We met David Craft and his new wife Susan Weinstein Craft, during a May 2016 Guided Aliyah day, where David became “Officially Israeli” and made Aliyah.  David and Susan originally met as teenagers and reconnected as adults, sharing their love for Judaism, Israel and each other. They are married, and happily enjoying their new lives together in Netanya.

The following is a “his” and “hers” take on their incredible love story.

Susan: 51 years ago we met and fell in love; we were boyfriend and girlfriend, met on the beach in Florida. We were a couple for about two years, a lot of long distance. We were children, 16 and 17. Throughout that next long chapter he was always there in the back of my mind, like silly little expressions that he used to say and songs that I taught my children, he was always floating around in my conscious. I moved to Israel in 1991, with a husband and two children. I had my life. Back in the 80s I actually went to visit his parents, and during that time I didn’t know, but he had been converting to Judaism, he had no idea I had visited.

David: When I was 12 years old I started reading about Theodor Hertzel , I fell in love with the whole idea of Israel and Zionism. After years and years of reading [about Judaism] I converted in 1983.  My relationship with Susan had nothing to do with the conversion.

I had gone through a life. Had children and grandchildren. One day I was online looking up old people in my life, and I thought about Susan, somebody who had been on my mind the whole of my life. I found her and I saw that she was living in Israel.  I had recently retired for the second time after deciding that I had wanted to make Aliyah. While looking for Susan online I had come across her husband’s obituary.  I said to myself that I have to get in touch with her, I had no information on her besides the town that she lived in. Then I looked her up on Facebook.

 

Susan: So, I get this friend request from a David Craft, I look on his profile and see pictures of the Israeli flag and that he’s Jewish- nothing that I had remembered when we were teens. David is his middle name and it’s a very common name so I didn’t respond and he later told me he fell in to a deep depression because of that. He wrote me a love letter like he used to and let me know on Facebook messenger saying, ‘I’ll leave you alone, I’m sorry to bother you. You have a letter coming, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’ To which I responded, ‘Who are you and what do you want from me?’ He then wrote, ‘When I was 17 I fell in love with you.’  For six weeks after that we texted back and forth for a few hours a day.

After 3 days of being in touch with him I quit a 50-year self-destructive habit and I told him, ‘I want to give this a chance.’ David said, ‘Just days ago I also started changing some persistent bad habits because I knew this is my chance to make a beautiful life with this amazing person.’

He came to visit in November of 2015; he got off that plane and kissed me.

David: She is the love of my life. The first time I saw her I just melted.  When we met at Ben Gurion after all that time, it was magic.

We are just soul mates! Her father, 96, is over the moon for us, he can’t get enough. And my mother never approved any female that ever came into my life, with the one exception:  Susan. We now live in Netanya.

Susan: He is reunited with me and now wedded with Eretz Yisroel.