One of the first questions Israelis ask when they hear that you're an oleh hadash (new immigrant) is: Do you have any family in the country? Until recently the answer for me (Stef) had always been "no".
Marrying Matt, however, meant marrying into his Kibbutz family, of which now I get to claim as my own. Little did Matt know that marrying me also meant marrying into a kibbutz family. I didn't know either...
A few years ago, when Matt and I were planning our wedding, my mother was tasked with the job (which turned out to be a very difficult job) of proving I was Jewish. This lead her to search for her mother's ketubah, which in turn led her to a shoe box. In this shoe box was a folder and in the folder, a stack of letters held together with a rubber band. The letters, she discovered, were a correspondence between her grandmother, my great-grandmother (who I had the privileged of knowing until I was 10) and a second cousin of hers in South Africa. After a quick facebook search, my mom learned that the descendants of this cousin from the letters lived here in Israel. The family had all picked up from South Africa in the 1960's and moved to a kibbutz about 30 minutes outside Haifa. Of the 5 sons, 2 still lived in Israel, one passed away, one went back to South Africa and one recently moved to Australia to be closer to his kids. Over the course of the past few years my mom has been reaching out to these newly found family members, among others, and rekindling long-lost relationships.
I met the first of these Israeli family members (the one who now lives in Australia) two summers ago. He and his wife, who are of my parents' generation, met me in Netanya and took me out to dinner. It is odd experience to meet strangers who are actually family, but who are still strangers. What it really means is that the person who passes you on the street or sits down next to you on the bus might actually be your long lost cousin, and you would never know.
With my mom visiting us for the past couple weeks, she decided it would be a good time to meet the rest of the "Israeli side of the family." Another of the brothers and his wife, who live outside Netanya, picked us up and drove us to the kibbutz where their family first settled 50 some-odd years ago and where one of the brothers still lives with his wife, also a native kibbutz-nik. All of the "cousins" were lovely people. We schmoozed, shared family stories and compared old photographs - an exact copy of one of the photos was found in both my mom's album and their album - a nice piece of evidence that we were eating lunch with the right people.
Another discovery at the meal was that my family's kibbutz, Galed, was the "parent kibbutz" of Matt's uncle's kibbutz, Ketura. To top it off, my cousin's wife is the first cousin of Matt's boss at Ketura from when he volunteered there in 2006 and who, we learned, grew up down the street from where we currently live in Haifa. The world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure that these new cousins really feel like family. I am happy to have found these distant relatives and had the chance to meet interesting people, but I don't feel any more connected to them as I do to the other wonderful people we have met here in Haifa or at other points in our lives. I was raised to believe that good friends are just like family and I have always been grateful for the presence of good friends in our lives. Who knows, maybe some of our friends are really family anyway?
Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend,
Stef and Matt
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