#holit

It’s been a long time since my last blog post and almost a month since I arrived in Israel.  I forced myself to sit down and actually write down a blog post regardless of my busy schedule in the absorption process and dealing with army bureaucracy.  This post is going to strictly cover the absorption process and later posts will deal with my army interactions.

My first interaction with the absorption process was my aliyah (immigration) flight, which is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  My flight was chartered solely for olim (immigrants) of all ages from seniors, families, and 125 young people my age joining the IDF.  It was covered on every news station throughout the entire country from prepping for the big move to landing.  I myself spoke on a radio talk show and my roommate from college, Aaron Finkelstein, was covered in a whole story on prime-time news.

There is one aspect of the flight that I must cover in this blog post, the landing; it was by far the most moving experience that has ever occurred to me.  As we began our descent one-hour before landing, music and cheering roared throughout the cabin.  When our wheels touched down onto the runway, I felt chills shoot down my body.  I finally landed in Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel) fulfilling my ancestors’ age-old dream of returning to our ancestral homeland.  As I walked down the staircase of the plane toward the terminal, the very first thing I did was drop to my knees and kiss the ground, as immigrants did as they jumped off boats during the establishment of the state.

After landing in Israel, we had multiple ceremonies congratulating us on our decision to immigrate to Israel and welcoming us.  From there, I took a bus to my new home, Kibbutz Holit.

In two weeks I will be departing for my last of four preparation seminars with my program for aliyah called Garin Tzabar, translated to English as a sabra seed.  I joined the program in January along with a group of twenty-eight others that are moving to Israel and joining the Israel Defense Forces.  In order to understand the program and how it works, it's vital to understand the plant (the sabra) that it's named after.

My Garin

When someone refers to a person as a sabra, they are speaking about a Jew that was born in Israel.  Sabras are known to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside.  The prickliness on the outside is symbolic of the Zionist "new Jew" that doesn't take sh*t from anyone; as opposed to the "old Jew" that allowed himself to be locked into ghettos and subsequently resisted fighting back.  The sweetness of the sabra is symbolic in that when you look beyond the prickly skin, there is a sweet and caring person on the inside.

So looking through my romantic lens, Garin Tzabar is planting myself and my twenty-eight other garin-members as sabra seeds in Israel to sprout, so that one day we can grow into full fledged sabras.

Kibbutz Holit (Yes it's only 4km away from Gaza and 8km away from Egypt)