99: Your Children in Israel (Aliya pt. 3)

hi this is david lelowski welcome to the robiolovsky show and whether you're watching with our good friends over at or anytime or you're uh wherever you watch or listen to your podcast a lot of people just listen to them we are thrilled to have you along for this exciting journey and this is part three of our aliyah series and we have a sponsor this show is sponsored anonymously in support of the daffiomi class of 2027.5 [Laughter] where there is a crack in everything and that's how the light of torah shines through i'm sure lenny would not object to the change in lyrics thanks for the head up on life so this is uh anonymously from a participant in our online daphyomishira uh he wants to do this anonymously but you know you know i love you and i'm so thrilled uh he comes to my da field he comes to my best shower obviously he watches the podcast a very very special individual and uh thank you so much and uh we are talking about uh moving territory yeah we're uh we have to decide whether or not this is a move for us so i said last week the first thing is the mindset it's got to be something that i have to do it not something that it would be cute to do if that's the case get a good job in america make a lot of money come and stay in a nice hotel you know go diving at the castle have a nice time you want to become an oiler you'll be completely burnt up [Laughter] so this has to be something that you really really want to do you really really want it yeah and uh um if you don't really want it the problems can sometimes be overwhelming so now i'm going to deal with uh one of the biggest things that go into your decision-making process and that involves your children you gotta you gotta be real if there's one thing you have picked i i hope that you've picked up from this podcast is i believe very much you have to be real you have to be real you know slogans don't work you gotta be real what will my children encounter when they moved there and i mentioned last time that americans and kim in general are sort of an underclass here in eritsen it could be like i say if this wave of tens of thousands of americans come there'll be a large enough community bowman zac sal once said that the biggest problem americans ever made is that when they came here they didn't establish their own kahila moroccans are happy to hang around with moroccans you know and uh and persians are happy to hang out with persians they don't feel like they have to give up their identity in order to become part of the israeli experience but for some reason americans think that unless they move out all by themselves with no other english speakers to knit to vote then they haven't really acclimated and uh and the emma says that um that my kids explain this to me i may have told this story one of my kids was having trouble with school and that's a generic enough statement that uh it doesn't narrow it down to anybody [Laughter] because really my kids have difficulties at school and uh remember weinbach got involved to try to help me and he said to me but david the problem is you tried to raise an american family in airshow i said you didn't he says of course not we only speak hebrew in my house my kids don't speak english they're like well other israelis they hate americans they tolerate me but uh that's uh that that's if you if you can make that transition i did not and so of course my kids have a certain identity uh i heard from marie oliveira many years ago that he said he heard from an adam gudl that you should always speak a different language in the house than they speak on the street so your kids know that your house is not the street he says when i was in america we only spoke yiddish in the house when i moved to eritsel we spoke english so since the only language i speak is english that was one of the reasons i moved to itself that was the only way i could speak a different language in the house i could send my kids i could speak hebrew in the house but then my children would end up in special ed because they think there's something wrong with them the way that they speak and i have tried speaking in hebrew at different times i remember one time i said to somebody i said well my duke is not so good he says that's not true it's non-existent past present future feminine masculine first person third person all the same thing within the same sentence you can mix everything together i don't ever heard the languages yeah to go could be because of my dyslexia whatever it is but you know especially when the hebrew goes in the opposite direction yeah so uh it took all of my effort to manage uh to more or less get a familiarity with english that's that's more than enough but we speak english in the house my kids are bilingual they're very comfortable in both languages um my son jacob who has been on my podcast a number of times uh he can do what i do in english but he can also do what i do in hebrew he has the words he has the vocabulary he has the culture he can do it over he started doing his own podcast in hebrew um but uh you know it's hard to hard to catch on you know uh evidently in israel the olaf skinny doesn't carry the same weight that it does in other places and my son always says to me that's good he says because if the israelis knew all the stuff that you said there would be pashta villa up about you every single week condemning you attack you says luckily they have no idea what you're doing what you say so everybody leaves you alone yeah but um um the uh so so he says he tried to raise an american family so my kids explained to me they said abba you don't understand it's not a binary choice it's not either you're an israeli or you're an american there is a sug called an american israeli and an american israeli has aspects of both communities hopefully they're taking the best from each one sometimes they may take the worst from each weapon but there's a synthesis they have an identity that their parents are american they have an identity that their parents are now some kids like i say come from houses like river weinbach where they've managed to excise the uh americanism out of them and they're just straightforward israelis i don't know what happens in the third generation yeah it's a little harder in the third generation to be able to maintain that but in the first generation these kids tend to be bilingual and for the most part my children married other american israelis except for one who married a bona fide um american if any of them married a bonafide israeli i'd have a lot of fun because my wife's sister moved here shortly after we came and one of their children married a israeli who does not speak english and so at family centres i have a tremendous amount of fun at his expense because i know he doesn't know what i'm saying and i you know every now and then i'll throw in a heap of phrase you know i mean like you know it doesn't bone but uh there's uh there's a so that means if you come here you're going to be joining a different kind of a community so right now because there aren't enough americans for us to be able to establish our institutions and that's what bowman said we should have said we are an american community that's living in israel that would have been the best way to do it uh and he he was very upset about it you know when he tried to make migdola amec that's what he was doing he was trying to make an american community in israel and he couldn't do it yeah it was it was too hard but but there are communities that have american schools or english-speaking schools or or schools that will cater more to americans it's changing change but is it is it uh sure sure it is so when i moved here my oldest kid was five yeah so you think like you know it would be it would be easy enough i came with a with a five-year-old a three-year-old uh a two-year-old and a six month and yet my kids experience certain difficulties we weren't israelis i spoke about some of them uh last week but there's going to be a certain a certain tension that exists i have seen it too many times and and this has been probably one of the major reasons why people who make aliyah end up going back because you find kids who are doing well they're in basiaco they're in um yeshiva they're in whatever it is and and they're doing fine and then they come here and they don't speak the language and even if they speak the language they don't know the culture and they're the odd kid out you know i had a daughter who uh who lived here and then she decided to go for a year to a high school in america and she called me up and she says i can't understand it so i come in and all the girls are like oh you're from israel that's so nice where you from who you staying with do you need anything can we help you with this and that and she was like sean because if a new girl comes into our class you know here in in hotel nobody says hello the girls will whisper now part of that is part of the israeli understated mentality that i spoke about but part of it is that americans are very open and we wear our hearts on our sleeves and and we're you know and israelis are not they're much more closed and so uh a kid comes and do they get bullied yeah kids get bullied i'm not gonna lie to you kids get bullied not every teacher is open to helping this kid out one of my children was in a class and uh and the teacher decided she called it the malkat queen of the americans and she took her away from whatever friend she had in the class and moved to the other class because she's a bad influence because what did she do did she do anything no she just she speaks in english to the to her friends devastated the poor kid don't care okay i'm generalizing are there gems out there yes they are but you know how hard it is to find a gem much easier to find coal and so plenty of of teachers are not interested in america it's pretty clear you're not allowed to hit the kids [Laughter] in in 2020. i had a kid and two kids they were beaten up by the rebellion one of my sons got smashed against the his head against the wall another one had his head smashed against the rail and got an eye infection i have neighbors nice people moved here you know sent the kid to a hater and there's this fellow there who has a position and he smacked the kid into a into a thing he he he lost a tooth that was like so he started calling up the other parents saying that he can't have this guy here so he got an anonymous call from somebody in the school who said listen we're not going to fire him but you keep this up and your kid will be thrown out and we'll never go to another school i said what'd you do he says we we just kept quiet it's unbelievable i mean what i'm going to tell you these things don't happen they do happen now again i don't know what the educational system is like in america these days it could be that repair also beat the kids it could be that teachers are also nasty to the girls could be i don't know but here somebody told me they were in their building walking through the staircase and these two teachers are sitting here talking about the different girls by name she says this this and that she's like this she's like that you know and they have all kinds of terrible things to say because as i mentioned last week everything here works by proteccia robert pelleg who is the uh rov of charity hospital told me that when he was starting a high school he was hired to start a high school many years ago so he only wanted teachers with some level of experience for high school this girl called up she was a young girl she wanted a job teaching so uh so he says do you have any experience and she said my grandfather was so-and-so this is very nice but we only want teachers with experience it says later that day i got a call from the grandfather and he said to me you're going to hire my granddaughter or it's going to be very bad for your school i said what'd you do to hire the grandfather we're the principal of the injury school i guess she got her job through protection too but at one point she said to my wife what you're not supposed to say she said the quiet part out loud she says look it was a problem with one of the teachers says look there's only so much i can do because the teachers know they don't have to listen to me because they all get their jobs to protect you and there's nothing i can do about it so that's a problem there's a problem so if you're thinking of coming and you have children who are above the you know who are already toilet trained or three years old either one i don't really care which one i'm not here to get involved in your personal business but you know your kids are already over three obviously the younger you come better it is you have to look into what your educational options are and do not move unless you first come and see what's going on and understand what your educational objectives are and barak hashem they have changed dramatically in the past 32 years when i made aliyah and there are schools because since there are so many americans who have moved here there are schools that are designed to accommodate a limb and accommodate uh new new people moving here but you have to don't don't leave it the chance don't leave it a chance there is a very high percentage i don't have the numbers uh jonathan rosenblum wrote a column about this once uh i think he has the statistics of people who make aliyah and their kids were doing great in their country of origin they were happy in school they had friends and they suddenly moved here and they go off to there because there's only so much rejection a person can handle not me i can handle an endless amount of rejection [Laughter] i met a psychologist once i said i think i have an inferiority complex he says no you're inferior but uh you know there's uh uh there's only so much that the average kid can handle so make sure before you come in that's what people ask me i have kids and like i said i said this two weeks ago there were bowmen or earlywick somebody quoted to me i didn't hear it from them directly would tell people that they should not move here you should not move here if you have kids uh some teenagers or preteens whatever the age was and i said it depends i taught in a seminary where girls were asking about moving to israel you know and making aliyah and i would discuss the pros and cons with them and they said oh because there's this other rabbi who's teaching here who said no girls no american girls removed and i said how can i tell that to somebody let me tell that to somebody and i would or from my own perspective and a few years later we i happen to meet this teacher and he says uh i hear you tell girls that they should make aliyah i said depends on the girl i don't think any girl should make aliyah because this problem that problem this probably i said i understand but some people they're not going to be shalem unless they're in eric's shell does it carry a certain risk factor yes it does and i have met families who moved here and they were gung-ho and as they watched their children becoming damaged they picked themselves up and went back so the first consideration if you have children is what are your educational options that's number one that's the first thing you have to work on the second thing you have to work on is can i make a living there was a young man who uh he said to me he was learning i mean well it's a stay in learning i'm getting married i spoke to a bunch of people they all told me you have to be talking you have to be talk he says but every one of those people who told me you have to have me talking have an outside income from something else nobody's just sitting and learning getting the you know a little bit of money they give you from the government and when they're a little bit of the coil they will have money from someplace else so i've met nobody who just gives you the speech about me talking who actually is living on nothing i i used to have girls from the very usual eye who used to come over and uh when they get engaged they'd sometimes bring their husband over for a shot this meal and i did what my father-in-law did when i came to meet him and he said how do you intend on supporting this young lady so i i asked this to the i said that's great did you make that arrangement over at the macaulay and said that when the bill comes due at the end of the month they should send it to and god would get flustered they could pop up my repair and tell me i said oh you were babe are going to pay the bills at the end of the month nobody just you expect the month to fall out your front door i mean you're a nice guy i don't know if you're excited on that level and in all the years i was doing this only one time i said so how you gonna live and he says i get this much from yeshiva i don't know this i took over the dry cleaning business in the yeshiva you know and i get a percentage from that i'm gonna tutor a kid you know and uh my wife's going this is how we're gonna do it i was so impressed because when it comes to prognosis so if you have no safety net there was an old joke when i came here in 1969 they were already telling this joke how do you get a million dollars in israel come with two million things are expensive here it's remarkable how expensive it is i went to america i went to a supermarket i did a whole shopping it's a fraction of what it costs here a fraction things are expensive i had a two family house and far rockaway with a basement and a deck and a yard and i sold that and added on money to buy myself a three bedroom apartment yeah so you got to be real now you have to have a certain amount everybody has that we talked about that's yeah uh there's no way to uh predict everything no matter how much money you've saved up nobody can have enough money if fast for showing there's a catastrophic illness we have to take a medicine that's a thousand dollars a pill you know it'll devastate you devastate you so everybody has to have a certain amount of talking but um but how am i gonna make a living and i'm talking about people who have nice jobs in america and they come here and sometimes they can transfer it over and sometimes they can't so you have the phenomena that is not uh uncommon among people who come from america and that is that the husband commutes he goes to america he works and then he comes back whereas one of these wives once said we are showing bias shalom by us i met some of these people perpetual jet lag yeah now not every family does that well without a father some families do better with i remember hearing this comic once he says uh i left my room i was just trying to walk across the living room without making eye contact with everybody and i noticed my kids sticking a fork into the light socket you know i'd be like i felt like i needed to intervene there was this uh woman who wrote a song called the mom's song everything that a mom says you know in the course of a day and she said it to uh william told overture right um uh you know get up now get up now get out of bed uh brush your teeth wash your sleepy head and even hear a word i said get him out get him out of bed um [Music] stop crying i'll give you something real to cry about oh yeah and it goes on like this all these things so uh so afterwards she said people said why don't you write the dance song you wrote the mom song he says okay okay there's some you know please tell a story i'm sure it's apocryphal but uh you know this this father was in kayla he would learn monash from morning tonight yeah and uh when he he left the kids weren't up yet and when he came home the kids were the kids already got to school whatever was that when he came home the kids were already in bed yet so anytime you saw them with shops so one time one of the kids was mistaken he gave him a punch and the kid goes running over to his mother because emma that man who comes here every shop has just hit me so okay but it's so hard to have to have your business in america i knew a fellow who was a doctor that's what he would do he would travel he had he had a practice i it's a little a little tricky to do luckily he was an anesthesiologist you don't have to develop much of a relationship with your patients in fact less the better i remember as i was being wheeled into my surgery the anesthesiologist came over to introduce himself he goes over abralovsky because i listened to all you sure i said do i put you to sleep he says no i said don't return the favor make sure i'm out [Laughter] but uh you know so he goes he works i know people who are lawyers i know people are accountants i know people who are have businesses they go back and forth flying a lot one fellow i know his leg used to swell up from being on the plane so much he was in perpetual jet lag i asked uh late kellerman once he used to fly back and forth to these groups and i said uh i said how do you deal with the jelly he says i don't i always stay you know in jet lag like the whole time i don't even try [Laughter] i have no circadian rhythm it's a very rough lifestyle trust me i know because i don't even trout and i don't travel at all but when i used to travel sometimes i would go every single month and um and uh it's it's hard you know i've said to me once can you not make so many trips i said sure can you get the kids to stop spending so much money she says i'll see you when you get back so uh you know what are you gonna do i'm limited in this country because i don't speak hebrew and surprisingly a lot of people in this country do so i'm left to teaching americans and and the american yeshivas and seminaries don't pay their teachers a lot of money you can look into it if you like so there was this rebbe who was a very popular rebbe in one of these two-year yeshivas for americans and he did what many people have done over the years he took out a pencil out of paper and he says x number of students paying x number of dollars equals oh my gosh these people are making a fortune and they're paying me nothing so i went into the office and he asked for a race and they said to him you're a very good remy you're very effective we would be very sad to lose you but if you quit we can find a better rebbe and pay him less money so the rebbe said thank you very much and went back to the basement because one thing there is no shortage of here are rabbis american rabbis there are a lot of them and there aren't that many positions and uh if i wasn't such a coward i would have opened my own yeshiva because it's yeshiva that i really want to open but uh fundraising is terrifying terrifying i've worked for institutions where i was months and months behind on my salary i'd say to the rest of shiva you know i can't go on like this and he would pull out a lottery ticket and say this tuesday i'm going to pay you all of your back salary with a bonus and i said that's not called a sound fiscal approach to uh paying your rebation [Laughter] but uh you know it's uh it's a challenge government bureaucracy here is legendary legendary there was a dry bones as better it's a lot better it was a dry bones cartoon um this guy was working for the uh the nut and um they said they announced we're gonna have a work slow down god thanks and he says i can't work any slower without coming to a complete stop there's a certain mindset that that you have to i think i told the story i may have told the story recently i went to uh to open a bank account now when you open a bank account in america you know so you come and you say i want to open a bank account everyone's like yeah sure come here you know fine hi i'm mrs wilson you know these forms fine um you want to pick out your checks would you like one with mountain scenes seascapes you know what would you like would you like your initial on it what number would you like to check to start at now let's pick out your check holder do you want leather do you want the western look do you want elephant hide i went for the elephant height of course you know yeah and you oh and by the way here's a toaster i went to open up an account and um i say uh where do i go you go over there so there's a guy there's nobody online he's reading the paper drinking coffee smoking a cigarette under the no smoking sign and i stand by his desk and he goes my throat said i said i need to sell it i'm going to open the cam he says uh lopo okay so i go when the window window person person upstairs downstairs and finally it turns out it is his job he just didn't feel like forget about a toaster so i get back online there are three people there and there are businesses and institutions less and less where they close between one and four in the afternoon yeah because you have to go home and have a schnitzel and take a nap and that's like yeah yeah certain certain mentality anyway back online there were two people in front of me and he looks up and goes my turn i said he said it's all right i can't do it now come back me and i almost did being an american and then i realized i'm being taken advantage of and so i put on that face that i used to use at junior ncsy shabbatonim when people were misbehaving and i said i never said of turkish bone and he said to me in a bank so two years later or whatever it was i wanted to open one of my local branch same thing the same exact thing i go to the woman who's supposed to be in charge she says uh no i don't do it and so i said uh i went to two and three other people they don't know it's her job she says uh yom shi she have shot i can't do it on friday so okay i had been here for already for two years and i had to learn how things work and i held up my check in the middle of the bank and i said me sure yes okay okay come over here i have to beg you to take my money please please take my money how did you get a stat bank statement 18 pages a tiny little writing in formulas frankel who is the head of the bank of israel said there's something wrong when i'm the head of the bank of israel and i can't read my bank statement i don't understand what it's saying so you have to know right um how am i going to take care of my kids education and how am i going to make a living now my go-to response is speak to nefer's benefit they're officially in charge now of aliyah and there are many knowledgeable and helpful people there i know some of them and they'll work you through if you're in this profession if you're in that profession what you need for this what you need for that you know there are certain people who actually after the year of yeshiva in seminary have a plan and so they go into a uh and they go into a position uh that they know is going to do well so um one of my children is very artistic all my children are talented in many different ways but this one happens to be into art and she wanted to become an art therapist i thought wow it's great you know there's a glut of our therapists they can't get jobs because their people are established there are no more jobs no openings so you have all these girls every single year graduating as our therapist they can't get a job so does anybody anticipate that someone said to me so what business makes money here there's no question about it i'm speaking from experience and being here for 32 years spongebob wash floors you'll make a fortune that's where the real money is and people will pay you anything my doctor right what's put up on his door when you give you a card it's for a rewind it's for three months yeah he says and people come doing those three months a couple of times two or three times he says on each visit i make 17 shekels each each person who comes and now they changed one of the other rules and that is only the doctors can make the prescription it used to be that the secretaries could print out the prescriptions and he just had to stamp it not anymore he has to type everything into the computers do everything and print it out and yeah there you go uh two wonderful uh pediatricians here in harnauf um and uh they they both retired but one went to harvard medical school and the other one i went to einstein medical school they were brotherhood was wonderful wonderful people and very good anyway this friend of mine his kid was sick but does that he he went to him um something like 12 times that month he says if you're in america you know how much this would have cost you this is 17 shekels you've been here hurting couple of times he says what do you want from me you're a zionist you decide to move here you're tough luck you should have stayed in america you'd make a lot of money gosh that's why they have a big problem here that people go to the medical schools and then they they move to a country where they can make more money socialized medicine doctors don't make as much as you might think 17 shekels of visit so um uh so those are the two considerations i spoke last week the first thing you need is the mindset you have to know for sure what you want and the second thing is you have to make sure that you can accommodate for your children and make sure that you have a way of making a living there are no guarantees you could lose your job there could be a virus that comes into the world and everybody has to close down and they can't work anything can happen yeah i have a daughter she's been looking for the profession where she can make a good living and she she wanted to do this she looked into that you know turns out what her information is and this is not authoritative i'm sharing you what she shared with me um cyber security and come like you know you have to be the hacker and then you try to hack into different places and do all kinds of nifty stuff like that you know and close down the iranian you know nuclear facility and all kinds of cool stuff like that stop them from closing down our report which they did at one point i don't know i don't know if that works or not but uh but this is what she decides she's gonna go into it but you have to look into it i can't i can't tell you i'm in a very specialized field yeah i i used to anyway travel around and tell funny torah speeches that's a very small niche not too many people have that niche so um uh you know so uh so i don't know how many openings there are in that in that particular line of work yeah um but uh but those are the two considerations you need and uh we will deal with other issues that you have to the next time so that's it for now uh if you want to find out more about the show you can go to rubyalovsky.com my website you can send me an email you can comment on the episode you could sponsor an episode and uh that's it for this week i'm devin dolonowski and this is the rabiolovsky show