Page 83 - Hey-book-2011-activities-RE4-fpage_Neat_HTML5

078

Segal was born in England in 1946, but was honorably dubbed „Oleh

Chadsh‟ when he was only 1 year old. He spent his childhood in the Tel-

Aviv – Ramat-Gan area. The family is light to moderate traditional, “A

normal household‟s way of thinking, a secular high-school and then the

army”. After giving much thought to his professional future, he decided

to go to England to study industrial engineering. Segal arrived at a

college at which he was the only Israeli. This was just after the six day

war, and the anti-Israeli atmosphere began to spread out across the

academic institutions. Segal was involved with all kinds of Israeli and

Jewish establishments and was a pro-Israel activist, but his strongest

motivation was the desire to gather experiences. He spent a year in the

U.S., hitch-hiked for more than 6,000 miles, in large part with hippies. “I
talked to them a lot, rode with them and slept with them. From my little

perspective, I got the impression that they‟re looking for real things”.
On the other hand, Segal explains, the famous hippy slogan speaking for

love didn‟t bring about a life of real love, but a life in communes, which
according to him causes “all the problems, troubles and complications

that one can think of”.

At some point Segal decided that he had traveled a lot, and that his

general direction would be home, to Israel. The story is longer, says

Segal, but when they returned to Israel they began searching for the

answers in Judaism. “We were in Kefar Chabad and in Bney Brak, taking

lessons. It was very hard, and took years…”

The booklet Nava and Yonatan Segal hand out to the people arriving at

their workshops, opens with a quote from a book by the Lubavitcher

Rebbe, whose portrait decorates the living room. Segal regards the Rebbe

as a very special leader, not just for being a great Torah scholar, but due

to his strength, his wisdom, his love for all men and his attitude of

equality towards women. “Only in recent years was I really exposed to

the texts he had written people, where he addresses the issue of love and

how to attain true intimacy between couples. This Rabbi goes into the
RE 4 All rights reserved to Ulpan-Or (www.ulpanor.com) Do Not Copy!
Jerusalem: 02-561-1132 Tel Aviv: 03-566-1493 New York 1-646-393-4709