Leaving Home for a Homeland : Emigres: For some Jews, leaving Los Angeles and settling in Israel has brought fulfillment; for others, the move has brought disappointment.

They leave Los Angeles in response to an ancient imperative of Jewish life, a powerful dream that promises them personal fulfillment as part of their people’s redemption. For that dream they leave behind friends, family and the ease of life in America and “make aliyah, “ which in Hebrew literally translates to ascent, but has come to mean immigration to Israel.

And then they must begin to grapple with the difficulties of Israeli life.

No one is certain how many Angelenos now live in Israel. The Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council, whose Jerusalem office tries to keep in touch with them, lists more than 1,000 households, but the actual number is surely higher, because many immigrants do not register with the federation or they drop out of contact with it.

The majority of current immigrants are Orthodox Jews impelled by their belief that it is a mitzvah, a spiritual obligation, to live in the Land of Israel. “For a Jew, there is no other place to live,” insists Yehuda Richter, a Los Angeles native who now makes his home in Elon Moreh, on the West Bank.

Some immigrants are driven by a Zionist commitment to build the Jewish state. Others are retirees who want to spend their last years in the Jewish homeland or are simply Jews who want to make a significant change in their lives.

But the fact is, it’s not easy. Los Angeles Federation officials say that half of all American immigrants will return to the United States within three years, driven back by the difficulties of earning a living and of integrating comfortably into Israeli society.

There is no typical Los Angeles-to-Israel emigre; they are a diverse lot. Here are snapshots of a few of them, drawn from interviews conducted during a recent visit to Israel.

David Kurz

In 1970, Kurz, a native of the San Fernando Valley, left graduate school in San Diego, where he had been spending as much time organizing against the Vietnam War as studying. Out of curiosity, he took a trip to Israel where, as a New Left activist, he expected to find “horrible Israeli imperialists doing horrible things to the Palestinians.”

The truth, he says wryly, was “considerably more mixed,” and to his surprise, he felt a sense of having come home. “I experienced this as the place I had the most connection to, of any place on Earth.”

He returned to the United States to complete his graduate degree in social work, got some experience in his field, then emigrated. And since then, says Kurz--a bearded, bearish man now fluent in Hebrew, married, and the father of two young children--he has never thought of coming back.

“Here’s an opportunity to create,” he said, “to build a society.

“Life in L.A. is a lot easier materially,” he acknowledged. “But the quality of life here in Israel is better. I can let my kids go out without fear of violence. We have no pictures on milk cartons here in Israel asking us, ‘Have you seen this child?’ We have no freeway shootings or drive-by shootings or drug wars with automatic weapons.”

As a parent, he worries about his children going into the army--Israeli men serve three years, women two. “We’re not happy about it, of course, but that’s a part of life here, too. Part of the choice of helping to build the society is also defending it.”

The only thing he really misses, he said, is his extended family, all of whom remain in the United States.

Galia Kaspi

Kaspi--her name was Gay as she was growing up on the Westside--made aliyah 20 years ago, during the halcyon days following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. “I always felt the importance of Israel as a home where Jews could go,” she said.

Just out of college then, she transformed herself from an American city girl into an Israeli moshavnik, a farm girl, through tough physical labor, and she married an Israeli. Now a single parent with two teen-age daughters in Tel Aviv, she must work two teaching jobs to make ends meet. Her daughters also hold down jobs in order to buy some of the things they need.

“Being a single parent is hard anywhere,” Kaspi said. She, too, does not consider returning to America.

Does she worry about the possibility of war in the Persian Gulf? “I worry about it the way people in L.A. worry about the earthquake,” she said. “What I really worry about is my 17-year-old daughter going driving with a friend who just got his driver’s license two weeks ago--that I worry about.”

Mark Feldman

Feldman grew up in Northridge, went to school at UCLA and emigrated to Israel in 1981. There he started a travel agency, a business he knew nothing about, by hiring two experts and learning the ropes from them. Though the agency is now well-established, taxes leave him only $13,000 in net income--respectable in Israel but far less than what a successful small businessman would make in the United States. Even so, he says, he is not tempted to return.

“In Los Angeles, I could earn much more money,” he said, “but it wouldn’t matter to the society or to me.” He credits his agency’s emphasis on American-style customer service with having changed the travel business in Jerusalem. “Israel is a place where you can still make a difference,” he said.

But Feldman’s business provides frequent reminders that, for many Americans, the adjustment is a tough one.

“We sell a lot of one-way tickets back to the States,” he said.

Joel and Cindy

Joel and Cindy--they asked that their real names not be used--are a young Orthodox couple with three small children whose story is typical of those for whom aliyah fails. Both lawyers, as immigrants they are now reaching the end of their third year, when their special immigrant rights lapse and men become eligible for army duty.

A central problem is finances. With the money from the sale of their home in Los Angeles, they bought a beautiful, high-ceilinged apartment in Jerusalem. It cost them $280,000. But that choice was based on their annual income in Los Angeles of $120,000.

In Israel, where they are completing the apprenticeship that will allow them to practice there, they both work full-time for a combined income of less than $1,000 a month. Admission to the bar would improve the financial picture, but not a lot, they say.

“My baby-sitter makes more than I do,” Cindy said. She and Joel rely on help from their parents to make it through each month.

In addition, their fulfillment as Jews, their core reason for making aliyah , has not materialized. Joel says he is distressed by the relentless secularism of Israeli society on one hand, and by what he calls the “unpleasantness” of the religious Establishment on the other.

Cindy confesses that she often simply doesn’t like Israelis. “In California, you have the sense of people being nice ,” she said. She recalled a recent incident in which shoppers in a Jerusalem store in which smoking was prohibited rudely refused her request that they extinguish their cigarettes.

Some people who know them suggest that Joel and Cindy were betrayed by their own expectations of the spiritual riches and professional opportunities that life in Israel would offer.

“We came with a romantic notion,” Cindy acknowledged.

They are considering returning to America, but they hesitate because, they say, Israel is good for their children--physically safe and emotionally warm, with Judaism and Hebrew a natural part of their lives.

“Yeah, we’re doing it for the children,” Joel said wryly. “So they can be Israelis--and then they’ll grow up and move to Los Angeles.” (At least 50,000 Israelis have emigrated to Los Angeles in the last two decades.)

Dan and Penny Wities

Another young Orthodox couple from Los Angeles, Dan and Penny Wities, are taking a more cautious path by only “trying out life in Israel,” they said. They moved directly to a kibbutz with a population of about 500, not far from the Gaza Strip.

Complete adjustment to kibbutz life will take time. Even after a year, Dan and Penny still sometimes feel outside the tight social network there. Moreover, their ambition to work in their professions away from the kibbutz--Dan is a computer programmer, Penny an educator--presents a dilemma to the kibbutz leadership, which fears this choice will further hinder the couple’s integration and commitment.

Nevertheless, the Witieses say they have made a basically good adjustment. “There may be problems,” says Dan, a lifelong Zionist, “but there is no more worthwhile goal than building the Jewish state.”

But they retain some mixed feelings about making Israelis of their two children, a boy of 8 and a girl of 5.

For one thing, they worry about army service. “Very scary,” Penny says. “I might never forgive myself for moving here if my son got killed.”

Dan, like David Kurz, is more philosophical, for himself as well as his son. “You pay your dues. If you want a Jewish state, you have to serve in the army.”

But right now, army service is far off, and the children are thriving--fluent in Hebrew, with a large peer group and an easy sense of being at home on the whole kibbutz, with its fields, barns, factories and wide variety of people and activities.

Dan and Penny have separated themselves and their children from all the familiar aspects of life in Los Angeles, 10,000 miles away, to create a strong future for the Jewish people. Yet, as they watch their children become seamlessly at home in Israel, pride is mixed with a sense of losing their children to this new country.

If they remain, their children will become different from them--Israelis, not Americans. Dan and Penny, for example, speak an American-accented Hebrew that will always mark them as immigrants. Five-year-old Adina, on the other hand, is not only more comfortable in Hebrew but has now begun to speak English with a noticeable Israeli accent.