Atara (Staiman) is from Teaneck and Zach Bienenfeld is from Scarsdale. Both grew up in homes that valued aliyah, and both attended Camp Moshava. Atara only wanted to date men who were interested in aliyah and Zach was the first man she dated! They lived in Riverdale where Zach worked as a software engineer and Atara was a Jewish educator at Westchester Day School. Though committed to aliyah, it was hard for Atara to leave her family and ultimately, it was Zach who decided it was time to “pull the trigger.” He requested to transfer his position to the Amazon office in Israel and that summer, they moved to Ra’anana.
Moving as a pregnant mother with two small children in the heat of the summer wasn’t easy. They arrived on Nefesh B’Nefesh’s charter flight, which was amazing, and they were greeted by family and friends and her grandmother… and then reality kicked in. They were laden with all of the bags that come with moving your life to a new country with small kids, including two car seats and a Citi Mini double stroller. When they asked the taxi driver to help them, he said that his job is to be the driver, not load bags. Then they arrived at their new rental apartment in Ra’anana and discovered that their double stroller wouldn’t fit in the elevator.
Zach started work right away, leaving Atara to take care of some of the bureaucratic appointments by herself. When she went to the Klita office to sign up for ulpan, she broke down in tears. The woman at the office hugged her and suggested that perhaps it was the right time for her to focus on her kids and herself during her pregnancy and that ulpan would come when she was ready for it. She remembers another appointment, walking to an office in 100 degrees to sign her son up for Gan. On the way, her three-year-old fell asleep in the double stroller… which also didn’t fit in the elevator at the office! Atara wasn’t sure what to do until a man came out and said that he had recently made aliyah and knew how hard the beginning could be and then offered to stay with her kids while she filled out the paperwork upstairs. She cried and remembers feeling like it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her.
While they loved the community in Ra’anana and the soft landing it offered, they started searching for a place where they could buy a home, with the goal of their oldest starting school in his new community for first grade. They moved into their house in Carmei Gat while the project was so new, that the movers got a ticket for parking in an area without roads!
Carmei Gat is a suburb of Kiryat Gat, so the community benefits from all of the existing infrastructure. It is a planned community, similar to Modiin but by being in the south and relatively new, it’s much more affordable and only an hour commute to Tel Aviv by train. Today, the community has 200 Anglo families, mostly in their 20s and 30s, with many new families moving in this summer. As one of the first families to move in and certainly with the help of their backgrounds in education and community involvement, Atara and Zach were heavily involved in growing their Ashkenaz shul, where they have both sat on the vaad and where Atara runs Torah learning programming for kids. Zach gives the daily Daf Yomi shiur, Atara recently started Matan Carmei Gat and she also runs a Nach Yomi whatsapp group. Noting the dearth of Judaic podcasts for kids, she also recently started a podcast called “Reaching Higher,” which covers myriad of Judaic topics for kids from around ages 6-12 and she’s already put out a number of episodes. You can find her on Instagram at @reachinghigherpodcast.
Atara never did get around to taking ulpan stating that “Speaking Hebrew is the best ulpan” but also adds, “Every different stage of life and every different thing you do is ulpan in itself.” She realized that when they redid their kitchen, she picked up the vocabulary for tiles and words related to construction. She also learned new vocabulary when her kids entered gan and different vocabulary when her children started school. “My Hebrew is dramatically better since making aliyah and especially so, since moving to Carmei Gat.” With that said, as much as she does interact with Israelis, her social circle consists of Anglos, as it’s just a different culture.
Becoming an active community leader wasn’t the only part of her aliyah that Atara could not have anticipated. The initial big holdback for her was leaving her family and Atara and Zach have been amazed that so many of their family members have moved to Israel since their arrival. Atara is one of four sisters; three of whom now live in Israel, and her parents came last summer! In Zach’s family, three out of the five siblings now live in Israel with their families, in a range of Anglo-friendly communities across Israel.
“I cannot imagine living anywhere else in the world. It is all worth it to be part of this chapter of history, to raise our kids with the Jewish holidays as their calendar, to give them the sense of Israel being one big family, to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, to be able to visit places in Tanach as often as we feel like it. I’ve had so many encounters with rough Israelis and impossible customer service but even more stories of the people on grocery lines carrying my crying newborns so I could pay and warm hugs after breaking down at Iriya offices. As a young and overwhelmed pregnant mother with little children whose Hebrew wasn’t great, I could never have envisioned that I would be making such an impact just a few years later! You can always find a way to make a difference.”
