They learned with an intensity; they flew in the heavens above the desert. And finally Chaim knew why he had to come on the trip

As told to Rivka Streicher

You don’t get to choose your neighbors, which is just as well. Chaim, a chassidish rosh yeshivah, and Ilan, a Moroccan businessman, traditional but not strictly religious, would never have become the close friends they are if G-d hadn’t put them next door to each other in Jerusalem.

On their adjacent porches, they’ve spent many a Shabbos together, singing, fabrenging, talking of their respective heritages.

Chaim’s ancestry is mainly Polish. Ilan’s winds its way through Africa. His extended family still lives in Morocco, comfortably and largely, but he’d come to Eretz Yisrael because he wanted to give his children something else.

Staunch Sephardi that he is, Ilan would make an annual trip to the gravesite of Rabbi Yaakov Abuchatzeira on his hilula. One time, a couple of days before he left for Casablanca, he knocked on his neighbor’s door.

“Chaim, this year you’ve got to come.”

And Rabbi Yaakov Abuchatzeira is buried in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in the Egyptian Nile Delta city of Damanhour. A dearly wished-for trip to the Holy Land cost him his life in 1879 when he grew ill on the journey through the desert and died.

Chaim had heard enough about it to know this was an experience he didn’t want to miss.

“Let’s see if I can make it,” Chaim said, and at the last minute he was able to.

He was busy with yeshivah-related matters on the way to the airport and didn’t think anything of it when Ilan said, “Leave it all to me, the itinerary, lodgings, food.”