In memory of my mother who made aliyah at the age of 99

On September 11, 2001, en route for a visit to Israel, my mother was in mid-air somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when Islamic suicide terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The United States no longer was the country she knew.

She was 94 at the time. Less than five years later, she left Baltimore for the last time to become an Israeli citizen, at the age of 99, never to return to the American Dream where she was raised by Lithuanian and Russian immigrants who found fortune in the “New Promised Land.”

The re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 changed the lives of almost every Diaspora Jew, especially for those like my parents who at that time had little attachment to Judaism except for living in a neighborhood populated only by Jews, even if only in name. Israel gave them a new symbol of Jewish identity for which they could be proud without offending Gentiles.

My parents, who later in life walked a long path towards being observant of Jewish law, became typical Zionist Americans, with “Zionist” as an adjective and “Americans” a noun. Nearly every American Jew saw the re-establishment of the Jewish national home, after nearly 2,000 years, as a country for other Jews, mainly refugees, the poor and the downtrodden. Zionism meant buying Israeli Bonds on Yom Kippur.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion visited Baltimore in 1951 to talk with rags-to-riches oil millionaire Jacob Blaustein and told him he expected 5,000 Jews to make Aliyah every month from the United States. Blaustein replied, “Mr. Ben-Gurion, America is my home.”

America was a haven, and the house in Baltimore was my mother’s inner sanctum.

She carried with her the pride of America the Beautiful, the country that once was the idol of almost the entire world that envied America’s peace, prosperity and its powerful defense of good against evil in an era when there was a clear distinction between the two.

In the attic, stacks of post-World War II Life and Saturday Evening Post magazines, with cover pictures drawn by Norman Rockwell, told the story of the image of a perfect America, one of purity, wholesome families, happiness and tradition.

Segregation, poverty and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant neighborhoods, where Jews were not allowed, simply were ignored. Everything was in order. The only thing lacking was that nothing was lacking.

The downstairs den had been home to the radio in the 1940s, entertaining the family with the comedy show Fibber McGee and Molly, the scary crime drama The Shadow, and Amos and Andy, the epitome of racism.  Our first television, a 21-inch round screen Zenith, brought us, in black and white, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, news from Walter Winchell, corny jokes from Groucho Marx and nightly test patterns.

After my father died in 1999, my mother, whom I do not remember ever being sick even for one day, steadfastly maintained the house. She shlepped herself up and down the stairs until she finally surrendered to sleeping in the den.

Even thinking of moving to Israel would erode the idea of nourishing the changing present with images of the distant past in the face of an uncertain future. Memories and the comfort of routine and familiar surroundings were too powerful to convince her to move to Israel and be near to two of her three children, and, at the time, seven of her 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Her standard reply was, “The only way you are going to get me out of my house is on a stretcher.”

When my mother broke her hip somewhere around the age of 94, she was back on her feet and behind the steering wheel after one month.

On December 30, 2005, one day before her 99^th birthday, she fell in the kitchen, broke her other hip and left her house for the last time, on a stretcher.

From that day, just as Israel is the Land of Miracles, the Divine hand escorted her to aliyah over an obstacle course spiked with a ridiculously short timetable, an illegal airline ticket, an expired passport and a last-minute denial of reality.

My mother proved that the medical experts were wrong after they said she never would walk again. She surprised them by recuperating faster than expected and eventually leaving the rehabilitation home with a walker instead of a wheelchair. Within a month, they served notice that they could not justify her remaining there and that she had to leave by February 20, which was three weeks away.

The problem was to where. My mother, even with a walker, could not function without a caretaker, which meant bringing an unknown person into the house that required wholesale renovations of the first floor that could not possibly be completed in less than several weeks.

The alternative of moving into an assisted living home was even worse. It would mean not only her leaving her house but also having to be with strangers and without the presence of my older brother, z”l, who had lived in the house with her for several years after separating from his wife.

The only other choice was Israel, which she accepted, on condition that arrangements be made for removing my father’s grave in Baltimore for reburial in Israel.

That was the easy part. Jewish law does not allow for re-burial unless interment is made with the stated intention, as we did according to my parents’ wishes, that they eventually would be buried in Israel.

The hard part was meeting the three-week deadline. It meant clearing out tons of stuff from the attic, basement and garage, choosing what items should be sent to Israel in a lift, selling the house and my returning to Israel and coming back with my wife, who is a nurse and was needed to accompany my mother to Israel.

While my sister living in Israel looked for a house to rent for my mother, who eventually moved into her home, my brother and I arranged for a lift and began the task of deciding what furniture would make my mother feel more at home in Israel and what would be left behind.

We painfully had to part with the huge mahogany dining room table that she and my father loved but for which there was no room in an average Israeli home. There was no time to try to sell on eBay magazines from the 1930s and what were known as 33-rpm – revolutions per minute – records, which spun on the turntable where one could hear songs by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Disney’s Little Toot sailor tunes for children.

We took cartons full of clothes to the Hadassah Thrift Store, which to my chagrin almost immediately sold my mother’s 50-year-old anniversary wedding dress that I gave away without permission.

A lawyer friend took care of selling the house, which was highly desirable because of its size and location in a neighborhood which over several decades changed from being totally non-observant Jewish to “black-hat” due to the demand from Orthodox families with many children.

Everything was going smoothly until I discovered, two weeks before the flight to Israel, that my mother’s passport had expired and that even if we applied for an expedited renewal, it would not arrive in time.

At this point, the house had been sold and was virtually empty, the lift was on its way to Israel and my mother had to leave the rehabilitation home on February 20, two days before the flight. I desperately called the office of my mother’s district Congressman Benjamin Cardin, who now is a senator, and pleaded to his secretary for help.

She emailed me within an hour and said a new passport would be ready to be picked up the next day at the Immigration Office in Washington, an hour’s drive.

We were back on schedule, and I comfortably flew back to Israel to return with my wife on Saturday night, February 19, two days before the return flight to Israel with my mother.

My British-born wife entered the United States on a British passport rather than having to apply for a visa. When we arrived at JFK airport on the way to Baltimore, immigration officials pulled her aside and ordered her into an interrogation room, along with a couple of dozen undesirable Asians.

Her passport had not expired, but it did not have a barcode as required by post-9/11 regulations. I felt like I was among the People of Israel at the biblical Red Sea, with no way back and no way to move forward.

I frantically explained to officials that if she could not enter the country, my handicapped mother would be homeless. They assured me that she would not be ordered back to Israel.

We got off with a $50 fine, but the low-price Israir airline, which later was sold at a distressed price, was fined $3,000 for having allowed her on the plane.

Thank God we did not travel on El Al, with whom my parents always flew, because they use scanning machines that would have detected the passport as being invalid, and the entire itinerary, including the aliyah flight two days later, would have been scuttled.

After arriving in Baltimore, all that was left was to honor my mother’s request to sleep one night in her house, even if it was not hers anymore.

We brought her home on Monday, when she had to leave the rehabilitation facility. She said goodbye to the bare floors and slept on the couch that still was in the den, but we were not prepared for her last theatrical act of defiance the following day when we started to leave the house for the airport.

My brother was behind the wheel in the driveway, waiting for my mother, my wife and myself. We had four hours before takeoff at the airport, a drive of only 30 minutes.

My wife escorted my mother to the back door, leaving behind the kitchen where she spent so much of her life cooking for our family and reading the newspaper, especially the obituary notices. She reached the porch, stood up while holding on to her walker, and then grabbed  the doorposts, declaring “I am not leaving this house.”

My wife looked at me with anguish and said, “What can I do? I can’t take her by force.” We were frozen in time while the clock kept ticking.

God’s guiding hand sent a friend who was instrumental in helping sell the house. He drove up the driveway, got out of his car and rushed to my mother while unfurling a flag of Jerusalem. The timing was a miracle.

His presence thawed time and melted away my mother’s fears. She smiled and stood with my wife at the back door for a photo before we walked to the car.

On the airplane, the stewardesses were thrilled to have a 99-year-old woman making aliyah. They gave her and my wife spare seats in Business Class.

In Israel, my mother lived with a foreign caretaker in my sister’s house, but it soon became clear that she needed to feel more independent. She agreed to pay for building a separate living unit attached to our home where my wife and I live.

Within nine weeks, record time for Israeli builders, our neighbor-contractor completed a new two-room unit, with a den and kitchen suited for a handicapped person and a caretaker.

We invited our small community to join us for the ceremony of affixing a mezuzah on the front doorposts when my mother would arrive the following day. However, the contractor notified us that there was a problem with one of the pipes and that we would have to delay my mother’s arrival by one day.

She had been visiting us every other Shabbat and already saw the house reaching completion. When I phoned my mother to tell her of the delay, she accepted it as part of life.

That same night, she suffered enormous stomach pains and was rushed to the hospital in Kfar Saba. I visited her the next morning, assuming she would be released. I spoke to her in her hospital room and phoned my brother so they could talk. As I was holding her hand, I noticed it was very cold.

A doctor and nurse entered the room for a routine check and immediately chased me out of the room while a medical crew rushed in.

She had died, and several hours later our community came to the funeral instead of the simcha of affixing the mezuzah. She was buried next to the grave of my father who had been re-buried several weeks before.

We are grateful she had the privilege of living in the Land of Israel, with her daughter and close to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My mother frequently repeated the old Yiddish expression:

Man proposes. God disposes.

In memory of Bryna bat Avraham Mordechai and Chanah Miriam