You can go home again–if it’s in Israel

Home. Like most of us, it’s something I don’t think about. It’s just there.

Sometimes I am reminded why I should not take that for granted. My father would be among those doing the reminding.

His family came from Tunisia, where Jews had lived for centuries. It was home. Until it wasn’t.

Granted, Tunisia was never a place that would be confused as a Jewish paradise. Over the centuries, there was discrimination, forced conversions, and a requirement that Jews wear yellow (sound familiar?) turbans to distinguish them from Muslims. Jews were also targets of invading armies. And even when there was peace, Jews were, at best, tolerated.

Tunisia was also the only North African country to come under Nazi occupation, though Jews there escaped the death camps. Geography—the Germans did not control the Mediterranean—and Allied military efforts saved many of them.

The war ended. But the hate did not.

There was a rise in post-war nationalism in Tunisia, which made itself known to the 100,000 Jews there living alongside their Muslim neighbors.

By the early 1950s, my father’s family knew their time in Tunisia was up. They followed many of their friends to Israel. Making aliyah was an easy decision. Getting there was not.

For days they traveled across the Mediterranean Sea. My uncle, then just a young boy, got sick. The captain threatened to throw him overboard, prompting my grandmother to hide him inside her clothes until they made land in Israel.

Even in Israel, their ordeal continued. Upon arrival, my family was sprayed with DDT to kill lice and forced to live at first in a transit camp, where they had to make do with a tent and one bed.

But it was enough. Dayenu.

My grandmother told me the family cried tears of joy. They had come home again.

No doubt, Israel threw some steep learning curves at my family. We did not speak Hebrew. We did not look like many already there. The Ashkenazi—Jews from Central and Eastern Europe who had fled persecution before us—dominated Israeli culture and key positions in the government in the formative years of the Jewish State.

We learned to persevere together. We thrived.

Today, Mizrahi Jews—descendants of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa—and Sephardi Jews—who originated from Spain and Portugal, though many found their way to North Africa—account for the majority of Jews in Israel.

It’s why I always get a laugh when the anti-Zionists call Israel a white settler-colonialist state. Have you seen us? We are many things. Being white is not one of them.

I reflected on that recently on The Forgotten Exodus podcast from American Jewish Committee, which focuses on the Jewish diaspora from North Africa and the Middle East after World War II. Some 800,000 Jews once lived in those nations. A tiny fraction remain including about 1,500 in Tunisia.

Those Jews still there live in constant peril. In May 2023, a historic synagogue on the island of Djerba was attacked by terrorists. Then 10 days after the October 7 Hamas massacre, hundreds of people desecrated another synagogue and the shrine to a revered 16th-century rabbi in Al-Hammah. When the marauders were done, they hoisted the Palestinian flag on the roof of the synagogue.

In other words, the conditions that prompted my family to leave more than 70 years ago are no different today. The hate is still there and is all but sanctioned by the government.

One day, I would like to visit, if for nothing else to see where my ancestors lived, walked, and prayed. Now is not that time and I lament that time may never come. But I don’t have to go to Tunis to know I would rather be in Tel Aviv.

I get to live the dream that came true for my grandparents in Israel. I feel safe, protected, and welcomed.

I am home.