'Israel is something you can't understand': JPost staff share struggles, silliness of aliyah

Moving to Israel has its ups and downs. Whether it is from struggling with bureaucracy or just trying to get on the plane, or trying to make a living within the country while waiting for everything to be finalized in different government offices - everyone has their struggles.

And once the aliyah process is over, it's time to get used to life in Israel - something that may be a far cry from what they're used to.

This week on The Jerusalem Post Podcast, several of the Jerusalem Post breaking news desk team spoke Tamar Uriel-Beeri and Alex Winston about their aliyah experiences, the highs and lows.

Gadi Zaig

Gadi Zaig is a longtime veteran of the breaking news desk, and a current student at Tel Aviv University. 

He made aliyah from New Jersey at the young age of 14, with his memories of adjusting to the new country still vivid.

"Where do I start?" he said with a laugh. "I was put in a public school - I didn't even know the aleph bet when they put me in there."

Learning Hebrew at an ulpan wouldn't come till later. After that, it was back to school.

"After I finished ulpan, I went back to public school, and I was just trying to wing it," Zaig explained. "I was just navigating high school with Hebrew as a second language that I didn't even know a year prior."

The most surprising thing of his first years in Israel, he explained, "is that I graduated." 

Mathilda Heller

Mathilda is one of the newer members of the breaking news team, having made aliyah just five weeks before the Israel-Hamas war began. That, right away, colored her entire experience. 

"The hardest part was having only just moved to Israel before the war started, and then kind of navigating my new life in Israel, navigating the collective trauma, and everything that happened from that point onwards," she said.

As a result, she never really got to experience pre-war Israel. 

"It was my first rockets and my first war," Heller noted, "so it was all kind of very new. I knew that for me, it was like a make-or-break moment, that either I would live here forever, or I'd be like, no, I'm out. And I knew very quickly that it was going to be the former."

In that sense, her experiences with wartime Israel ironically catalyzed a much more secure aliyah experience.

The strangest thing she has experienced in Israel so far, though, is the "amusing and dysfunctional" customer service - or lack thereof. 

"My favorite thing is, if you're going to your [health fund] and they'll say 'Press three for English,' and like 100% of the time you'll never get an English speaker," Heller noted. "As a tip, if you press two for Arabic, they tend to speak better English."

She also shared some of the more surreal things she's seen living in Tel Aviv. 

"Everything in Tel Aviv is bizarre," she said. "It's very normal to see a man go to the beach with his pet python, or a woman walking along with a rabbit on her shoulder, or someone carrying a sofa between two scooters. And you just have to let it slide because... Israel is one of those things where you can't really understand it. You just have to go with the flow."

Sam Halpern

One of the desk managers on the breaking news desk, Sam is actually not a citizen yet, and is in the process of making aliyah. And with that comes many of the bureaucratic nightmares Israel is known for.

"I'm going through Nefesh B'Nefesh, and while this process has benefits, there's also steps along the way that take some time," he explained. "For instance, they require an FBI background check, which... can take like, six to eight weeks just to hear back."

Other absurd bureaucratic red tape includes needing a letter from a rabbi to confirm Jewishness, submitted as its original copy with the exact ink the rabbi used for the letter as well as what kind of ink is acceptable. 

"The first rabbi letter that I submitted, they rejected offhand," Halpern said. "I think they told me it was formatted incorrectly, but my suspicion is that they just didn't like the Reform temple that it had come from. So instead, I got a Chabad rabbi to do it for me, and they were happy with that one."

For Halpern, the most surprising part of his aliyah experience is that it was actually doable at all. 

"I don't have family here," he said. "I'm kind of just getting started on my own. Found my own place to live, my own work."

Joanie Margulies

Another one of our breaking news desk managers, Joanie Margulies made aliyah not by herself, but with her dog. 

That decision :made things so much harder, but totally worth it," she explained.

Adjusting to life in Israel was a challenge. While she did know some people in Israel, most of them were farther away than she expected. "Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva are in two different worlds," Margulies said.

She was hit with a wall of bureaucracy and had to learn to navigate everything on her own - especially with the situation made worse by COVID, which was in full-force when she came in 2020.

For Margulies, the weirdest thing about aliyah was the coincidence of meeting so many people from the same part of the US she's from.

"So many of the people that I'm closest with, like my close group of friends and my partner, they just happen to be from the same part of the United States that I'm from," she said. "The world is very small, and it's even smaller in Israel. People don't understand what that means... It's actually not that strange to find out that someone's second cousin, who you met at a wedding in Ashdod, is housemates with your friend who lives in Nahariya."