14 years ago today, single at age 34, with two elderly cats, I took the biggest leap of faith of my life. Unlike many other stories I had heard, I didn’t make Aliyah after studying at a university here, landing an internship, or because I lost my job in the US and had nothing to lose. Quite the opposite. I quit a very lucrative sales job in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, sold my nice car, rented out my condo, and said goodbye to my parents and sister. With no job lined up and nowhere to live, I made the plunge purely for my soul’s calling—for Zionism. With about $7,000 in savings, I took a massive risk to follow my heart. And when people tell you that making aliyah isn’t easy, it’s an understatement compared to the challenges I endured.

While apartment hunting, I rented a furnished apartment on the beach in Tel Aviv. I spent my days running back and forth with my laptop to a neighborhood café because my building’s Wi-Fi barely worked. About two weeks in, while looking for apartments, jobs, and starting Ulpan, I received an email from my condo association: they were evicting my “roommate” because they discovered I had moved overseas. I had only learned a few weeks before my Aliyah that, due to building rules, I wasn’t allowed to rent out my condo because the allowed percentage of rented units had already reached its maximum. I was told I needed to join a waitlist. As number four, it could take years until my turn came up—and in the meantime, I was responsible for paying rent in Tel Aviv and the mortgage on an empty condo in Chicago. To say I was panicked and stressed would be an understatement.

I spent my days contacting lawyer friends, reviewing my building’s bylaws, pleading with the condo board—and crying. Long story short, a few people on the list let me pass them, my parents helped a bit with the mortgage, and four months, it was finally my turn to rent out the unit. But by then, my $7,000 was almost gone.

The first apartment I found—through a broker who offered me a joint while picking me up on his motorbike—basically conned me into renting what seemed like a gem: a small one-bedroom at the bottom of a four-story building just off Rothschild, one of Tel Aviv’s prettiest and most popular streets. Soon after, I stepped out of the shower into an inch of standing water covering the entire apartment. This occurred almost any time water ran for more than 5 minutes. That’s when I learned the unit had originally been a........

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