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Aliyah from Australia

לאה ודן
לאה ודן

.I was born in a small country town in Australia where we were the only Jewish family
I remember when my baby brother was born. My father was very excited at the birth of ason after two daughters. When the hospital rang to tell him that his wife had given birth to a son he replied "No, my name is Hovev and I only have daughters". In the morning he took my sister and me to the hospital where we saw my mother and the new brother. My father was very, very proud.
After some years we moved to Sydney where we lived in a suburb which had many Jewish families. My sister and I joined a Zionist oriented youth group and mixed only with Jewish friends. I met my future husband who had left his home in New Zealand to go to Israel. We fell in love, married and left for Israel. We left a grieving mother , although both my parents were very involved in Zionist affairs and organizations. After a five week sea trip we arrived in England where we worked and stayed for about a year. After leaving Britain we toured most of Europe for an extended time. We boarded the ship "Jerusalem" bound for Haifa.
Our arrival at Haifa, where we were met by a fewrelatives, was only a few days before the Sinai campaign in October 1956. We were not worried by this as we considered the situation to be normal with tanks and troops going south through the roads of Rehovot. Shortly afterwards my husband, Reuven and I, attended an Ulpan on Kibbutz Hazorea in Emek Yizrael. We studied there for five months after which the kibbutz offered Reuven a position teaching English at the adjacent kibbutz.I however did not want to spend the rest of my life washing and hanging out laundry, which is what I had been doing. So we drove to Tel Aviv where in one day Reuven was accepted as an English teacher by the ORT organization and I had a job as an English typist with an insurance assessor's office.
We rented a flat in Ramat Gan for a few months before we bought a flat through the Sochnut (Jewish Agency).It was in a complex for immigrants where we found neighbors from South Africa, South America, England, Hungary and Poland. We lived there happily for eight years. During this time our first two children, a boy and a girl, were born.Then we built a house inRamat Chen which was then a very cheap area compared to other Ramat Gan neighbourhoods, not to mention Tel Aviv. There were areas near our house where cows grazed and you could see for large distances without houses.There were, of course, no problems with parking!
Our family eventually had the addition of two more sons. The four of them in turn attended the same kindergartens and the same primary schools. Three of them went to Blich high school and Ramat Chen scouts where they became leaders. While the children were small I did not work outside the house but eventually I joined the work force, working again in insurance and commerce. My husband did not live a healthy long life and passed away leaving me surrounded by my children and grandchildren, who now number twelve. They are my contribution to Israel. When looking back on my life I am very proud of my children who have all become successful in their careers and who have their own families and whom I love very, very much and I am grateful that they are so wonderful. Perhaps because they are Israelis!

מילון

country town
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