A best friend is revealed as a long-lost sibling

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Family archives

Imagine having a dream where you discover that your best friend is really a long-lost sibling you never even knew existed.

That your chavrusa and best buddy from yeshivah, the one who sat with you at every meal and shared your dorm room and late-night DMCs, turns out to be your big brother. It sounds like a plot so far-fetched that only the Supreme Author could have thought it up — but for two fellows named Ofer Shushan and Lior Alhanati, it was a dream come true.

Lior Alhanati’s unconventional attire — a flowing Tanach-inspired tunic and a tarboosh crowning long, twisted locks, sparkling eyes, a grey-streaked beard and spiraling peyos — testifies to a life of searching for connection. Indeed, he’s been many things over the years: farmer, shepherd, equestrian therapist, landscaper. But his most profound self-definition, he says, is one that eluded him for 30 years: Brother.

Lior’s personal odyssey began 48 years ago, as an underweight, chronically-ill baby (he’s now a broad, strapping six-footer), whose emotionally-depleted and financially-destitute parents couldn’t cope with this third child in as many years. When he was two years old, the Social Services Office in Teveria, where the family lived, was alerted to the difficulty, swooped in and, with the father’s permission, took Lior away and placed him in a children’s home.

While Lior’s father was glad to be relieved of the burden, Lior’s mother was less certain, although she assumed that any new arrangement would be a type of foster care, where she would be able to visit her toddler son on a regular basis until the family situation stabilized. But little Lior was put up for adoption and the door to his family was slammed shut and locked.

Lior lived in the orphanage for two years, until he was adopted by the Alhanati family, a devoted and loving childless couple from the Galilee town of Carmiel.

Eventually Lior’s biological parents reestablished themselves and had another five children, but Lior was permanently out of their lives — and no one in the immediate family, except for his parents, even knew of his existence.

“I can still sense the horror, the devastation of the separation and abandonment,” recalls Lior close to five decades later, sitting in his sun-drenched living room in Elad, where he works as a landscaper in non-shemittah years and is currently busy tending to permissible work in the olive groves of nearby yishuvim. “I grew up knowing that I was adopted, that somewhere there are other parents, brothers and sisters. It was an awful feeling that accompanied me through my years growing up.”

Lior praises the parents who raised him, referring to his father as “one of the 36 tzaddikim in the world” with his deep, unswerving faith, and his mother who took in a strange child and raised him as her own.

In the Alhanati household, Lior was raised mitzvah-observant. He would go to shul with his adoptive father, and recalls as a seven-year-old being in shul and reading the perek L’David Hashem during Chodesh Elul. When he reached the words, “Although my father and mother have forsaken me, G-d will gather me in,” it shook him up.

“I went up to this old man and said, ‘Who wrote this prayer? Does he not have parents either?’ The man explained that I was 3,000 years late, that we were talking about David Hamelech. Yet I’ve always felt connected to those words, even in the most rebellious times that would lie ahead for me.”