Is Beit Shemesh Aleph Child Friendly?

And the answer is, not really. Now on the pilot trip you'll take note of the playground equipment. The city does have some decent playground equipment. But that's it. There's nothing for bigger kids or teenagers. There's no soccer field, basketball court, or bicycle park. Accordingly, the sidewalks tend to be dangerous places as teenagers race their bicycles there. The entrance ways to buildings often have kids smashing soccer balls into the walls.

Also, there's no real libraries. In America, one takes libraries for granted. Every town has one, oftentimes very good ones.

Here, there's a small municipal library way down in Beit Shemesh. In Ramat Aleph, there's a tiny library run out of somebody's storage closet. It's open for an hour or two a week and certainly you can't go in there and read. The community center had a small library for a while. I'm not sure if they closed it or limited its hours. It's also quite small, with books that somebody was going to throw away.

I spent a good part of my childhood at the library or on sports fields. You cannot do that in Ramat Aleph. And the teenagers really have no place to go.

Nefesh B'Nefesh in Israel - Not

So here's something important for you to know. NBN is an organization that promotes aliyah, largely through advertising, through providing information on a website, through a small amount of on-line information sessions, through arranging flights, and through helping you with the immigration paperwork. It helps. It's free to the recipient even though it costs the donors, including Israel's Jewish Agency, in general a fortune. The money does not appear to be well spent, but I'll leave that for the donors to examine.

That's really it. Once you get to Israel, NBN disappears. They remind me of a car salesman. Before the sale, you think you found a new pal. Once you drive that car out of the lot, you never met him.

In America, their ads appear every time you log onto the computer. That all stops once your IP address shows Israel.

They organize a tiyul or two in your first year or two. There is some lady who gives some help with job search. But that's it. It's nothing you couldn't get supplied elsewhere.

Am I criticizing them? Yes, but more importantly I am just outlining the reality. NBN is not your family in Israel. In fact, unless you have family, nobody is your family here. All the platitudes about the nation of Israel being a family, well maybe that occurs on some supernatural plane, but you won't see it in your actual life here. In fact, most people are so busy with their own lives, and the atmosphere here is so generally unfriendly, that you'll find yourself quite alone in the way of getting support.

NBN has a buddy family "program." How does the program work? They give a family your name. That's the program. NBN doesn't teach the family how to be a buddy, doesn't give them parameters, tips, doesn't check up on anything.

So what happened with us? We had two buddy families. We contacted the first and were told that they weren't available for a few months as they had family over. What the heck? That's not helpful. The first few months are when you really need them. We got rid of them and got a second, a family we knew from America. We told the coordinator, make sure you tell them that have to make us feel wanted. We called them. Never heard from them. They never even had us over. We complained to the coordinator but never heard back from her.

So that's NBN. You are dealing with a car salesman, only the car salesman knows he's out to make a buck. The NBN staffer actually sees him or herself as an idealistic person or is doing the great mitzvah of getting you to Israel. What happens when you get here is irrelevant.

The schools here

In my opinion the schools here are atrocious for boys. For girls it's not a picnic either, but not as bad as for the boys It's this horrible grind, 9 hours a day in a tiny classroom, the rebbe just reading from the Mishnah. My son has done 10 chapters of Mesechta Shabbos in one month! There's no concept of preparation, instructional design, variety. There are no assemblies, no projects, no trips. No background on the Oral Torah. No comparison to other Mishnayos. Just grinding through the book. It's like daf yomi for 5th graders. The rebbes do no preparation, no lesson plan. They go six days a week and Shabbos is full of restrictions. There's no free day. And they go 11 months like this. The schools have no cafeteria, no libraries, no assembly hall.  I can only think that the goal is to destroy the boys. The key concern about schools is getting in. I have a friend who just begged a school for 3 months to accept his 3 yr old. It's like the school administrators are some kind of evil characters out of a fairy tale.

Compare

 News in the USA:

Articles about the Republication Convention, the Rep. VP candidate, sports, swimming, Home Depot and Halloween.

And now Israel:

War, terrorism, forcing the draft on Haredim (lo aleinu), Nazis, anti-Semitism, Gaza. You want to live in a country that's all war and violence and in-fighting?

Not (much of) a democracy

Is it more democratic than Iran? Sure. Wonderful. It doesn't come close to America. In America, you vote for your leaders. You vote for individual members of Congress and for the President. The Senate votes for the Supreme Court as nominated by the President.

In Israel, you vote for a party who appoints members of Knesset who vote for the PM. And you can't get a new party started because of election thresholds. The result is the same people year after year, decade after decade. In America you see new faces all the time. Carter, Clinton, Obama, Trump. All new faces. I just had to look up JD Vance, Trump's VP. AOC is new. All the time new people. In Israel, same people, and not just the PM, but Bennett, Lapid, Liberman, Shaked. 

And the Supreme Court votes for itself and has absurd powers over the Knesset. In the USA, a person has to bring a case to the court which then decides according to the Constitution and case law. In Israel, a yenta looks out over society and decides what's "reasonable."

You see the difference everywhere. Oh, the military decided to shut down Meron this yeah. They decided. In the USA, there'd be injunctions where the court would put an end to that funny business. 

Shouting does not a democracy make. Oh in Israel they yell at each other. That doesn't make it a democracy. In fact, it's the opposite. A democracy requires some civility and cooperation. In Israel, there is none. 

Zionists tend to be selfish people

I'm generalizing, but this is what I have found. All the Zios that pushed me to move to Israel haven't reached out to me even one time. I took a job near Tel Aviv upon my first arrival in Israel. Not one of the Zios there invited me to anything, even the ones in my town. Never once received an offer of help. The Zio buddy families that NBN gave us the phone numbers for were never available. First there was one family that couldn't meet with us. Then we asked for a new one - same result. And NBN is the same way, offering next to zero assistance despite this illusion they create that they have so many resources for the oleh.

Wanna know who did reach out to us, who has invited us countless times to varies simchas and to their home for meals and who has offered us other kinds of help - anti-zionists.

Years ago, when I first considered moving here I noted to some people that the Israelis I met in the USA were generally not very nice, were often hot tempered and kind of crazy. So here comes the propaganda - oh the worst people leave Israel I was told. The good ones stay. I was given the flip side of this propaganda as well. Idealistic people move to Israel. What I have found is that most olim are not normal. Think about it. Is upending your entire family and moving to a war zone an action of a normal mind? Most of the olim that I have met are militant and simplistic in their outlook. They also usually are not particularly generous.

What I conclude from this is that Zionism itself is a kind of anti-religious gesture, a moving away from Hashem and replacing Him with something physical, something you can hang on your wall. It's the action of a materialistic person, and such a person is selfish. 

Israel, Israel, Israel

You've heard the word a thousand times and always with such excitement. "She's going to Israel this Pesach." "I learned in Israel for two years." "He runs a yeshiva in Israel." "In Israel the women wear that kind of sheitel." Then there are the authors who proudly tell you their name and their city in Israel. The DL's in the territories will say, "Judean Hills."

It's all said so romantically that you develop fantasies about Israel.

Then you come live here, and see what a messed up place it is. The Americans with their little trips don't realize that they are on vacation. They don't live in Israel. Even the students don't know what it's like.

And of course all the news is slanted. Most of the news concerns the Arabs so it's slanted that way. You don't hear so much about the money troubles, the stress, the yelling, the abuse, the boredom. Oh yes, you should support Israel and give money to scholars in Israel, but you don't take from that, that it's not a good place for Americans to move to.

So I'm here to tell you, it's not a good place for Americans to move to.