Expatriate Israelis : For Some, Orange County Presents the Nearest Thing to God’s Country Outside the Holy Land

For Pnina Shichor, raised in the predominantly Jewish Beverly-Fairfax district of Los Angeles, the churches of Orange County were much like the banks in her husband’s native Israel.

There seemed to be one on every block.

As an American Jew, Pnina sometimes felt uncomfortable with the largely Christian topography of Orange County, her home since 1975. Yet her Israeli husband, David, seemed oblivious.

Indeed, for David Shichor and the 1,000 to 1,500 relatively upscale Israelis who have made their homes here, any initial misgivings over the county’s reputation as deep-rooted Christian and conservative are minor.

“I really do like it here,” says David Shichor, a criminologist at Cal State San Bernardino. Orange County, he says, is about as close to God’s country as an Israeli can get without actually living in the Holy Land.

Having grown up as Jewish citizens in a predominantly Jewish country, most Israelis do not share the traumas that have afflicted their counterparts in the diaspora.

What matters to most of them is that Orange County boasts a quality of life they believe is superior to that of Los Angeles, where the bulk of Israelis in Southern California have settled. But unlike their countrymen who live in the next county to the north, these Israelis are not immigrants in the classic sense. Most, because of their educations and professional skills, “made it” from the moment they first took up residence in Orange County. They didn’t need to live in close proximity to other Israelis while adjusting to their new circumstances and learning the ropes. It was enough to find the best place to live.

What they were looking for was somewhere to settle back and live out the American Dream: Orange County, which offers a standard of living light years beyond what even those of their class could expect in Israel.

Shmuel Ben-Shmuel came to Anaheim Hills a year ago after securing his doctorate in aerospace engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Ben-Shmuel, 50, resumed his studies in the United States after a number of years working for Israel Aircraft Industries. But in Israel, he says, he could never have matched the material gains he has accrued here, after only one year in the space transportation division of Rockwell International. Wages are considerably higher in the United States, and taxes--income tax, valued-added tax and customs duties--are dramatically lower.

Moreover, America offers, on the whole, far lower housing and consumer costs. Even Orange County, with some of the highest housing prices in the country, offers Israeli newcomers more building for the buck than is available in most Israeli cities. It also offers mortgages that would be difficult to obtain and impossible to sustain on Israeli wages.

Today Ben-Shmuel, who was born in Bulgaria and arrived in Israel when he was 11, owns a roomy two-story house that only a wealthy industrialist might afford in Israel--a house, says his wife, Geula, valued at about $300,000 in today’s superheated market. He and Geula, a Hebrew teacher of Yemenite descent, drive cars that back home would have cost triple what they cost here. And there is money for their three children’s university tuition and for periodic trips back to visit family and friends.

“It’s not fair to compare this life style to what is available in Israel, considering its situation,” says Ben-Shmuel. “Let’s (compare it instead to) Los Angeles. Orange County is less crowded, the crime rate is lower, and the public school system is better.”

There was a time, Ben-Shmuel says, when he felt uneasy over having left Israel, even though he was encouraged to get at least one of his degrees from an American university for the sake of his future job prospects in Israel. Most Israeli emigres spend their lives wrestling with the Angst that comes from departing a country in which immigration and perseverance remain paramount virtues.

Even those who, like Ben-Shmuel, never really thought at first that they were leaving for good find it hard to shake the societal and self-afflicted stigma of yerida, in Israel a pejorative term for emigration, which for many remains emotionally akin to desertion.

Eytan Bentzur, Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, calls yerida “a mark of Cain” that he hopes will remained stamped on the foreheads of each of the 150,000 to 200,000 Israelis living in Southern California. It is Bentzur’s contention that these Israelis have sold their birthrights and those of their children--the ability to live dignified lives as Jews in a sovereign Jewish state--for insubstantial and ultimately worthless lives engaged in California dreaming.

“They are lost and miserable here, and they know it,” said Bentzur, now winding up his two-year term.

Harsh words, these, and they have not earned the consul many friends among his local Israeli constituents. Indeed, a column last week in the Los Angeles supplement of the Hebrew-language New York weekly newspaper Israel Shelanu (Our Israel), broke ranks with the consulate and angrily took Bentzur to task for his oft-expressed disdain of yordim (emigrants) .

“We have no need for any official sanction of our presence here,” wrote editor Noam Niv. “Both Israel and the U.S. are democracies. These are the ‘80s--people should be free to pursue their own, individual goals unhindered by outmoded ideological concerns.

“I know a lot of Israelis here, some who have made it big, others who just get by--just like any other immigrant group in America. The contention that all of these people have squandered their lives here is based on nothing more than unfounded stereotypes.

“Instead of coming down on Israelis for leaving, perhaps Israel and her emissaries should take a hard look at why they choose to leave and then take steps to rectify matters.”

Of course, neither public disapproval in Israel nor personal misgivings stop Israelis from leaving, though not in numbers sufficient to endanger the state or even to cast doubt upon its feasibility. Last year the Israeli press reported that the perhaps 500,000 Israelis living in the United States had been joined by about 200 senior Israeli army officers who were here selling their battlefield experience to the defense industry, private security firms and think tanks.

Orange County in particular acts as a magnet for Israelis who have worked on building up the Jewish state’s formidable weapons industry. A visit to local aerospace and weapons system development plants will turn up scads of Israelis either engaged in joint projects with or fully employed by local companies.

Many, like Ben-Shmuel, almost inadvertently drift to America and never manage to find their way back.

“You come here at first and you don’t even think of staying,” he says. “But three years become four and five. Before you know it you’re here for good.”

But any uncertainty Ben-Shmuel felt over his decision to remain here was dispelled during a recent return to Israel, when he caught up with his former colleagues.

The controversial Lavi jet, for Israel Aircraft Industries a bread-and-butter project, had been canceled because of American pressure and major cost overruns. “The same people I worked with in IAI who once took a dim view of yordim were suddenly applying for visas to Canada and South Africa, where they were still building airplanes. So now I consider myself lucky--I made the right career move.”

Ben-Shmuel acknowledges that there are costs. The children lose touch with their roots--they are likelier to become song girls and surfers than soldiers and officers. Israeli emigrants risk losing touch both with realities in Israel and, to an extent, with those in America.

Tammy Drezner, an urban planner also living in Anaheim Hills, says that recent visits to the land where she and her husband were born have convinced her that “the Israel we remember and would like to go back to no longer even exists.”

Today, says Drezner, an Ashkenazic Jew of European descent, religious fanaticism and Sephardic values (which she disparages as reflective of “the Levant”--the Middle East) have made greater inroads in Israeli life than she feels comfortable with.

Drezner and her compatriots have found that even here, amid the churches and malls, the impeccably manicured golf courses and posh country clubs, a genuine if somewhat rarefied Israeli life style can be pursued and maintained.

Yet despite a dramatic upsurge in Jewish life in Orange County during the last 15 years (estimates put the Jewish population here at about 75,000--about one-fifth that of Los Angeles), the Israeli presence here has been largely invisible.

This stems from the small numbers of Israelis and the fact that--outside of Irvine, which boasts a sizable Jewish population--Israelis are spread thin.

They have rendered themselves relatively inconspicuous with their generally superior command of English and the relative ease with which they have adapted to American ways; the fact that they come with skills that make them highly attractive to academia, the aeronautics field and to weapon systems developers; and their general unwillingness to band together in any single Israeli enclave, instead quietly pursuing the American dream.

Moreover, as Pnina Shichor discovered four years ago when she founded the Hadar chapter of B’nai B’rith--Orange County’s first and only Hebrew-speaking association for local Israeli residents--getting her husband’s countrymen to even contemplate joining a Jewish-American organization can be exceptionally difficult.

Because of their vastly different life experiences, Israelis and American Jews have less in common than is often imagined. American Jews derive much of their Jewish identity from their religion. But in most other regards, they are little different in their attitudes and behavior from their non-Jewish neighbors. Israelis, however, most of whom are moderately irreligious, take their identity from a shared life-experience in an embattled, Hebrew-speaking, Jewish homeland whose inherent Jewish character does not depend on the communal voluntarism and organizational fund-raising that characterize Jewish life in America.

Most Israelis feel that they have long since paid their dues merely by having lived in Israel, fought in her wars, paid her hefty taxes and participated in her achievements. Consequently, Israeli newcomers to America tend to resent and suspect those Jewish-American institutions that turn to them for financial support.

“Most Israelis are also reluctant to participate in Jewish communal life,” says Pnina Shichor, “because they don’t see themselves as immigrants. Even those who have been here for many years see themselves as sojourners who will go back to Israel one day, if only to retire.”

Four years ago, however, she attended a party in Los Angeles given by the Shalom Lodge of B’nai B’rith. Established 18 years ago, Shalom Lodge has grown to include about 350 of the city’s most established Israeli families.

“We had been looking for an umbrella,” she says. “It was a question of finding an organization that would permit us the freedom to define our own objectives.”

The approximately 250 Israeli families eventually persuaded to join Hadar discovered that B’nai B’rith fit the bill admirably. Lodge meetings, which until recently were conducted in members’ homes, could be held in Hebrew. Men and women were permitted to become members of equal standing (unlike orthodox or conservative religious life in which women play a subordinate role). There were no denominational barriers to joining. And perhaps of greatest moment, given the obstinate streak of independence present in most Israelis, Hadar was left by the parent organization to set its own agenda.

“I don’t like being dictated to,” says Tammy Drezner, who joined the Hadar lodge soon after coming to Orange County two years ago with her husband, Zvi, now a departmental chairman in the school of business at Cal State Fullerton, and their 15-year-old daughter.

“If I want to make a donation, I will determine the cause. I don’t like anyone making this decision for me or taking money from me. I won’t judge the American Jewish system, but it’s not for me; I don’t feel comfortable with it.”

Hadar’s agenda, which the Drezners have little trouble living with, is quite unlike that of most other lodges in Southern California, providing an extensive social framework fashioned around a distinctly Israeli social calendar.

Israelis, for instance, vigorously celebrate many Jewish holidays that most American Jews regard as minor. And the biggest party of all, Israeli independence day, is held early in May, commemorating what for many Jews has become the prevailing miracle of their time--the resurrection of the sovereign Jewish state in 1948.

In between these observances, Hadar’s members seek one another out to do the things they used to do in Israel. Friday evenings, for instance, are reserved for coffee and cake with friends, served up with ample dishes of politics. These days, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza serves as the focus for what Israelis generously call “discussion,” but which to outside observers might seem more akin to a street fight.

Steve (born Shalom) Eisenberg, Hadar’s newly elected president, says he has observed a liberal trend among his Israeli friends and acquaintances in Orange County. They voice greater willingness than at any time since the aftermath of the Six Day War, in 1967, to talk with Palestinians about trading land for peace. Many Israelis living in Los Angeles, however, lean to the right and have adopted a hard-line approach to the recent riots.

Eisenberg, at 54 a lean, tanned resident of Huntington Beach who owns an insurance company, says this dichotomy is not hard to understand.

“We have a better class of Israelis living here,” he declares, “people who have been here for some time, professional people, academics. And here, as in Israel, such people are more liberal in their politics.”

There is a certain snob appeal, Eisenberg acknowledges, to living in Orange County and to belonging to Hadar. Oddly, this tinge of exclusivity seems aimed more at fellow Israelis in Los Angeles than at their non-Jewish neighbors.

“We have no problems with our Gentile neighbors,” says Shmuel Ben-Shmuel, “and I get on well with my colleagues at work. But though cordial, these relationships are superficial. We don’t visit each other’s homes. There is no getting away from the fact that we are foreigners--you can tell that every time we open our mouths.

“We simply have more in common with each other. Although we have some contact with the Jewish community, we seek out other Israelis because we share the same background and culture. It’s only natural.”