As an oleh chadash, one of the questions I get asked most frequently is why I made Aliyah. The answer is simple. I am an October 7 Zionist.

Prior to October 2023, I had a very comfortable life in semi-retirement in a tiny town on the Oregon Coast (in the United States). Every day I took my dog for a walk on the beach and for dinner I enjoyed the fresh bounties of the sea. In the summertime I bought local fruit and vegetables (and lots of berries) at the weekly farmers market.

I was 70 years old and in no way identified as a Zionist. I had been raised in an observant Jewish home on Long Island (outside of NY City). My father and most of his immediate family had escaped Germany in 1938, so I was the son of a Holocaust survivor, although my father throughout his lifetime refused to use that term, believing that it only applied to those who had survived the camps.

As a young adult, I had been active in the anti-(Vietnam) war movement and identified primarily as part of the New Left counterculture. I had been a political activist throughout my life, and ultimately raised a family with 3 children while living in Boulder, Colorado for 20 years.

I had visited Israel only once (when I was 16 years old) on a summer program, and to the degree that I paid attention to the politics of the region, I hoped that the Israelis and the Palestinians could somehow reach an agreement to live in peace together.

It seems as if in every generation, modern Jews have believed that they have found a new home where they will be welcomed and allowed to integrate. America was such a place for me. On October 7, I woke up to the shocking news of the horrific massacre.

I guess I should clarify that while my father was born in Germany and lived in Berlin until April 1938, my mother’s side of the family immigrated to the United States from Lithuania before the First World War. My mother was born and raised in a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox family in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My bubbe had immigrated from Tavrig, Lithuania in 1907, and my zeida had come from Skaudville,........

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