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ALIYAH DIARIES

On Moving to Israel

Odelia Glausiusz

t’s strange how the Hebrew lan- Sometimes it’s hard. I get really homesick say affectionately in supermarkets. In
guage can give you an uncanny and wish I could teleport my family and England, if you casually called people
insight into the people who live friends here with me. I speak to them all “my life,” “my love” or “my soul,” they’d
I here in Israel. I learned a new the time, but it’s the everyday moments probably think you were high.
expression in ulpan this morning. To say, “I I miss – watching my younger brothers
want to have a private conversation,” you messing around in the kitchen, chatting When I was in seminary in 2019, the news
say you want to have a conversation “b’ar- to my mum in the car, and laughing at one broke that Zechariah Baumel’s body had
bah einayim” – literally, “with four eyes.” of my dad’s unique one-liners. I miss the been found. Zechariah was a tank com-
It’s a weird phrase, conjuring a surreal comforting ease of having my best friends mander who went missing in the 1982
image of two sets of disembodied eyes all living around the corner from me. At Battle of Sultan Yacoub in Lebanon, at the
talking to one another. It implies that a the same time, I can’t fully express myself age of 21. Intelligence officers searched
private conversation means speaking to in Hebrew. The bureaucracy is baffling. for his body for nearly 37 years, and now,
someone with your eyes as well as your And of course, people stream onto the finally, he was returning home. I went to
words. “Four eyes,” or two sets of inter- train before letting you get off (in London his levaya on Har Herzl, and was struck
locking eyes, implies that two minds are you’d get death stares for doing that!). by the sheer number of people there. I’m
interacting, rather than just two voices not sure that there’s another country
colliding. It lends a sense of gravity to the But if life can be harder here, it is also whose military is prepared to go to such
conversation. It suggests that there is an richer. There is an underlying current lengths for its fallen soldiers. I’m not sure
art to two people talking. And that art is of connection that courses through the there’s another country where thousands
connecting to the person in front of you, daily rhythm of life, a depth that shines of people feel a strong enough connection
speaking to them with your eyes as well through those quirky Hebrew phrases to a stranger who died close to 40 years
as with your mouth. like “b’arbah einayim.” It has a lively ago to make the journey to honor that
warmth that twinkles through everyday strangers’ memory. But that’s the thing –
I moved to Israel from London this past slang as well. “Chayim sheli, ahavah sheli,” the people who went to Zechariah’s levaya
November. I can’t lie and say that I’ve felt young Israelis squeal upon seeing their didn’t see him as a stranger. They saw
like I’m “living the dream” every day. friends. “Todah, neshama sheli,” old ladies him as a person, a person who sacrificed

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