"Eretz Israel, my beloved," Papa often says. Usually, the remark comes as he's gazing out at the endless countryside plains. You can see the love in his soulful blue eyes. And appreciation as he bows his head to the land.
It was 1912 when Papa first set foot in Eretz Israel, or the territory of Palestine as it was known then. He was a fifteen-year-old boy who fled Russia after waves of pogroms with too many memories of lost and hurt family members. He arrived after a long, lonely trek, walking many terrains through the warm summer nights. When he finally crossed into the land of rugged hills and verdant valleys that spoke of ancient times, of prophets and kings who once walked the paths, he fell to his knees and kissed the ground. "This is home," he wrote that day.
By the end of the week, he almost changed his mind. Home was now a room in a small house at his Uncle Lev's in Tel Aviv, which was then just a nascent bloom on the Mediterranean's age-old coast, founded only a few years prior in 1909 by a collective