Dollars, Overdrafts, and Depression-Era Meals: Our First Year of Aliyah

A lot of Facebook posts and forums for aliyah circle around one question. Will I have enough money to live in Israel? - And rightly so.

My POV is the emotional side of making aliyah, especially for preteens and teenagers who make aliyah with their parents during one of the most emotionally tumultuous seasons of life - and that's before getting uprooted from your life and moving across the world and learning another language. Finances and emotions are certainly intertwined. Looking back, I can say that the lifestyle change that was forced on me - was a huge part of the angst I dealt with as a 12 year old olah chadashah.

Counting Shekels in a Strange Land

By American standards in the 1980s, we were middle to lower middle class, financially. My dad was offered a job in Jerusalem, and that's what put my parents' aliyah dream in motion. He always said he wouldn't have moved the family here without securing a job first.

Still, I can't imagine how his Jerusalem salary compared to their US income. With 5 kids in tow, and my mom not working for the first couple of years, they really must have been livin' on a prayer.

From my 12 year old POV, making aliyah was like a funeral. My life, buried in ashes. RIP. Dripping with angst.

Frugality Feels like a life sentence

I went from packed lunches which included every good thing a kid in the 80s could want to really weird and awful sandwiches, made by mom with whatever she could find at the supermarket, aka in Israel, the "super".

One day, I think it was a Saturday, when everyone was home, my mom made cucumber sandwiches for lunch. My dad proudly declared that this is what Grandma ate during the Great Depression, with cucumbers plucked from their backyard garden. Seriously?

The Great Depression plucked at my core. "We're doomed," I thought. We're back in the Great Depression, and my dad is happy about it. But why? Why would anyone choose that? Never having eaten cucumbers in my past life, I refused to eat the sandwiches, ran to my room, and slammed the door shut.

My parents did not lack the typical ideological and spiritual beliefs of olim that I didn't necessarily negate. I just didn't feel like they understood what I was giving up for their beliefs. At the same time, letters were coming in (thankfully) from my friends back home. Life was moving on. Everyone was having so much fun, without me.

Stovetop Survival: The Settlement Cookbook Years

On our way to Israel, we stopped in NYC for a few days. At Bloomingdale's, I picked up a really cool jeans jacket, which I later covered in pins and badges from the shops on Ben Yehuda. My dad found a cookbook he thought I might like and got it for me too.

That first year, the boredom ate away at my soul. Life in Israel was agonizingly boring. While Olim today can doomscroll their pain away, I didn't have that option yet. I had the Voice of Peace on the radio, this cookbook, and not a lot more. I begged my friends to send me magazines in the mail, which they did - and probably saved my life. I think the cookbook from Bloomingdales was called The Settlement Cookbook. I read it from front to back.

Our rented flat in Jerusalem was supposed to have an oven. The first time we used it, nothing happened. It was broken, and there wasn't a lot we could do about it. For the first year, everything we ate was cooked on the stovetop. I yearned for a microwave, just to bake 1 potato.

So I cooked from scratch, step by step from the Settlement Cook Book. Mostly fried food. Funnel cakes, cornbread, anything they made on the homesteads of America 100 years ago, was tried and tested on the stovetop of our rented flat on the outskirts of Jerusalem, just to pass the time and fill my stomach with food made from the cheapest, most basic ingredients we could get in Israeli supermarkets.

The Burden of the Eldest: Holding Down the Fort

Back then, everything was paid in cash. We were always asking Mom for some, and I could tell it was tight. She wasn't working. Just Dad.

My sister was in kindergarten when we made aliyah. It was surrounded by sand the neighborhood cats used as a giant litterbox, and she screamed every morning when I dropped her off on my way to ulpan. It wasn't long before she got sick and was hospitalized. Mom stayed with her in the hospital for several weeks while she recovered.

I was livid. Since when do we spend weeks in the hospital? Why is my 5 year old sister so sick?

Someone had to take care of the baby, who was about 1½. There was no grandma down the street and no budget for help, so I was the help. I often stayed home from school to watch the baby. I thought anything is better than Israeli school, even if diapers are involved. Dad was busy at work, and we didn't know a lot of people here.

Refusal to live in a 4th-floor Box

When Mom came home from the hospital, she immediately got busy going out with the realtor, looking for a permanent home for us in Jerusalem. My dad was sure we'd live in a small apartment, like everyone in Jerusalem does.

My mom, with 2 boys, and 3 girls, refused to give up on a house with a yard. She couldn't imagine living in a cramped apartment four flights up, in a crowded neighborhood of people we didn't have a lot in common with.

That first year, she just didn't have the time to work outside the home. They must have had some savings that sustained us, barely.

Vocabulary for Financial Panic in Israel

I'd never heard the word meenus, overdraft, before. But I started to hear it at home. The bank would call. My parents would go to meetings at the bank.

By then, my mom was running a business the realtor found for her, and my dad started his own business in the same office space. We always got receipts for everything. When you're running a business in Israel, everything is a deduction.

When it came time to pay for school, my mom always asked for a discount. We are olim chadashim with 5 kids. It seemed to work more often than not.

I learned another word too: tashlumim. Payments could be split up. How many tashlumim will you take? As many as you want, she was often told.

An Era Before Malls, Magazines, and Online Shopping

Shopping? The mall? What mall? There were no malls back then. I used to love going to the mall, and coming back with random tops, hair things, make up and candy. That just wasn't an option here. I didn't have money to shop, but also, they just didn't have that kind of shopping here. There wasn't a lot to buy in the 80s and 90s, in Israel not like today. There were only a couple of malls in the country, and the experience wasn't comparable.

When we made aliyah, we were thrown into a very simple, frugal way of life. The fridge wasn't always full. Going out to eat meant falafel or a slice of pizza. Sushi and matcha wouldn't arrive for a few more decades. We didn't have a car for a while, and even bus money was tight.

The Cost of Silence: Buying Books for a Language I Couldn't Read

Before the first day of school on September 1st, families had to go to bookstores to buy textbooks for the school year. These cost hundreds of shekels each year. Now multiply that by 5 kids.

Parents would try to sell the used books back to the store for credit, but it was still an expense of thousands of shekels every school year. Not for school supplies, which weren't really a thing (just basic pencils and notebooks), but for the books themselves.

If my mom had known that for the first few years I had no idea what was going on in school, let alone understanding a single line in those books she stood in line for and spent all the money on, she could have saved a lot. I'm pretty sure my brothers faced the same thing, at their schools. I mean, c'mon, who are they kidding. Hebrew textbooks were lost on us. If I could go back in time, I'm sure she would have appreciated the break. Now I feel sorry for not speaking up. I guess I thought she knew.

Today, things have changed. kids get their books from school, like a normal country, and just send a deposit check that isn't cashed unless the book isn't returned at the end of the year.

The Long Game of Belonging

So, will you have enough money to live in Israel? Here's my honest answer. Living in Israel is hard, in every way imaginable. Obviously there is money here. Not everyone has it, and plenty of olim families, mine included, didn't arrive with much of it.

Those first years, and even decades, were a game of survival. Empty refrigerator, appliances breaking down, angry phone calls from the bank, asking for discounts from everyone, splitting everything into tashlumim.

None of this means you shouldn't make aliyah unless you're wealthy. My parents certainly weren't, and somehow they built businesses, raised a bunch of kids, bought the house with the yard my mother insisted on, and made a life here.

But if you're bringing older children with you, acknowledge their losses. Have some money talks, face to face. You don't need to frighten them or hand them adult financial worries. Just let them know that their standard of living may change, and that losing familiar comforts can genuinely feel like one more loss on top of everything else they're already leaving behind.

You may know that the cucumber sandwiches are temporary, and that you’re doing a mitzvah by eating them in Eretz Yisrael. Your 12-year-old may be no less spiritual, but feel something entirely different. What you meant as reassurance, gratitude, or perspective can sound an awful lot like a guilt trip to an adolescent who's still counting their losses from the life left behind.

Once I discovered brie in the grocery aisle, and baguettes in the bakery aisle, I actually fell in love with cucumber and brie on baguette sandwiches, and looked forward to them during the long school days. Before long, you couldn't pay me to eat the cr@p lunches I missed so much in the beginning. Cucumbers are actually one of the main staples of my household today, but I never forget the path it took to get me here.

If your family is somewhere in its own cucumber-sandwich year, the Israel Dream Journal is a place to talk about it together, in pictures and in words, before the losses go quiet.