My wife, Bonnie, and I accompanied a group of new immigrants to Israel this week on a Nefesh B'Nefesh -- the group that helps American, Canadian and British immigrants --charter flight. I wrote an article on the experience for Washington Jewish Week.

But the flight couldn't help but remind my wife and I about our own aliyah 37 years ago and how much we would have benefited had that organization existed in 1972.

While the olim on our flight had ample staff to look our for their needs and calm their natural anxieties, my wife and I -- with our two daughters Lauren, then 5, and Debra, then 5 weeks old -- were completely alone on the flight.

There was a representative on the NBN flight to process the immigrants' paperwork. When my family arrived in Israel 37 years ago, we were greeted at the airport by surly government representatives who seemed annoyed that we were not already fluent in Hebrew.

NBN's job does not end once their aircraft landed. The group helps the olim with their contacts with government agencies and in coping with the ins and outs of a new society.

We were completely on our own. Two especially horrible experiences come to mind. One was my wife's journeys around warehouses in Tel Aviv with our daughter strapped to her trying to find the place where some of our personal items were being stored after being shipped by airplane.

When I went to Haifa later to try to get our lift with furniture and other items out of the port, I was forced to pay a bribe to the dock worker before he would even go to work. I discovered when he finally found our things that only half of our possessions had been shipped and the expensive, time-consuming process of returning to Haifa from our home in Jerusalem would have to be repeated.

In addition, NBN provides social activities for the new immigrants and contacts each family at least on a monthly basis for several years after its arrival to try to ease the people's absorption into Israeli society.

Socially, we were again on our own. Our shaliach (emissary) in Washington before we went to live in Israel had been Eli Melech Rahm, who, we learned later, was a reporter for Israeli TV. Neither he nor anyone else ever contacted us to see how we were doing.

Finally, NBN provides most immigrants with loans that become grants after they live in the country for a few years.

Financially life was tough for us. We came on aliyah with almost no money and although Bonnie worked as a nurse at Kibbutz Kfar Gilada where we lived for four years and later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and I worked at the Israeli Health MInistry, in various kibbutz operations, a hotel and finally as a journalist for Newsview, an Israeli magazine in English, and for The Jerusalem Post, our standard of living was low.

Nonetheless, despite the lack of encouragement or much help from the government -- we did live in government-subsidized housing for some 10 years before we finally were able to buy our apartment in Jerusalem -- we lived in Israel for 16 years before a personal financial catastrophe forced us to leave in 1988.

The purpose of this blog is not to generate sympathy for us -- we loved living in Israel and visit our children and grandchildren there often -- but to praise NBN for the great job it is doing helping American, Canadian and British immigrants.

It is an organization that deserves support.