“Sit,” owner Elisheva Levy says before you’ve even had a chance to look at the menu. “What would you like? Tea? Coffee? Have a scone.”

By the time you’ve been there five minutes, it already feels less like a café and more like someone’s home.

That is precisely what Levy wants.

If one of her regulars misses their morning tea for more than a few days, she starts making phone calls.

“I’ll ring them just to make sure they’re okay,” she says. “To see if they’re alive.”

She laughs after saying it, but only because it’s true.

After five years running Kumkum Tea House, the line between customer and family has almost disappeared.

“It became more than a business,” Levy says. “It’s my life.”

For Levy, home has never been a simple concept.

She grew up in Manchester, United Kingdom, in an Orthodox Moroccan Jewish family, one of five children in a community where being Mizrahi often meant feeling like an outsider.

“I was always a fish out of water,” she says.

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By the age of 20, she knew she wanted something else.

She came to Jerusalem intending to volunteer for six months in the neonatal unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center. Instead, she stayed.

Her first day in Israel happened to be Israel’s Independence Day.

The taxi dropped her outside the nursing school with her suitcase, but the building was deserted.

“I couldn’t understand why nobody was there,” Levy recalls. Only later did she realize the country had stopped to celebrate Independence Day. That evening, fireworks burst over nearby Mount Herzl, visible from the dormitory where she was staying.

“I loved Jerusalem straight away,” she says. “The white stone. The weather. Everything.”

Nearly four decades later, Levy still speaks with an unmistakable Mancunian accent. But Jerusalem became the place where the rest of her life unfolded.

She studied nursing, married, raised three children and spent years abroad while her then-husband served in Israel’s Foreign Ministry, living in India, Belgium and the United States before eventually returning to Jerusalem.

Her children, she says with a smile, are “more Israeli than I........

© The Times of Israel