Making aliyah post October 7

I made aliyah in the middle of March 2024. That’s six months post October 7, but around eight years since I first thought about it. 

In contrast to a holiday, an exchange program, or acquiring a visa, getting citizenship and moving your life to another country takes more than a reaction. As with many other olim (new immigrants) I’ve met who've made aliyah since October, the war was yet another hurdle, an especially hard one, on our mental and practical roadmaps for relocating. 

A young woman I met from Germany moved because of years of built up antisemtism in Europe. A guy from Argentina arrived at the start of last year for a holiday and stayed because he felt at home. Two people I live with, one from New York and one from Manchester, made aliyah after feeling for a long time that they could not live as left-wing Zionists in their culture. And myself, from Melbourne, I came because I believe that there’s not just Jewish history in Israel, but a Jewish future, and I want to be part of it. 

“What do you think, nana? Do you wish I didn’t make aliyah?” I asked my nana on the phone a few days ago, while on a noisy street in Tel Aviv near my ulpan (Hebrew school). "It all balances out,” she said, about her worries and how far away I am, but also about me living here and how she too cares about this place. 

I do miss home a lot. Especially on Friday afternoons when I might usually help cook or set the table for Shabbat with my mum, go to my community’s Kabbalat service and then have dinner with my family. 

But then again, here, I experience an expanded sense of home: hearing the Shabbat siren; seeing pain on a stranger’s face and feeling that it’s likely similar to my own; the collective grief on Yom Hazikaron; the smell of a neighbour’s cooking as I walk up the stairwell to my apartment on a Friday afternoon.