14 years ago today, single at age 34, with two elderly cats, I took the biggest leap of faith of my life. Unlike many other stories I had heard, I didn’t make Aliyah after studying at a university here, landing an internship, or because I lost my job in the US and had nothing to lose. Quite the opposite. I quit a very lucrative sales job in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, sold my nice car, rented out my condo, and said goodbye to my parents and sister. With no job lined up and nowhere to live, I made the plunge purely for my soul’s calling—for Zionism. With about $7,000 in savings, I took a massive risk to follow my heart. And when people tell you that making aliyah isn’t easy, it’s an understatement compared to the challenges I endured.

While apartment hunting, I rented a furnished apartment on the beach in Tel Aviv. I spent my days running back and forth with my laptop to a neighborhood café because my building’s Wi-Fi barely worked. About two weeks in, while looking for apartments, jobs, and starting Ulpan, I received an email from my condo association: they were evicting my “roommate” because they discovered I had moved overseas. I had only learned a few weeks before my Aliyah that, due to building rules, I wasn’t allowed to rent out my condo because the allowed percentage of rented units had already reached its maximum. I was told I needed to join a waitlist. As number four, it could take years until my turn came up—and in the meantime, I was responsible for paying rent in Tel Aviv and the mortgage on an empty condo in Chicago. To say I was panicked and stressed would be an understatement.

I spent my days contacting lawyer friends, reviewing my building’s bylaws, pleading with the condo board—and crying. Long story short, a few people on the list let me pass them, my parents helped a bit with the mortgage, and four months, it was finally my turn to rent out the unit. But by then, my $7,000 was almost gone.

The first apartment I found—through a broker who offered me a joint while picking me up on his motorbike—basically conned me into renting what seemed like a gem: a small one-bedroom at the bottom of a four-story building just off Rothschild, one of Tel Aviv’s prettiest and most popular streets. Soon after, I stepped out of the shower into an inch of standing water covering the entire apartment. This occurred almost any time water ran for more than 5 minutes. That’s when I learned the unit had originally been a pipe closet, illegally converted into an apartment by my call-girl landlady to make extra money. The building residents confirmed it flooded often, and that several renters had come and gone. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the broker to refund his finder’s fee, nor could I get the hooker to release me from the lease.

I spent the next few weeks letting plumbers in and out as they used my electricity to tear up the walkway outside my unit (and asked me to make them coffee), working with a pro bono lawyer to get out of the lease—and, again, crying. About two months in, my lawyer finally got her to agree to let me out, but of course the two air-conditioning units I had installed, along with the window screens I made to keep out cockroaches, were a total financial loss.

The second apartment I found was owned by a religious Magen David Adom paramedic, and I naively assumed he was a law-abiding, stand-up guy. I quickly learned otherwise when I realized he had illegally divided what should have been one unit into two. The shadiness was confirmed when a lightbulb literally exploded above my head, and I discovered he had set up the electricity himself. To try to make some income, I rented out the parking spot included in my lease—easy to do near the corner of HaYarkon and Geula by the beach. But a month later, a nosy neighbor tattled on me, and the landlord forbade it.

As if that weren’t enough, I dealt with a nocturnal Russian drug-dealing neighbor on the other side of what was supposed to be my apartment, then a mother and young son whose abusive ex-husband regularly banged on their door in the middle of the night, an elderly couple upstairs who threw soiled adult diapers out the window (yes, really), and a neighbor below who left her two large dogs barking endlessly every day. I spent as much time as I could out of the apartment—at Ulpan, at the gallery, with friends, or at the beach.

And in the middle of all of this, I was hospitalized for what doctors believed was severe food poisoning, my cats got fleas for the first time in their lives, and somehow, I managed to land a sales job at a gallery on Ben Yehuda—where one hour’s salary could buy me an avocado. I studied at Ulpan three evenings a week and was grateful my Hebrew was already at level “bet,” so I didn’t need the full intensive schedule.

About halfway through the lease of my costly beachfront disaster, I found a young single guy to sublet and take over. By then, I had met my now-husband and gotten engaged, so I was more than ready to leave my Tel Aviv rental fiascos behind and move with him to his “du mishpachti” in Ashkelon. Honestly, the timing couldn’t have been better—I was out of money, and my gallery job barely covered a third of my rent.

While pregnant with our first daughter, we lived through the 2014 war with Hamas, called Protective Edge. Luckily, our old house had a ma’amad, and we had 30 seconds to reach it. When our daughter was born, we used the safe room as her bedroom, and I made it pretty by painting butterflies on her walls and hanging cute ladybug curtains.

About a year later, we built a beautiful home in Kibbutz Zikim. I understood that we would then have only 15 seconds to reach the safe room, but we thought the pros outweighed the cons, and of course, we didn’t expect what was to come…

The ma’amad in our new home became the bedroom of our then 3-year-old and newborn. It was a wise decision, as we often suffered from rockets from Hamas. But we quickly learned that we never had the full 15 seconds that was promised to us—we were lucky if we had 10. As the girls grew up over the next few years, I’d catch them playing “tzeva adom” with their My Little Ponies, and we got accustomed to having “rocket days,” when we would be stuck in the house with no school or work. This was “normal” life for those of us living in communities on the Gaza border.

But we had a beautiful custom-built house, where I put my interior design skills to use, and a huge yard filled with fruit trees, bougainvillea bushes, and quiet. The girls couldn’t have had a better daycare experience—visiting the cows, the petting zoo, daily walks, and trips to the playground. So we tolerated the rockets.

And then the incendiary balloons started. We began living with patches of burning fields around us. I would drive with my eyes scanning the horizon for smoke clouds—and I would find them almost daily, especially in the hot summer months. I had to teach my then 3- and 5-year-old daughters to stay away from balloons. Party favors had become terror devices.

Twice, our community was evacuated for one to three weeks, when rockets from Hamas became so frequent that it was considered a “mini war.” And then October 7th.*

After evacuating on October 8th to a hotel in Jerusalem, two weeks later my husband and I made the decision that I would take the girls back to the Chicago area to wait out the war. Our displacement turned into almost two years, as Israel fought a war with Hamas, then Hezbollah, and then Iran.

Assuming it was safe enough to return, my girls and I came back to Israel in August 2025. We moved closer to the center, to Moshav Bitzaron. And now, we are living through another war with Iran—more rockets, more disrupted routines, more disrupted lives. But this time, it feels like a luxury to receive a pre-alert that lets us know we may or may not get the real siren in a few minutes for our exact area. And we are grateful to have a full 60 seconds to reach the safe room when the siren sounds.

When we toured our current house, my (traumatized) 10-year-old chose the ma’amad as her bedroom. So we’ve had a lot of family time in there over the past few weeks.

Sadly, we didn’t join my husband’s family in Ashkelon for the Seder this year. Their house doesn’t have a ma’amad, and I wasn’t ready to risk the drive—being on a crowded highway when a warning or siren might go off, or sitting at a loud, crowded dinner table where we might not hear a siren, and might not make it to the ma’amad across the street. So the four of us stayed home and held the Seder just us, three meters from my daughter’s reinforced bedroom.

A friend in the US complained to me that her kids’ spring break didn’t coincide with Pesach, so they couldn’t do the Seder with their extended family either. And it dawned on me: despite all the challenges I’ve faced just to live here—to stay here—the financial struggles, the physical hardships, the terror I’ve endured (which is, frankly, more than my share, and certainly more than my young daughters’ share), it still feels right. It feels like home.

I live in a country that is almost constantly under threat from radical Islamic terror, but we are all in it together. We are all experiencing it, one way or another. We all understand it. And we understand each other. We all get it. And that is why we endure it.

If Israel can dismantle the Iranian regime and restore freedom to the Iranian people—if we can cut off the head of the snake of radical Islam—then we can make Israel, and possibly the entire Middle East, a safer place.

I would rather live in the only Jewish state and miss the Pesach Seder with family because of incoming missiles than miss it because I live in a country that is not.

*To hear our full 10/7/23 story:https://youtu.be/lg–2fdOTF8

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)