Akiva Tuttle: Raised in Alaska, revealed in Romania, residing in Israel

Born in Germany to a German mother and a father serving in the US Air Force at the time, Kevin Tuttle spent much of his childhood in various parts of Alaska, including an off-grid town about 60 miles north of Fairbanks.

It didn’t matter that there was no Jewish community in those parts. Neither Tuttle’s mother nor the three children knew that they were Jewish. 

Sign up for our newsletter to learn more >>

In 1990, when Tuttle was 14, his parents spontaneously decided to move to Romania after watching an episode of the investigative news program 20/20, revealing the plight of neglected children in state orphanages. They told him, the youngest sibling and the only child they were taking with them, that they would go for a year.

“It was hard as a 14-year-old to be pulled out of school in my freshman year of high school. But I thought, ‘Okay, a year of helping somebody could be interesting.’” 

In the end, he stayed for three years, returning to the United States to finish high school in Wisconsin, where he met his future wife, Bonnie. They wed in 2001.

His parents, meanwhile, stayed in Romania for six years. One night in 1994, when Tuttle was 17, his mother overheard some friends in Romania, an elderly Jewish couple, speaking Yiddish to each other.

“My mom said, ‘Oh! My grandmother used to sing songs to me in Yiddish.’ And they said, ‘What? We thought you weren’t Jewish.’ And my mom’s like, ‘I’m not.’ And they said, ‘If your grandmother’s singing to you in Yiddish, you’re Jewish.’ My mom was just flabbergasted,” he recounts.

After confronting her own mother, she found out that after surviving the Holocaust, her mother and grandmother had vowed to eliminate all traces of Judaism from the family. They had kept this secret for more than 40 years. 

As soon as the truth came out, Tuttle’s father converted to Judaism and changed his name to Yeriel Even-Pinah. After leaving Romania, the couple made aliyah and settled in Mevaseret Zion.

Tuttle, who would visit his parents in Israel 17 times over the ensuing 20-plus years, decided, upon learning of his Jewish heritage, to stop eating pork and shellfish “because that was the one thing that I knew Jews didn’t do, and I wanted to honor that.”

This became difficult when he was deployed in Afghanistan for a year during his service in the US Air Force from 2001 to 2007. “We were in the middle of nowhere, and the meals we were sent were all pork. It was so frustrating because I had made a vow that I wouldn’t break. Finally, my commander saw that I was losing a bunch of weight, and so he made a call and got me some different food,” Tuttle recalled.

Despite his dietary vow, he was not interested in exploring Judaism any further. 

“I pretty much hated God. I didn’t want anything to do with God,” he said, explaining that when he was 17 he began having flashbacks to childhood molestation he’d suffered at the hands of a family member. 

“I had buried those memories for a long time, and when they started coming back to me it fueled that typical mindset of ‘If there’s a God, how can bad things happen to children?’ It wasn’t until I finally reconciled with God four and a half years ago that I had clarity on that,” Tuttle said.

“I finally understood that God didn’t allow anything to happen to me; He gave us free will, and somebody chose to do wrong to me. That has nothing to do with God but with man’s evil. 

“So my life changed. I stopped running from Him, and I stopped running from myself. I got counseling. It was a very painful experience overall for my family and myself but also very healing, and it propelled this journey that we’ve been on since that time.”

And that was why for the first 16 times he visited Israel he had felt no personal connection. 

“I appreciated the beauty and the history, but because I hated God, it didn’t touch me,” he said.

In fact, when he and his brother in Alaska discussed who would care for their parents in Israel when they aged, Tuttle said he’d never move to a country full of bad traffic and bad manners. 

“But on my 17th visit, in the summer of 2022, when I had reconciled with God, it was such a night-and-day difference, even though nothing had changed in a worldly, physical sense. Nobody had stopped yelling, and the traffic was still horrible. But none of it mattered anymore. I felt this deep connection to the land, to the Jewish people, to everything here. I was in tears when we left because I didn’t want to get on the plane.”

Tuttle was consumed by a deep longing to make aliyah and connect to his Jewish roots. When he summoned the courage after a few months to confide in Bonnie, she surprised him by admitting that she’d felt the same way ever since a previous family visit. 

“She couldn’t tell me at the time. She couldn’t say, ‘Kevin, I felt like God was talking to me there.’ But when I expressed to her what I was going through, she was able to reveal to me that she, too, felt a deep connection to the spiritual aspect of Israel.”

Moving to Israel

THEY DECIDED they wanted to live in Zichron Ya’acov because they had visited his parents’ friends there and fallen in love with the beauty and serenity of the town.

Their children – Eliana, then 14, and Leo, then 12 – were, understandably, less enthusiastic about the impending move. 

“Ellie was a freshman in high school, just like I was a freshman in high school when we moved to Romania. And so, interestingly enough, I understand exactly what my kids are going through,” said Tuttle.

“It’s been incredibly hard for them. The first year was quite the challenge, especially not understanding Hebrew. But man, am I proud of them for pushing through and managing to get good grades in school.” 

A big remaining difficulty is that the Tuttles have yet to attain citizenship. They began the aliyah process through Nefesh B’Nefesh but bought their own plane tickets when it became apparent that the Jewish Agency was not completing the paperwork in time for them to get to Israel for the start of the 2023-2024 school year. 

Nobody told them that by doing so, they’d have to start the process all over again, this time through the Population and Immigration Ministry. The red tape became so long and tangled that the Tuttles, currently still here on tourist visas, have engaged a lawyer to help them through the bureaucracy.

This non-status has caused many unhappy repercussions. Leo, a talented baseball player, successfully tried out for the Israel National Baseball U15 team but was not permitted to play in the European Championships last summer in Lithuania because he didn’t have an Israeli ID card. “It is so incredibly heartbreaking and frustrating,” said Tuttle. 

Another heartbreak came when Tuttle’s mother passed away just two months after he and his family arrived in Israel. Eventually, his father moved in with them in Zichron Ya’acov.

Tuttle, who founded and heads Spirit PR, a public affairs and public relations company with an American clientele, said that despite their immigration and acculturation troubles and the war on top of that, the family is determined to remain in Israel.

Recently, he underwent circumcision because he had not been circumcised as a baby. “I had already been thinking about this ever since I reconciled with God and started seeing all the passages in the Torah, over and over, that you must be circumcised. It was like this weight on my shoulders, but I didn’t know how to go about it,” he said.

While having a distilled water system installed in their home a few months after the move, Tuttle discovered that the technician was a rabbi. He kept running into the rabbi around town and eventually sought his help in arranging the surgery, which took place in Bnei Brak. 

“Besides my wedding day and my children being born, that experience was the most incredible day of my life,” Tuttle said.

Several days before the event, the rabbi had told Tuttle that he would need to choose a Hebrew name, and suggested “Akiva.” “He said it has a couple of different meanings, and one is ‘the protector.’ That one really touched me because that’s something I’ve really adhered to since I was little; I’ve always tried to protect others,” Tuttle said, adding that he’d been bullied as a kid and tried never to let that happen to anyone else.

As he and his father were driving to Bnei Brak for the procedure, his father asked if he’d chosen a Hebrew name.

“I told my dad I’d decided to go with ‘Akiva,’ and he was just silent. That surprised me, and I asked him ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I’ve never told you this because I didn’t want to weigh in on anything, but a few years ago when Mama started thinking you might come here, she said, “You know, when he comes, he can get a new name, and I’ve always loved the name Akiva. That’s what I would choose for him.”’ 

“I had no idea,” said Tuttle.

Moreover, this revelation was made as the father and son were passing Or Akiva on Highway 2. And when they got to their destination, they saw that the adjacent street was called Rehov Akiva.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, God, okay. I obviously made the right choice.’ And it just felt so blessed.”

Following the procedure, each of the men present in the room asked Tuttle for a blessing. “They said that I’m the closest to God on Earth right now of anyone [there], and that my prayers have special powers.”

The rabbi from Zichron stepped forward and asked Tuttle to pray for his (the rabbi’s) daughter to find a suitable marriage partner.

“Thirty days after that, I got a message from the rabbi’s wife inviting me to their daughter’s engagement party. I said, ‘Wait a second, is this the daughter that I prayed for at the bris?’ and she said, ‘Yes, yes, that was her!’

“I don’t want to say that it’s because of me, but who knows? Maybe I had a role to play in it. And then shortly after that, somebody else said that they’d like me to pray for their daughter to find a husband. 

“I said, ‘Okay, but I’m not getting circumcised again,’” Tuttle related with a laugh.  ■

Kevin (Akiva) Tuttle, 48 From Wisconsin to Zichron Ya’acov, 2023

Learn how to buy your home in Israel with confidence >>