu: that too could be enough
to spark despair. But there’s more.

The governor of Texas
recently made it illegal for
municipalities to require
masks. To many, masks have
become a symbol of govern-
ment control. A mask is
literally the least we can do to
protect the immunocompro-
mised (and all children under
the age of 12). Refusing to wear
a mask during this pandemic
is like leaving your lights on
during the London Blitz.

Combine the anti-maskers,
and the anti-vaxxers, and
the new delta variant (more
contagious than chicken pox,
and vaccinated people can
spread it), and cases are rising
again. We’re facing another
long winter of isolation and
mounting death counts — and
it didn’t have to be this way.

Between what we’re doing to
our planet (which disproportion-
ately harms those who are most
vulnerable), and the impact of
JEWISH EXPONENT
anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers
on public health (ditto), and the
persistence of the Big Lie that the
presidential election was “stolen,”
and the lack of accountability
around the Jan. 6 insurrection,
it’s hard not to despair. How can
I write sermons from this place?
I’m pretty sure no one comes to
High Holiday services to hear
their rabbi admit that she’s given
up hope.

I poured out my heart about
this to my hevruta partner,
who reminded me that in
Torah even God sometimes
despaired of humanity. When
God despaired of us, it was
our ancestors’ job to push back
and remind God of reasons
to hope for humanity’s future.

This is part of why we live (and
learn!) in community: to help
each other find hope when our
hearts despair.

Indeed, the Torah readings
most of us will encounter on
Rosh Hashanah cue up that
inner journey. On the first day
we read about the casting-out
of Hagar and Ishmael. On the
second day, the stakes may feel
even higher with the binding
of Isaac. Yet these same Torah
stories also remind us of the
hope to be found in tough
times. An angel opens Hagar’s
eyes to a flowing spring, and
she and her son are saved. An
angel opens Abraham’s eyes to
the ram caught in the thicket,
and Isaac’s life is spared.

Our task is to see the
traumas of this moment clearly
— and also to cultivate the
ability to look beyond our own
despair. The Days of Awe open
the door to new beginnings,
even when (or especially when)
we can’t see our own way back
to hope for change. We just
have to be like those biblical
angels for each other: helping
each other see the hope we
can’t find alone. l
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat is a founder
of Bayit: Building Jewish and rabbi
of Congregation Beth Israel in
North Adams, Massachussetts.

Since 2003, she has blogged as
the Velveteen Rabbi.

STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
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published. AUGUST 12, 2021
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