December 2017 – Thinking about where to live
When you fill out the Nefesh B’Nefesh application you have to choose a destination city. So…. where the heck would we live? The past two summers when we visited Israel we’ve stayed in Jerusalem. It was nice, fun, seemed pretty family-friendly, lots of kids, lots of parks, etc. But would it be too much of a culture shock? Too religious? Too big and unwieldy for us to navigate? The other obvious big city it Tel-Aviv. We have some cousins and in-laws who live there and we’ve visited there as well several times. And while it is fun and exciting in a “young and single big-city” sort of way, to us, coming from Phoenix, AZ, it seemed a bit like a big congested nightmare.
So we consulted the “Aliyahpedia” on the Nefesh website, and emailed friends we have in Israel about where to live. We needed someplace close to a major medical center for me to practice cardiology. We needed a place with religious diversity, neither purely secular nor monolithically religious. And, we needed a place with a high percentage of english speakers in order to ensure a smooth transition. Although this last point is debatable, and some might prefer the “sink or swim” method by being fully immersed in a hebrew-speaking only community, and while we understand that this may be the right answer for some; for our family a community with more english speakers seemed to make the most sense.
So with these concerns in mind, we narrowed down our list of cities to Jerusalem, Ra’anana, Zichron Yaakov, and Netanya. We considered but ruled out Be’er Sheva due the low percentage of English speakers. We also considered Modi’in but ruled it out due to the often hour and a half commute to either Jerusalem or Tel Aviv (during rush hour – 40 minutes without traffic) to get to the nearest hospital.