Judy Didn't Decide to Make Aliyah. She Just Kept Choosing It.

Let me tell you about my favorite kind of aliyah story. It's not the one you think.

We love the dramatic ones, right? The lightning bolt. The guy who watches the news one night, slams his laptop shut, and announces to his stunned family that they're moving to Israel in ninety days, no further questions. The single, cinematic, turn-on-a-dime decision. I get it. It makes for a great trailer.

Judy's story has none of that. And it's one of the best ones I've recorded.

Because Judy didn't decide to make aliyah. Not really. Not in the way we usually mean it. She came to Jerusalem for a year when she was twelve — her dad was a scientist, the kind who grew up adjacent to the Manhattan Project and then got talked into guest-lecturing at Hebrew University — and somewhere in that hard, confusing, didn't-speak-the-language year, something got planted. She fell in love with the place. Then she kept coming back. Summer after high school. Two years of college, then back again on her own. And at some point the question in her head stopped being "should I move to Israel?" and quietly became "when am I going to be there next?"

That's the whole thing. That's the story. One decision led to another led to another, and one day she looked up and she wasn't visiting anymore. She lived here.

I think we don't talk about that version enough.

1981, no roadmap

Here's something that knocked me sideways a little. Judy made aliyah in 1981.

Sit with that for a second. No Nefesh B'Nefesh. No Facebook group of 40,000 olim ready to answer your question about which cell plan to get. No Google, no forums, no slick onboarding. You went to the Sochnut, you got a booklet, and you figured the rest out with your own two hands and however much nerve you could muster. She and her husband packed a "lift" with a little furniture (because, as she put it, American couches don't fit in Israeli living rooms — a sentence that is somehow still true 44 years later), measured their boxes down to the inch, and showed up.

And then they got to JFK. And the boxes were over the weight limit. And the airline wanted some absurd excess baggage fee. And Judy — about to leave her entire country behind, on the literal threshold of the rest of her life — broke down crying right there at the counter.

You know what happened? The Israeli working the desk took one look at her, and cut the fee in half.

I love that moment so much. Because that's it. That's the whole country in one tiny interaction. The bureaucracy will grind you into dust, and then a total stranger will quietly decide the rules can bend for you today. Both things are true. They're always both true.

When America becomes the culture shock

Here's the part of the conversation that I keep thinking about.

Judy talked about taking her kids back to the States every couple of summers to see family. And at some point — gradually, then all at once — America started to feel strange. Walking around going "my goodness, these roads are so wide, these houses are so huge, look how enormous this store is." The culture shock flipped. The place she came from became the foreign country. The place she chose became home so completely that home stopped feeling like a choice at all.

I asked her if there was a single moment she could point to where she felt like she'd become Israeli. She basically said no. There wasn't a day. There wasn't a ceremony. It just accrued. Like sediment. Like the way you don't notice your kid getting taller until one day their feet hang off the end of the bed.

And honestly? I think that's the truest thing anyone's said on this show. Belonging isn't an event. It's a thousand small mornings stacked on top of each other until they're load-bearing.

The question none of us can avoid

I want to be careful with this part, because it's the part that got quiet in the room.

Judy told a story about her mother-in-law during the Gulf War — three little kids and a new baby, missiles, the whole thing — calling and begging them to come back to the States, even offering to arrange a nanny. And Judy said no. And one of those kids, who was seven at the time, said something years later that I haven't been able to shake. He said if they'd gone to America then, he could never have held his head up in school. We ran away when everybody else stayed.

I told her, right there in the conversation, that this is exactly what I felt after October 7th. That question — are you going to leave? — landed on a lot of us. And for me the answer came back fast and certain and not entirely rational: I can't run away. If I ran, I don't think I could ever come back and not feel ashamed.

Judy's family has been answering that question for forty years. Through intifadas, through wars, through every reason the world has ever handed them to go. And they stayed. Not because staying was easy — because leaving was unthinkable in a way that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with home.

We didn't dwell on it. We didn't need to. Some things you just nod at.

The middle that nobody built (so she built it)

Okay, now let me get on my soapbox for a second, because this one's personal.

Judy grew up Reform. Active, committed, the whole family deep in synagogue life. And when she got here, she ran headfirst into the thing that still drives me up a wall about religious life in Israel: the dichotomy. You're either Orthodox or you're secular. Observant or nothing. There's no middle. There's no room for the "I grew up traditional-ish, I care deeply, I want community, but I'm not signing up for the whole package" crowd that so many of us American olim come from.

She didn't just complain about it (like, ahem, some of us do on podcasts). She helped build the middle. Decades of quiet, unglamorous, pioneering work helping non-Orthodox communities exist in a country that didn't make space for them. When she made aliyah there were maybe ten Reform congregations. Now there are fifty-some. That's not nothing. That's a life's work that most people will never know her name for.

And when I told her I still struggle to find that middle ground here in 2025 — that when I describe what I grew up with, people genuinely don't know what I'm talking about — you could see it land. A little bit of "after all this time, still?" That's the cost of building something quietly. You don't always get to see how far it reached.

Why this one stays with me

Four kids. Ten grandchildren. Eight of those grandkids and three of those kids living right here, a short drive away. A tour guide, a writer, a builder of communities, a person who has watched Ra'anana go from a one-traffic-light farm town with a guy selling watermelons off a donkey cart into the city it is now.

She built all of it piece by piece. On purpose. Over decades. Without a roadmap and without a single dramatic moment to point to.

That's a different kind of resilience than we usually celebrate. It's quiet. It's patient. It's the resilience of choosing the same thing over and over, on the ordinary days, long after anyone's clapping.

I think we could all stand to hear more stories like that.

🎧 Listen to Judy's full episode on the Aliyah Chronicles Podcast — and if her story reminded you of your own slow burn, do me a favor and send it to someone who needs to hear it.

🌐 aliyahchronicles.com