Last update - 00:00 21/12/2007
The most nurturing experience an oleh could have wanted
By Ariel Zilber
We were a unique group at Ulpan Etzion in January 2004, new immigrants from the four corners of the earth. If the Zionist enterprise is history's most ambitious lab experiment, then we were the fresh batch of mice thrown into the volatile cage. At this run-down yet reputable school in West Jerusalem, we could not have asked for a better, more nurturing facility.
From the school's social worker who took on my HMO after it wouldn't process my health insurance without proper forms from the army, to the ulpan director who assured us we were more Israeli than the natives because we were here by choice, to the Hebrew teacher who explained the difference between the verb structures, ulpan was a new home away from home, a cultural kaleidoscope that brought together gentiles from Uzbekistan, Argentine soccer fanatics, Brazilian engineering students, and young, flamboyantly wealthy French Jews.
During class, one kippah-wearing oleh from Uruguay broke out in applause when the teacher showed television coverage from the period of Rabin's assassination. One secular Brazilian girl who spent summers at Hashomer Hatzair found little in common with her Orthodox roommate. Nor was she amused when the sign she had carried to a Peace Now rally was torn into pieces by Israel's newest volunteers for the West Bank's hilltop youth.
Although palpable, the politics of the day did not dominate the ulpan dynamic. The friendships forged cross cultural and linguistic barriers that would not have been broken in any other social structure. Where else could the Ghanaian son of a Russian Jewish mother meet a Colombian girl who would later become his bride?
Ulpan did more than just instruct us about proper spelling or warn us to tell the cab driver to turn on the meter before he offered to rip us off. It gave us our first cold dose of the Israeli reality that we grapple with to this day.