We made it!

Hi everyone,

We made it! Our friends so kindly saw us off at JFK with hugs and cake and a few speeches at a nice ceremony. After an exhausting 10 hour flight that was delayed an hour and on which no one slept a wink, we arrived in Israel at about 8 am local time. Our aliyah documents as well as passport control were processed on the plane. When we got off there was a massive celebration (some of you might have seen). We were blessed to have our good friends Yossi and family as well as Rueven and my cousins Ravit and Tovah there to greet us. We even ran into a teacher from my old school in MA who was there greeting other friends. Everyone was singing and dancing. Sidney was struck by the female soldiers who gave her a flag to wave. It was overwhelming and exciting.


We then moved inside the old terminal building (if you flew to Israel before 2000 or so, that's where you would have gone). There we heard speeches from representatives of Nefesh b'Nefesh as well as the government, most notably Natan Sharansky who is now head of the Jewish agency. Josh then headed upstairs to the absorption offices where after a bit of a wait he received our initial package including our Teudat Oleh (identification card as new immigrants), a voucher for the car ride, a voucher for our health insurance, some helpful information about what we should accomplish in the next few days, a little pocket money, among other things. We then joined the crowd from our 747 in finding our luggage. That took some time, but finally it all arrived. We then headed outside where we were paired with a driver--his car usually seats 7, but we had it all to ourselves; each family got a mini-bus to themselves, and given the volume of luggage...thank God.

After about a 20 minute ride, we arrived in Modiin, to our new apartment (about noon). It's much bigger than we expected and really nice. It will be even better once our stuff arrives. Sidney then crashed big time--hungry and tired not being a good combination. So we walked across the street to the little shopping center and got pizza and nectarines. We then headed back to the apartment for a little nap and planned to take care of health insurance and bank account. It turns out that the post office (where we needed to go for health insurance) was already closed for the day. Very Israeli:>. We decided to try the bank instead. For that we needed to bring our citizenship numbers (kind of like Israeli social security numbers), but when we got to the bank we found that although we had the numbers, they had not yet made it into the system. The people at the bank were super nice and we've arranged for them to take care of it in the morning--hopefully we'll be in the system by then. One warning that we got before we arrived was that Israeli time is a little more relaxed than we are used to. So we're taking all this in stride. No rush. It will get done. If not today, then tomorrow. So we have a few projects for tomorrow.

After the bank we walked over to the park that is basically directly across the street from our apartment. Sidney was thrilled. We then continued on to our friends Yossi and Jen's house where we are now and where we will have dinner. So we are happy and exhausted and looking forward to a good night of sleep.

Once we get phone numbers, we will send out all of our contact information. For now, email is the best.