After a day and a half with the kinfauna, I hopped on a bus to Jerusalem and proceeded to spend an inordinate amount of time wandering around places that looked very familiar… just not familiar enough. O1 had already sent out the search and rescue (read: she walked up her street) by the time I arrived. I had some difficulty finding her apartment because I was looking for one of those ugly, cramped things where poverty-stricken students huddle together for warmth in the winter, and instead I found a building set back from the street behind an extensive shady garden.

“Did you graduate?” I felt compelled to ask, once she’d cooled me down with cold water. (Both in a cup and over the head.)

Nope, she had a year or so to go. But, as an oleh, her tuition is paid for three years, and she gets a stipend for rent and living expenses.

“Ah,” I say, wondering if thermodynamics is really so hard in Hebrew after all.

Not that she was living on her lonesome. There were two others in the apartment and I gathered that rent was actually lower than in New York (any part of it).

O1 is what I call “boring” and Nefesh B’Nefesh calls “a success story.” She never went home after seminary. Why? “I don’t remember,” she says, which probably means “None of your business.” Anyway, she preferred not to go home, so she stayed. Started on interior design, had trouble with the Hebrew, switched to architecture because she liked that better anyway, and somewhere along the line she made aliya, which helped pay the bills. She started reading Harry Potter in Hebrew.

I tell her about O2, who came on the same flight as I did. Two months ago he was in a Chabad House in the Peruvian Andes. Quothe the rabbi, “L’shana habah b’Yirushalayim.”

Quothe back O2, “Why next year? Why not this one?”

So after Shabbos he logged on to Nefesh B’Nefesh and started scanning documents. “It was all online; went like this,” he snapped his fingers. “Two months later, here I am!”

“Well it’s true,” O1 agreed. “Everyone says ‘next year in Jerusalem’ and then keeps sitting on their rear ends in the USA.”

“Well, he is developing a website for a living,” I had to point out.

O1’s advice for olim? “Get an aliya coach. Someone you can run to with all your questions and who knows everything.”

“Where do you get one?” I asked.

“Oh, Nefesh B’Nefesh provides them. You just have to ask.”

O3 flew to Israel from Greece, where he was hanging out and feeling restless. “I guess I got the Zionistic bug,” he said. “So I logged on to NBN.org.il and made aliya. This is where Jews belong. It’s our country – the only one we’ve got.”

“When I see the flag I feel proud. This country is great and wonderful – it’s so much more than the war zone you see on TV. It’s not a war zone, it’s our home and responsibility, and I want to be there,” said O4.

“I just visited and loved it here. No ideological reasons; I just liked it and decided I would move here,” said O5. “I knew it would be hard and I’d have to start at the bottom with a rotten job and work my way up just like any immigrant. No great expectations. But I’ve got a career now and I’m doing well.” She did admit that the last vestige of her American accent is the bane of her existance.

“You know you’re finally comfortable here when you win your first argument,” O6 said.

“Hey, I did that this morning,” O2 grinned. “This girl walked into a cafe blaring music and when I asked her to turn it down she gave me the finger. I told her rude people belong in New York, not Israel, and she should go there if she was going to behave like that.” The teen’s jaw went slack and she didn’t respond.

“Where was this?” I asked.

“Tel Aviv,” O2 said. Of course. Where else? Truth is, you don’t find obnoxious people in the rest of Israel. At least, I haven’t, though granted I haven’t been everywhere.

(To be continued…)