Exodus to IsraelBy Dikla Kadosh
Jewish Journal.com
“Yes, I’m leaving,” she said in Hebrew to her friend on the other end. “I’m giving up.”
On a chilly winter morning, the Israeli ex-pat who made Los Angeles her home for the past six years sat bundled in a thick jacket at a Starbucks in Valley Village. Several days earlier, she had packed up all her belongings, vacated her apartment in Tarzana and moved in temporarily with her eldest son. After six years in the States, Gavriel, 53, had just bought a one-way ticket back to Israel.
The current economic crisis wiped her out, she said, leaving her no other choice than to return home — a decision thousands of Israelis in Los Angeles are now facing. According to the Immigrant Absorption Ministry in Israel, the number of Israelis returning has spiked by 58 percent from the same time last year. The ministry estimates that more than 9,000 citizens returned in 2008, compared to approximately 5,000 in 2007.
“I thought to myself — with all my degrees and experience owning my own businesses, this is what I’ve been reduced to?” she said. “I didn’t come to America to clean buildings. The next day I called my son and told him I’m going back home.”
Within the past three or four months, the Israeli Consulate has seen a dramatic increase in calls from Israelis desperate to return home immediately.
“We’ve received a tsunami of calls,” said Israeli Consul General Yaakov Dayan, who reported that some callers are looking to expedite the required paperwork, while others are requesting economic assistance for their way back — the most desperate are pleading for help in buying plane tickets.
Ex-patriot Israelis almost always talk about moving back to Israel eventually. Moving to the United States is generally seen as a temporary means to a more financially secure life back home.
“You can have everything here, but nothing here,” the 30-something Israeli truck driver said. “There’s no family, no community, no meaning to life here. It may not be simple in Israel, but it’s home.”
1 comment:
Not surprising! To thousands of Jewish Americans, America was/is the new land of milk and honey!
They should have known better if they followed the prophecies of the Bible....Daniel in particular!
This end-time prophet foretold the fall of Babylon-America and the nations who drank of the wine of her fornication.
From the time the twin towers America's symbolic architectural icon of capitalism and Liberal Democrary was knocked out; all Bible prophecy students and scholars would have known that the systems which have defined and build Babylon were on their way down.
The Rastafari Movement have written and sung about Babylon, America as a global system having fallen and falling since the early '50's.
I am not sure how Jews read the Torah, whether they just take it literally or study it through text analysis as a form of literarure. If so it represents a sterile for of engagement with the Bible.
Without an appreciation of the PROPHETIC dynamics of the Bible and how it speaks to modern times and its spiritual, economic and geo-political conditions....to many Jews, America will be a deluded extension of the original Promised Land, Israel.
So as many head back home to Eden as Babylon Falls, HalleluYah! The movement should Eastward and Westward, certainly not toward America. Remember who is America in Prophecy!
Shalom
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