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Last update - 00:00 25/01/2007
Family Affair / The Zeidlers
By Avner Avrahami and Reli Avrahami
Kiryat Tivon
The cast: Amit (51), Corrie (47), Hamutal (15).
The home: 86 square meters, slope-adjacent, forest-facing. Below, in the wadi, lies ancient Beit She'arim, straight ahead is Mukhraka (on bayonets of cypresses). The home stands on a steeply sloping lot on which are lemon, pomegranate and oak trees alongside cyclamens, an herbarium and bristly hollyhocks ("which will begin to bloom in March"). The building has two apartments on the second floor, which is accessed by a separate side entrance, by which one descends by stairs from the road level.
Real estate history: Built in the 1950s, purchased in 2003 for $155,000, to which they added $10,000 for renovations. They already had half the amount (from selling a one-room apartment in Jerusalem) and they obtained the rest with a 10-year mortgage, on which they repay NIS 4,100 a month.
The rooms: One is Corrie and Amit's (functional), one is Hamutal's (with a brown teddybear and an Escher drawing), one is for work (with a desk and a computer). We head for the library.
The library: Covers an entire wall and is divided into four areas. On the left is Judaism (Talmud, Book of Zohar, Mishna); on the right is Dutch literature, part of which was translated from Hebrew by Corrie (such as David Grossman's "Her Body Knows"); in the center is Hebrew literature (Agnon, Zeruya Shalev, Haim Be'er) and English literature, including albums, dictionaries, cookbooks and "The Complete Works of Shakespeare."
Design: Most of the furniture is from Holland. The small armchair (brown corduroy) is an inheritance from Grandma in 's-Gravenzande, a village near The Hague; the low table is from Leiden ("from a close woman friend"); the sofa is from Ikea (Eindhoven); and they found the armchairs in Nijmegen (the city of marches). On the upper shelf are Judaica items and on the wall is a picture of a passenger ship.
The ship: Drawn in great detail with colored pencils. Corrie relates that the artist was her grandfather's brother, a Dutch captain, who sailed to Indonesia in the 1920s.
Livelihood and occupation - Amit: Process engineer at Tower Semiconductor, a factory in Midgal Ha'emek which makes computer chips, specializing in photolithography - designing electrical circuits on chips ("There are connections of 130 nanometers"). He works a five-day week, driving a company car (Ford Focus), and is not apprehensive about the plan to tax leased vehicles ("I definitely think that we would be taxed more heavily").
Livelihood and occupation - Corrie: Reform rabbi at the Union of Progressive Judaism ("That's a bit of a patronizing name") Ma'alot Tivon congregation. She was ordained last year at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, and has been working half-time since January. The congregation has 120 members ("from birth to 87"). The synagogue is located in a bomb shelter. Corrie delivers the Friday-night sermon, leads the service and makes sure everything goes as it should. She also prepares children for the bar and bat mitzvah. So far, she says, she has performed one marriage and officiated at one funeral.
Reform worship: Men and women sit together, mentions of animal sacrifices have been removed from the service while poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik, Yehuda Amichai and Lea Goldberg have been added.
Hamutal: Tenth-grade student at a local branch of the ORT vocational schools network (a 15-minute walk away). She is in the communications track and is in the drama and dance clubs. Her drama group won a community theater competition ("We did Hanoch Levin skits"), winning a day at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. She is also learning ballroom dancing (waltz, samba, cha-cha) and says that the "slow" is a dance without technique.
Corrie's bio: Born in 1959 in New Guinea to a Protestant family ("not strict"). Her father was governor when the island (or half of it) belonged to The Netherlands; her paternal grandfather was governor of the Indonesian island of Bali ("We were a colonialist family"). The family returned to Holland when she was three ("We lived in The Hague"). When she was 11 they moved to Bussum, a small city near Amsterdam, where she attended high school. She paid her first visit to Israel when she was 16 ("My parents belonged to the Dutch-Israeli Friendship League"). Two years later, in 1977, she came to Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem, as a volunteer, where she met Amit.
Amit: Born in Kiryat Anavim and a grandson of kibbutz founders ("Granddad was killed in a plane crash while enroute to Holland to buy cows, just after the War of Independence"). His mother was the kibbutz cook and his father worked in the chicken coop and drove a truck. In high school, he showed a tendency to dismantle watches, film projectors and chemical substances ("I released teargas into the classroom"). He did his army service after the Yom Kippur War, in the Artillery Corps, after which he returned to the kibbutz, worked in the fruit groves and started up with Corrie.
The meeting: She was a volunteer from Holland (a chambermaid in the hotel), he was a recently demobilized soldier working in the groves and running the discotheque ("Lots of 'Hotel California' and The Moody Blues). One evening he asked her "What's up?" in Dutch, but she didn't reply ("I was from a good family"). A month later they were going out.
Continuation: Corrie returned to Holland ("parental pressure") and studied at Utrecht University (Semitic languages), while Amit went to Kiryat Shmona to save up money to visit her ("I worked as a security guard for Israel Military Industries"). In Bussum she introduced him to her parents, who were very impressed, especially after he renovated their house ("a little paint and some plumbing"). A wedding was arranged in short order (in the town hall), after which they returned to Israel and attended university (he studying physics and mathematics, she Hebrew). At the same time she studied for conversion to Judaism.
The conversion: Orthodox, performed by Rabbi Krupnik, who is ultra-Orthodox. ("His wife is also a convert.") Amit attended all the meetings ("It's inconceivable for a convert to know more than me about Judaism"). He notes that he faced a dilemma in regard to conversion: he wanted his wife to be a Jew but did not want to impose it on her, and at the same time, "love had to triumph." Corrie, it turns out, had no hesitations: "I simply wanted to convert." They were married for a second time in 1979, in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony at Jerusalem's Beit Hamehandes banquet hall.
Bios (cont.): In 1982 they moved to Kibbutz Yahel, a Reform Movement kibbutz in the Arava Desert, where daughters Shimrit, 23, and Dikla, 22, were born (both are now studying in Holland). They returned to Jerusalem five years later. Corrie worked at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a think tank, Amit at Intel ("the start of my high-tech career"). In 1992, after Hamutal was born, they moved to Holland for nine years, living in a small village (Amit worked as an engineer for Philips). They returned to Israel in 2001, to the Intifada and the suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem ("The girls were there that morning"). They lived in Kiryat Anavim for a year, and Corrie began her rabbinical studies ("I am the first convert to be ordained in Israel"), moving to Tivon in 2002 after Amit found a job in the area.
Daily routine: Amit and Corrie rise at 6, drink a cup of filter coffee (Dutch) and wake Hamutal (every five minutes from 6:30 until 6:45). Hamutal gets up. Breakfast is at 7, fruit and eshel (a cultured-milk product) for Corrie and Amit, cold cereal ("As a rule, I don't like to eat") for Hamutal. Amit and Hamutal leave at 7:30, while Corrie stays home to deal with e-mails and phone calls and to prepare lectures. They have lunch separately - Amit in the company cafeteria ("They know me as a vegetarian"), Corrie and Hamutal at home. Usually they start with lentil soup and go on to a Tivall vegetable pie. They have supper together. Amit makes a salad and Corrie bakes bread (in the breadmaker machine). She uses dry yeast, from Holland.
Television: "We don't have cable." They watch only the news, on Channel 1 and Channel Two. Hamutal adds "Gilmore Girls," the Israeli satirical program "A Wonderful Country" and the local series, "Life Isn't Everything."
Household chores: "We share them." Hamutal is responsible for her room, Corrie does the rest. Do you wash the floor? "Not so much" - she mainly vacuums. Amit cooks ("I try things"). Recently he made mock chopped liver with eggplant, which he says was better than that of his mother (the kibbutz cook).
Shopping: Friday morning, together, at a branch of Mega. They buy vegetables in the nearby village of Rekhasim, and Tivall at the company store (at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot). They note that it's very important to go to the supermarket with a shopping list, not tabula rasa.
Shabbat: They drive but don't buy. The drive is usually to the synagogue or to visit Amit's parents ("the commandment to honor one's parents").
God: Corrie believes, but not in a deity of reward and punishment and not in life in the next world. Amit - "By the time I was in second grade, I said there is no God, but today I know that the subject does not need to be defined. There is no need to know or to answer the question." Hamutal: "God does not help those who do not help themselves."
Jewish people: Corrie is pessimistic ("We are deteriorating to self-hatred").
Dreams: Corrie - "For the community to grow until another rabba [female rabbi] is needed"; Amit - "For Corrie to succeed and for me to be a photolithography guru"; Hamutal - "To be an actress."
Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): Corrie - 9, Amit - 8, Hamutal - "Up from 7 to 9, I have a boyfriend."
The place
Kiryat Tivon - a town in Lower Galilee, population 14,000, founded in the 1930s, leads Israel in waste recycling and in green areas.
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