Home at Last

The move from Westwood to the West Bank was a natural for Joel Zeff and his wife, Donna. For years, the question the Orthodox couple had asked themselves was not if they should move their family to the land of their Jewish forefathers, but when. And finally, where.

The Zeffs left Los Angeles for Israel in 1994 for the same reason millions of Jews from around the world have migrated to the Middle East in the last half century: to take part in what Joel Zeff calls “the greatest Jewish adventure in 2,000 years”--the building of a Jewish state.

Housed in a temporary “absorption center” for a year, the couple searched for a community that would provide a safe environment for their children and a comfortable standard of living. “We wanted a place where we could buy an apartment, raise our family and just sort of get old,” Donna Zeff said.

They found their haven in the embattled West Bank.

Never mind that Joel Zeff passes an Israeli army checkpoint to get to his teaching job at the David Shapell College of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem each day, or that the community the family settled in is enclosed by a barbed wire fence and an electric metal gate.

Forget the bomb that exploded at the bus stop out front a few months back--that can happen in London or Tel Aviv--and forget that Palestinians frustrated with a broken-down peace process also claim this land as theirs.

The Zeffs have never felt safer than in Alon Shevut.

“This is really a suburb of Jerusalem. . . . It is like a small town in the United States in the 1950s,” Donna Zeff, 39, said one morning in the final days of pregnancy with her seventh child.

A small college campus would be a more apt description. Alon Shevut offers an encapsuled life to its residents--modern Orthodox Jews who, like the Zeffs, wear modest dress, keep kosher and honor the Sabbath.

It is a separate reality of manicured lawns with pink oleander trim, of crimson rose beds and tiger lilies. Paved footpaths connect the Zeffs’ apartment building to a central plaza with a post office, bank, grocery store, health clinic and synagogue whose picture windows open to the ancient Judean hills.

“If you look around, you almost don’t see Arab villages,” said Joel Zeff, formerly the rabbi of the Westwood Kehilla Congregation. “There are 17 Jewish communities lumped together here. You don’t look out and see a hostile population. You see a Jewish population and feel comfortable.”

Minimizing contact with the Palestinians--and potential clashes--was one reason the Israeli government bulldozed a new “bypass” road from Jerusalem to West Bank settlements such as Alon Shevut last year. The $42-million highway tunnels beneath the Palestinian village of Beit Jala and swings past Arab olive groves into the hills with bands of stone like tree rings marking the centuries. Israelis may drive the highway, but Palestinians are not allowed.

Alon Shevut, part of the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements built in the 1970s, looks like what the Israeli government undoubtedly hopes the controversial Har Homa development in east Jerusalem will become in another 20 years: A large, deeply rooted and seemingly permanent Jewish community on the ruddy land captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War.

Unlike the Har Homa project, which has brought about a halt in peace negotiations because the Arabs believe its development violates the spirit and letter of the accords, Alon Shevut was raised on the ruins of Jewish communities wiped out by Arabs during the final days of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. For that reason, and its proximity to Jerusalem, even liberals in the former Labor governments that forged landmark peace accords with the Palestinians envision annexing the Gush Etzion bloc to Israel in a final peace agreement.

But the Palestinians insist that all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem should be turned over to them for an independent state, and, so long as there is no peace treaty, West Bank residents such as the Zeffs are seen by most of the world as settlers in occupied territory.

The Zeffs do not see themselves that way, of course. Like most devout Israelis, they call the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, and see the land as a Jewish birthright. Although they say politics did not motivate them to settle here, they were more than happy to give up the Southern California “good life” to help populate this disputed territory.

“I look at these hills and they have Jewish meaning,” Joel Zeff said. “The Santa Monica Mountains are pretty, but they have no Jewish meaning.”

The family lives in a five-bedroom garden apartment with a splash pool and Little Tikes toys in the yard. Armed sentries at the front gate and a gaily painted bomb shelter near the front door are facts of life in Israel. To the Zeffs, the important thing is that their children are free to walk to school without a chaperon and safe to play in the park alone. And they are close to their Jewish roots.

“Our children take a school field trip and it is to see where an important battle took place during the time of Hanukkah or to visit the tomb of Abraham and Sarah in Hebron,” Donna Zeff said. “In Los Angeles, they went to the science museum. I am not opposed to the science museum, but in Los Angeles you cannot get on a bus and go to a place with biblical significance.”

In Los Angeles, the Zeffs also lived in a Jewish world. While he ran the synagogue, she kept a Jewish home, led birthing classes and ferried the children to Jewish schools in the Fairfax district. The couple identified with Israel, where each had lived as a student.

During the 1991 Gulf War, with Israel under Iraqi Scud missile attack, the Zeffs decided they had to move to the Jewish state as soon as possible and embrace an all-encompassing Jewish life. It took another three years to wrap up family affairs and work in the synagogue before they could make aliya, or ascend, as immigration to Israel is called in Hebrew.

“In the United States,” Joel Zeff explained, “you can have a Jewish life, but there are major aspects which are not going to be Jewish. Politics and the economy are not Jewish issues. In Israel, every aspect of life becomes a Jewish issue. Democracy versus religion, privatization and what kind of economy we want are Jewish issues because this is a Jewish state.

“Judaism,” he added, “is not something you address in one part of life. It colors every part, collective and private. Only in our own state can we express what it is to be Jewish and everything becomes a religious experience.”

“So when you voted last year it was a religious experience?” his wife asked half jokingly.

“Yes, it was,” he said earnestly.

Joel Zeff, 40, is an opponent of the Oslo accords, signed by the Labor government and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in which Israel sought to trade land for peace. The agreements, he said, are the product of a naive, secular Israeli view of life. “I don’t think the architects believe in the depths of their hearts that this land belongs to us by divine right. . . . They regard the Jewish presence here as an illegitimate occupation.”

His thinking is more in keeping with hard-liners in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who advocate further settlement in the West Bank. Soon after arriving in Alon Shevut in 1995, Joel Zeff took his children and sleeping bags to nearby Efrat, where they occupied a hilltop overnight in protest of the Labor government’s restriction on settlement expansion. The demonstrators were evacuated by the Israeli army in the early morning, but now two rows of temporary, prefab shacks line the hill.

The Zeffs believe that the intifada was nearly extinguished when former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the first agreement with Arafat in September 1993 and that the rock-throwing rebellion was preferable to a rocky peace with suicide bombers and armed Palestinian police. “A lot of problems don’t have a solution. You just live with them and it takes the passage of time to work them out. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the illness,” Joel Zeff said.

Time, in Israel’s experience, allows trees and settlements to take root; temporary shacks are replaced by sturdy houses with red-tiled roofs, and new West Bank enclaves grow into Israeli towns, making it harder for Palestinians to turn back the clock.

Like most of the men in Alon Shevut, Joel Zeff wears a multicolored knitted skullcap instead of a black kippa--a symbol that he is a religious Zionist who supports the state of Israel and believes in integrating Jewish tradition into the modern world. His community is home to the Har Etzion Hesder Yeshiva, whose students alternate Torah studies with army service that is required of all but Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox in Israel.

Unlike the haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are called, the Zeffs read secular newspapers and allow their children to watch television and popular movies such as “Independence Day.” Hebrew-language religious tomes share space on the family bookshelves with “The World According to Dave Barry” in English. And their living room walls combine posters of Yosemite with a map of Israel and a portrait of the country’s first chief rabbi.

The Zeffs say they sometimes miss the beauty of California and the civility of American politics, but otherwise they have no regrets about having left the United States. Joel Zeff views his extended family’s time in America--less than 100 years--as a mere stopover on the way from Eastern Europe to Israel.

Now the Zeffs feel their family is home.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

ALON SHEVUT

Atmosphere like a small college campus.

School field trips to biblical battle sites.

The ancient Judean hills.

Every aspect of life is a Jewish issue.

WESTWOOD

Major university town.

School field trips to the science museum.

The Santa Monica Mountains.

Politics and the economy are not Jewish issues.