My neighbor, Aliza, came here as a girl from Kurdistan, just before the creation of the state; her mother, a widow, decided to raise the children in Jerusalem, where they arrived after weeks of travel by donkey through Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, hungry and ragged but home. Or my friend Shula, who was twelve years old when her family began walking from their Ethiopian village toward Zion, and who for weeks carried her little brother on her back. Or my friend Alex, who sat in the Gulag for organizing classes in Hebrew, an illegal language in the Soviet Union. As a former American Jew, I am
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