Can love (of Israel) conquer all?

• Author: BARBARA SOFER
• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

My pleasure is increased because the supplier of the festive candy bags is a grandson of a family that made me feel at home in Israel.

I was a student from the University of Pennsylvania on my junior year abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In ulpan, educational researchers named Bracha and Ptachia recruited me as a volunteer to explore the impact on first graders who had student tutors in their homes. The project was aimed at the pre-gentrified Nahlaot neighborhood near Jerusalem's Mahaneh Yehuda. Many residents operated fruit and vegetable stands. Seeking my assigned family, I peeked my head into a sukkah on Lod Street and asked where #9 was.

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"They're not home," the mom answered.

She shrugged when I insisted on seeing for myself, unfamiliar with a neighborhood where everyone knew each other's daily plans. When I sheepishly passed their sukkah again they insisted that I come in for tea and cookies. Every Shabbat morning for that university year in Israel, I joined them for early morning cholent: Kurdish kubbeh made of soaked and hand-broken rice mixed with ground beef stuffed with more meat, and cooked with even more meat and chicken. Although they were a large family, there was no first grader so they didn't qualify for a tutor. Nonetheless, I stopped by whenever I was at the neighbors' home.

Like so many Israeli sagas, theirs was marked with tragedy. In 1978, a terrorist bomb planted in their market stall murdered their son Shimon, 23, whose wedding I had attended. Other sons took over from their heartbroken parents, and switched from vegetables to kosher candy. Ami Hayim – My People Lives – Candies was born.

I CAME to Israel because, as a Zionist, I thought I should. But love of Israel made me stay, a love that was nurtured by the tastes, sounds and stories of Israel, a place where I could be welcomed into the sukkah and become forever friends with a family from the hilltop Kurdistan city of Amadiya, known in ancient times for trade in gallnuts used in printing, that moved here as soon as they could after our sovereign state was created.

Is instilling love a necessary element when teaching about Israel – and is that even possible from afar? That's a question raised in a recent intriguing and disturbing podcast in The Forward's Bintel Brief advice column. Writes the questioner: "I'm the mother of two kids...