Israel from Outside and In: A Love Letter

By Stuart Feinhor
From Tel Aviv

I suppose it started with my name, my Hebrew name, Yisroel Noam, after one of my maternal great-grandfathers, Rabbi Israel Groban, z”l, and a paternal aunt, Elsie Naomi, z”l, who died as a child in a tragic fire. Noam – that was an easy and “pleasant” name to carry, and I used it regularly in Hebrew classes and among certain friends. But ISRAEL? That was a much heavier name to carry, let alone embody, even though some have suggested that One Who Wrestles with God is pretty apt. Recently, I saw that my great-grandfather also went by Sruly, and that might have been cool to grow up with. (As a gay kid, I was called much worse.) Alas, my “American” name, Stuart Nolan, sounds about as British as Sruly is Yiddish! What’s in a name? A lot!

Israel, and certainly the State of Israel, can live without me. But that’s not the question. The question is whether I could live without Israel, the Land of Israel, the people of Israel, and the answer was making Aliyah.

Born a mere 12 years after founding of the modern State, Israel figured prominently, if quietly, in my childhood. One set of great grandparents, from Eastern Europe, did well in Dayton, Ohio, and took a months’ long trip back to Europe and on to Mandatory Palestine, when my mother was a year old, in 1934. Among my treasures from their trip is an olivewood mezuzah I am eager to hang on the doorpost of my new apartment in Tel Aviv. And I hope to bring back with me on a return visit to the US the antique Megillat Esther they bought in Jerusalem, as well as a beautiful seder plate from Carlsbad, among other heirlooms. My great-grandparents also co-funded a JNF forest somewhere in pre-state Israel, which would be an unlikely hoot to see one day. Sadly, no evidence exists to show they purchased property on Sederot Rothschild!

I’m old enough to remember the Six-day War and the changing maps that were hung in our Sunday and Hebrew school classrooms before and after the Yom Kippur War. But my first trip to Israel took place in the summer of 1977, when I was 16, as a member of the Beth Abraham Youth Chorale, from my shul in Dayton. “Choir,” as we still lovingly refer to it decades later, (just as we refer to Cantor Jerome Kopmar as Cantor – I could never call him Jerry!), had made their first tour to Israel the summer before I decided to try out. In fact, that tour was the primary reason I wanted to join! If there was any chance choir would return to Israel, I wanted to be on that plane! Luckily, the summer when choir returned to Israel for the second time, I was among those who performed at the Zimriya choir festival, as well at IDF bases and kibbutzim around the country. We completed our tour in London – where the men wore top hats! – and sang in other cities in England. Choir was, and remains, one of the most formative experiences of my life.

(Fun facts. The Beth Abraham Youth Chorale, whose motto was, “God respects me when I work, but loves me when I sing,” was a big deal in the Conservative Jewish world, as we commissioned our own music, toured all over the East Coast – including performing at a Cantors’ Convention in the exotic-to-a-Midwest-Jew Catskills, plus Florida, Toronto, and Southern California. We recorded our music and accompanied Cantor Kopmar for many years on the bimah for the High Holidays. We were fortunate to sing with some of the greatest Cantors of the time, not to mention renowned opera tenor, Jan Pierce, born Yehoshua Pinkhes Perelmuth, in his final performance; that concert took place a few years after I had graduated and gone to college. Records for sale in the lobby!)

The experience of spending 4 incredible weeks in this still relatively young country in 1977 made a deep and lasting impression, with images and sense memories that remain readily stimulated today, including the highs of fresh-squeezed orange juice on every corner, Jews everywhere, and the Mediterranean sun and beach, as well as lows of the sound of war in the north, and toilet paper so rough and indelicate … never mind – IYKYK! A few years later, when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University, I spent a year abroad both as a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem – at one point standing in the same spot as my great-grandparents on the Mt. Scopus campus, and as a volunteer on Kibbutz Ein HaNatziv. It was during this time on kibbutz that my late mother made her first and only trip to the Holy Land. She spent a few days on kibbutz with me, during which my “kibbutz abba,” Rafael, took us on an amazing tour of the surrounding area. Additionally, I’ve never forgotten something the volunteer coordinator, a woman called Vicki, said to my mother, something which is perhaps as relevant now as it was then. At a time when American Jews could still take pride in Henry Kissinger’s prominence and role in the US government, Vicki asked us to consider what someone like that could have contributed to the government and development of Eretz Yisrael. Indeed.

Not too many years later, after completing my first graduate degree, in counseling, I spent another year in Jerusalem, as a first-year rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and though it was not preordained that I become ordained (It’s a long story.), I cherish the friendships and the learning I have retained. Although I now live in Tel Aviv, after having spent the better part of two years of my life in Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital will always be my first beloved “home” b’aretz.

For a variety of reasons, both financial and naively/stupidly political, there was a 33-year gap between visits. By now, I was contentedly living in Boulder, Colorado, having cared for my mother’s sister, serving my county as a congressional staffer, and working for Jewish Family Service of Colorado. So, when I was invited to the wedding of the daughter of friends now living in Jerusalem, and whose wedding I had attended in Brooklyn decades before, I jumped at the opportunity to come. This was in early 2023, a time (another time) we know of as Before. It was a wonderful and magical trip that included an incredible tour of the City of David and a fabulous night at the Jaffa Hotel, highly recommended!

And then, on October 7, the world turned upside down. It has yet to right itself, if it ever will. Like most of us, I was consumed and obsessed with the hostages and the war and the diabolical reaction of Western so-called Civilization, and I knew I had to DO SOMETHING. So, in June of 2024, I arranged for a month off from work and registered for a week with Sar-El, an incredible organization that brings volunteers to serve with the IDF. If only my late father, a former Marine and Purple Heart recipient who fought at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, could have seen his son in uniform! Additionally, I was blessed to participate in a few jobs with Sword of Iron Volunteers. My life was further transformed after taking a tour of the Gaza Envelope with a Nova survivor, an unforgettable experience that affects me to this day.

To see this country and the better parts of the Jewish world pull together on October 8th, to witness the blessed soldiers and reservists of the IDF, as well as untold numbers of volunteers, coming home from all over the world, is another thing, of so many, we as Jews must never forget. Neither is the miraculous, even biblical, short and long history of this beautiful, incredible, frustrating, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, challenging, and eternal place, this holy makom. This family.

By the time I returned for another visit in June of 2025, just a day before Israel’s incredible action against the Iranian regime began, when I lost my bomb-shelter virginity, the world had already convinced me that making Aliyah was my only option. And so, at the age of 65, and without a trust fund, I completed my application with Nefesh B’Nefesh, got my three apostilles (a word hardly anybody knows!) and papers in order, scheduled my Aliyah interview, and liberated myself from decades of records and books and photographs and furniture and “stuff.”

It was time.

With no children from my siblings nor me, this was THE mitzvah I could perform for my family lineage, one, in fact, started by my great-grandparents, in 1934. Yes, it was hard to leave the country I love, that one that had saved my family from the pogroms and destruction of European Jewry, but it was easy to go East, where my heart was leading me.

I booked my Aliyah flight, my first on El-Al, for April 15, 2026.

Israelis, both sabras and olim, ask me, sometimes incredulously, but mostly with love and expressions of Mazel Tov, why I made Aliyah, and why now. The answer is simple, if heartbreaking: October 7, October 8, October 9, yesterday, tomorrow.

Not only the Jews, but the entire world is facing a tsunami of terror. Israel is the Ark, and I want to be on the Ark.

This post first appeared in the Times of Israel Blogs, June 22, 2026. It is reposted here by the author.