'In Canada, I was talking to the wall'

Frieda Solomon-Meller, an 81-year-old Auschwitz survivor who spent over 50 years in Montreal, recalls crying from fear before her recent aliyah. But within one year she concluded this was perhaps the second best decision of her life.

"Before she came I was sure it was the right thing, because her children and grandchildren were here and I didn't want her to be alone," said Solomon-Meller's daughter Barbara Brown, who last year founded Aliyah 121, a private company specializing in helping retirees plan their aliyah. "But in the first months after she arrived even I started thinking I might have made the wrong decision, because it wasn't easy for her."

"I was scared," Solomon-Meller told Anglo File this week in her cozy apartment in Jerusalem's Ramat Tamir assisted-living facility. "I had all my doctors in Canada, I knew my way around there. When my daughter came and packed for me I said I don't need anything, I'm not going." But she went, and to get over the initial teething troubles, she started going on walks with her next-door neighbor, who was also her late husband's best friend.

"But one day I said I don't want to go out on walks with you anymore," Solomon-Meller, who is strictly Orthodox, remembered. "People are talking. I don't want to have a boyfriend and I don't want to be a girlfriend. We have to stop this." She even forbade him from calling, but the next morning the phone rang and he told her he proposed to marry her.

"So we got married, here in Ramat Tamir," she said. "In Canada I was talking to the wall, hoping my late husband would walk in. Now I couldn't be happier, because I have somebody to talk to. The good thing is I can talk about my late husband because it was his friend. And we talk a lot about him so he is not forgotten."