For many years, the Jewish community had lived in relative peace in Syria. It was only at the end of 1947, when the UN declared Israel a state, that tensions between the Jews and the Syrian government surfaced. There were pogroms in which Jews were murdered, and batei knesset and businesses were vandalized. My grandfather’s store, which sold luxury imported fabrics, was burnt down. The community was terrified. Although some locals tried to protect us, people felt Aleppo was no longer a safe place to live.

Before my parents were married, my father was involved with the Sochnut (the Jewish Agency, which facilitates Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael), helping them smuggle children out of Syria to what was then Mandatory Palestine. He only stopped when he was caught, beaten, and thrown into jail. Baruch Hashem, relatives were able to come up with bribe money to bail him out.

After the War of Independence in 1948, even our Arab neighbors who had previously protected us turned against the Jewish community. At that point, my father turned to my mother and said, “We can’t stay here any longer. This is not a place to raise a family.”

My mother agreed. “We need to get out of here.” That’s when my parents began to actively look for ways to leave the country. However, it was illegal to travel to Israel, and you needed to be granted an exit visa to leave for any country, so it wasn’t simple.

Overall, most Arab countries had no relations with Israel in those days. For example, when my grandmother emigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1950, she went via Lebanon, where she had a sister. After settling in Eretz Yisrael, she had no contact with her sister back in Lebanon until 1955, when her daughter (my aunt) married an American and moved to New London, Connecticut. Once my aunt moved to America, she became the go-between for their correspondence. My great-aunt would send letters to America, and my aunt would forward them to her mother back in Israel.

It wasn’t until 1950 that my parents finally had an opportunity to leave with their children, my two-year-old self and my one-year-old sister. By that time, my grandparents on both sides had already gone. My parents decided to escape Syria by driving to Lebanon, only a few hours away, and crossing the border to Rosh HaNikra in Northern Israel. They figured it would be a good idea to leave on New Year’s Eve because the Lebanese guarding the border were Christian and would most likely be celebrating that day, so they wouldn’t be paying as much attention to the border.

Not to arouse their neighbors’ suspicion, my parents decided to leave from an uncle’s house on the other side of the city. A few days before January 1, they told their neighbors that they were moving to live near relatives in another neighborhood. They packed up the house, sending ahead larger items like Persian carpets, lamb’s wool blankets, and pillows to my mother’s aunt, Rabbanit Shrem, in Lebanon, and then with the rest of their belongings, moved into my great-uncle’s home for what they thought would be a few days. They hired a driver to take them into Lebanon late at night on the first of January.

But on the night of their planned departure, there was a huge snowstorm. The roads were closed. It was impossible to drive to Lebanon.

The three days they had planned to stay in my great-uncle’s house ended up being three years. By that time, my two little brothers had joined the family. We were six people living in one room in my great-uncle’s house, but I remember always feeling secure. My parents were obviously tense about the situation, but they managed not to pass their anxiety on to us. As far as I was concerned, we were together, and I was okay.

IN 1953, a regime change finally forced my parents out of Syria. The new government declared that all foreign citizens had to leave the country immediately. Even though my family had lived in Syria for almost 200 years, we were considered foreigners, and the government gave my parents two weeks to get out. Those who had “bakshish,” money to bribe government officials, were able to stay longer. My parents didn’t have it, so we had to go.

Because we were being forced by the government to leave, we didn’t have to escape in the middle of the night to be smuggled across a border. However, it was still illegal to emigrate directly to Israel, so we traveled via Turkey.

My aunt had a relative who lived in Istanbul who agreed to let us stay with her until we were able to secure passage on a boat bound for Israel.

The train ride to Istanbul from Aleppo took two days. I remember one scary moment as we were settling in our seats, and an Arab man tried pushing his way into our car. My father blocked the door and said, “You can’t come in. There are women and children in there.” Baruch Hashem, the Arab backed away and left.

Since Syria didn’t recognize Israel as a sovereign country, there was no Israeli embassy there, so my father couldn’t contact the Sochnut and arrange passage and visas to Israel until we reached Istanbul. Once we arrived in Istanbul, he visited the Israeli embassy every day to find out when the next boat was leaving to Eretz Yisrael.

What I remember most from that time is that my aunt’s relative lived in an apartment building with an elevator. I’d never seen one before. My sister and I spent most of our days having a blast riding up and down in it.

Finally, one day my father came home from the embassy and said, “The boat is here. It’s time to go.”

The Sochnut had sent a freight ship, and our accommodations were less than ideal. We were assigned to the steerage section, and each of us received one small, thin mattress to sleep on. There were many adults and even more children, many of whom were war refugees from Europe. I was excited and enjoyed the first few days on the ship until we hit stormy weather. I got so seasick.

After two weeks of travel, we arrived in Haifa. The dock hadn’t been built yet, so our ship couldn’t pull up right to shore. We stopped in the middle of the ocean and rowboats were sent to bring us in. I remember my mother was so nervous to climb down the shaky rope ladder from the ship to the rowboat while holding the baby.

My most heartwarming memory from that time was the surprise of seeing my uncle, my father’s brother, excitedly waving to us from the shore when our rowboat pulled up. We hadn’t seen him for two years.

“How did you know we were going to be on this boat?” we asked him.

“I have a friend who works in the port who saw Sasson on the list of arrivals,” he said. “I figured it would be you.”

From the Haifa port we were taken to a machaneh olim, an absorption center. There was one huge room for all the new arrivals. We were each given a bed, made of a heavy metal frame, and a straw mattress. “Look at this place,” my mother said. “How will I manage with no privacy and four children under the age of five to take care of?”

For us kids, though, with so many children around to play with, it was great fun. Luckily for my mother, we were only there for two weeks.

Something my sister and I still laugh about today was that we were convinced that the truck that took us from the machaneh olim to the ma’abarah (transit camp), our next destination, was self-driving. We sat in the back compartment, and we couldn’t see the driver, so in our little minds, there wasn’t one. “Who’s driving the truck, do you think?” I anxiously asked my sister. “It’s driving itself!” my sister whispered back to me, and we giggled nervously the whole way.

The ma’abarah, called Machaneh Yisrael, was an abandoned British army camp across from Ben Gurion airport. There were lots of barracks with rooms, and each family was given one small one. The only furniture we had were the metal beds they’d given us in the absorption center. I remember the barrack’s domed metal roof, which was not a roof you wanted to live under in any circumstances. In the winter, the cold caused the metal to contract, creating gaps where rainwater entered. The adults would place pails all around so it wouldn’t flood. We children got sick a lot during the winter because of the bone-chilling cold. In the summer, the domed metal roof trapped the heat, making it so hot that we were forced to spend most of our time outdoors.

We had a well of water to do our cooking, cleaning, and laundering. I tried to be a big girl and carry the water buckets from the well back to our room, but many times I couldn’t do it because they were too heavy. We bathed once a week, then used the same water for laundry, and finally, for cleaning the room. Our “kitchen” consisted of a primus — burners with kerosene and wick — and our light came from kerosene lamps, which smelled so strongly it sometimes made us feel sick. There was no indoor plumbing, so our bathrooms were outhouses.

Because there was no electricity, just a kerosene lamp, we’d go to sleep when the sun went down. “Time for bed,” my mother would say. I’d read to my little siblings until it got too dark to see, which could be as early as four thirty in the winter and only as late as eight in the summer. We slept two to a bed because there was no space for more beds, and we’d wake up with the sun at six or earlier the next morning.

During the day we children went to the nonreligious school established for new immigrants. My father, who had been a jeweler in the family’s jewelry business, was reduced to working as a street paver. He never complained, though. “I’m grateful to have a job,” he’d tell us over and over.

One day, my uncle, who worked in a cement factory in Beit Shemesh, visited and said to my father, “Yosef, I have a great job opportunity for you. You won’t have to pave streets anymore. The cement factory is looking for a bookkeeper. You’re good with numbers, you’ll be great at it.”  My parents were thrilled at the opportunity, and the following Sunday my father left for his new job. The factory was happy with his work and things looked promising until Friday came along, and his boss said, “We’ll see you tomorrow.” There was no way my father was going to work on Shabbat. That was the end of that job.

Baruch Hashem, a month or so later, my uncle came over again and said, “Yosef, there are moshavim in the area that are looking to hire a bookkeeper. You’ll have to make rounds at a different moshav each week to work on their books. But the best part is, they don’t expect you to work on Shabbat!”

While working as a bookkeeper was definitely an upgrade to road paving, the hard part was that it was too expensive to travel home each night to the ma’abarah, so my father stayed away the whole week, only returning for Shabbat. That was especially difficult for my mother, who was left alone with four small children.

Even though we had no money, my parents never made us feel like we were poor. My mother learned how to sew and made us all our clothes. She even sewed our school backpacks. We had food and a roof over our heads, even if it was a leaky one, and I did not feel deprived. My mother would often quote an Arabic saying, “Eating bread will make your shoulder wide (strong).” We lived by that. As long as we had bread, we were good.

In 1955, my youngest sister, Geula, was born in the ma’abarah. By then, most people we’d come to the ma’abarah with had already moved on to their own dirot. We had so little money and no protekzia that we weren’t able to leave until four years later. By then, my father had joined the HaMizrachi political party, which was established by the Religious Zionist movement, and he’d gotten a bookkeeping job in the movement’s bank, Bank Mizrachi. In 1957, the party helped find us a house in a religious shikun (neighborhood) in Givat Mordechai in Yerushalayim.

Finally, we had a place to call our own. We were four families living in the house, but we each had our own apartment. We didn’t have a fridge or a regular stove, we still relied on an ice box and on a primus for cooking. And we still had to sleep two to a bed because there were only two small bedrooms for the eight of us (my youngest brother was born in Givat Mordechai).

But we did have indoor plumbing and electricity, and that was amazing. A strange thing about this apartment was its lack of doors. We had only a front door and a bathroom door. At some later date, my uncle came and built bedroom doors and cabinets for us. We also didn’t have a telephone installed until about 12 years later.

Reflecting on those early years in the newly founded state, I have to admire my parents’ incredible strength and resilience. Despite many hardships, they were determined to create a better life for our family in Eretz Yisrael. Their emunah and hard work provided us with a foundation of ahavat Torah, and the values of perseverance and love of family.  That legacy continues to inspire me and my family today.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 900)