Israeli Reminisces: My Travels Around Israel in '78 - '79

There's a truism that states that the only place a Jew can really be Jewish is in Israel. And I heartily concur having lived in Israel for almost five years total out of my almost 48 years on this earth.

I was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up on LI, NY but at the tender age of 19 I took a plane to go to Israel to sip the deep wisdom that is the heritage and legacy of every Jew.

I wanted to know the ancient secrets that are the property of the Jewish people. Yes, Israel is important but the intellectual property as well as the physical land of Israel is important to the well being and spiritual health of every Jew.

So, sometime in mid 1978 I had a meeting with my Uncle Isser, and Shlomo Carlebach and Shlomo invited me to come to his Moshav. He said, "You can stay with my Chasidim. You'll meet your soul brothers and sisters and you can use the Moshav as a base to do anything else you want to do." So I was off.

I studied the Torah with a number of prominent teachers on the Baalei Teshuva circuit including Rabbi Noah Weinberg, Rabbi Baruch Horovitz, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Zt'l, and Rebbetzin Ester Jungreis. Each of these teachers not only added their own personal knowledge of Yiddishkeit but also inspired me to continue to add to my fervor to come back to Israel several times over the years.

Additional teachers included Rabbi Meir Fund, Gershon Winkler, and Rabbi Yoseph Krupnick Sometimes I only spent some fleeting time with these people but I always managed to soak up a lot of material during the time I was under their tutelage.

But what I want to focus on now is the energy I gave back to Israel. Let's look at my time in Israel in May of '78 to October of '79. I came to Israel and went to YeshivatD'var Yerushalayim for a three-month summer course. I landed at the yeshiva with nothing more than $100 in my pocket, my steel six string Goya acoustic guitar and my faith in G-d.

My uncle, Isser Green, was dismayed. "What are you going to do for money?" he said. "I don't need any," I replied,"I'm going to yeshiva!"