From American to Israeli: Interview with Stef Part I

When I interned in Haifa, Israel for two months the summer after my junior year of college, I got to know our leader, Stef. She was responsible for facilitating our experience in the program. Now, seven years later, we reconnected, and Stef shared a bit about her experience making the transition to Israel later in life. She is a mother of four kids: two 6-year-olds, a 4-year-old, and a 1-year-old. She is also currently an arts student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, which is her third time attending university. She is married to Matt who is an archaeologist, and they have been living here in Israel for eight years. Read on to learn more about her!

Mariya: What’s your aliyah (immigration to Israel) story? What prompted you to make this change in your life?

Stef: So I think the first time I actually thought about making aliyah was probably when I was 12 years old. My mom had a good friend, an Israeli woman, who worked as an ulpan teacher. She invited us to come spend one of our summers in Israel when I was 12 years old, and I actually lived at this old ulpan. Ulpan is where you learn Hebrew when you come here. It's sort of like an intensive immersion Hebrew program. We did it for a summer. It was us and a whole bunch of other families and people who had made aliyah. We didn't. We were just here to learn Hebrew and spend time with this family friend. So I think that was the first time it popped into my head as a possibility since we were surrounded by all of these other people who had made aliyah.

By the time I was 17 years old, I was really involved in youth group and Jewish summer camps. Israel was always a prominent event in my teen years. So the idea of living in Israel was always spoken about, and I did an Israel trip in high school. I really fell in love with the people and the country, and thought that this could be a place I would want to spend my adult years. I planned to come on a gap year program between high school and college, but it was in the midst of the intifada, the Second Intifada and my parents pulled me out of the program just before it started. So I went off to university. Y'know, my plan had been that I would do a gap year program, make sure it was what I wanted to do, stay, join the army, spend the rest of my life here. But that didn't happen.

So I went to university in Canada, and decided that I would try again for my junior year abroad. So I came for my junior year abroad for a semester, loved it, decided right then and there that I wanted to give it a shot living here, whatever that meant. I came back after I graduated and did my master's degree in Jerusalem, and I gave myself three years (it was a three-year-long degree) to decide if this is really what I wanted to do. If I really wanted to spend my life here and live here. It was kind of this dream that always was, but I didn't know in practical terms what it meant. So I gave those three years as my trial period. I decided that it was definitely what I wanted to do. I felt at home here, I felt that my future was here for so many reasons.

I went back to the US, worked for a few years, came back with my husband (we made aliyah together). So it was sort of a dream that was building for a long, long time until all the pieces fell into place.

M: Wow that's amazing that you already knew from age 12 that this is what you wanted to do. Did you feel, when you were dipping your toes into the possibility of living in Israel, that there was any element of culture shock?

S: I think for me the culture shock was more of a comfort. I grew up in Buffalo, NY, in a place where for my whole life my Jewish identity was something that made me different from everybody else. I was one of one, or possibly two, Jewish kids in my class. I went to a Hebrew school that had five or six kids in it. It was a very small Jewish community, where I was. Always the places growing up where I felt most comfortable was at Jewish summer camp, Jewish summer trips, youth group. Also, when I came to Israel, it felt like that environment of being in a Jewish country and all of the things that made me stand out as being different where I came from, culturally were normal here. And I think the culture shock was a comfort in the sense that: "Wow! I can go out to eat at all of these different places. I don't have to check labels at the supermarket. People are speaking Hebrew." Everything was just so amazing that all of the things that I struggled with my Jewish identity growing up were all of a sudden easier here. That's what stands out for me when it comes to the culture shock that it wasn't shocking, but rather this is where I'm meant to be. This is where I feel comfortable.

M: How does it feel almost a decade later to call yourself Israeli? Do you think you would ever go back to live in the United States?

S: I definitely feel Israeli, and I think the times when I feel most Israeli is when I go back to the US to visit. Then all of a sudden all of the things that have become normal for me here stand out when I go back there. Here, we are "Americans" in that we have accents and there are still certain cultural things that will always stand out. But I see us spending our lives here. My kids were all born here. My husband wants to spend his life here also. This is our home. This is where we want to be. You know, we'll always go back to the US to visit family and friends, but to live -- not.

THIS CONCLUDES PART I. STAY TUNED FOR PARTS II AND III OF THE INTERVIEW.