It wasn’t lost on Ofir Sofer, the Israeli aliyah and integration minister, how unusual it was for someone of his prominence to fly to another country solely to board a charter return flight full of new immigrants.
“Flights like this—a big group of olim that come in one day to Israel is a strong message that is conveyed to our people that is not just happening today. It’s happened since Oct. 7,” Sofer told JNS aboard the first Nefesh B’Nefesh charter flight since the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
JNS spoke with the minister after he recited the evening prayer and as the El Al crew dimmed the lights and the plane flew over the ocean, Tel Aviv-bound.
A sea of blue T-shirts, many customized with family names, filled the plane. Nefesh B’Nefesh told JNS that 225 people made aliyah on the flight—its 65th to date—that landed early on Wednesday morning.
New immigrants ranged in age from 72 to nine months, and there were 45 families, 125 children and 10 single people among the olim, who were split about evenly between men and women. Immigrants hailed from Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, as well as Ontario, per Nefesh B’Nefesh.
Before the plane departed from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, travelers sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, overseen by heavily armed Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department officers.
Despite rising Jew-hatred in the United States necessitating such guards at U.S. airports, Sofer told JNS that the new immigrants were motivated to move to Israel rather than fleeing from North America.
“I talked to a few families. They told me that they thought about aliyah. I asked them when they decided. They decided in the last year, but they thought about it for eight years, decades,” he said. “Oct. 7 pushed them to make the decision.”
Antisemitism most likely played a role, but Sofer doesn’t think that was the overriding factor for the new immigrants. He switched to Hebrew and told JNS that if one walks barefoot on a hot road, one gets dirty. Jews had to move, “but then you have to make the decision where,” he said. “They love Israel.”
“Our responsibility as the government of the State of Israel is to care that every Jew can be in any state in the world, especially with our allies,” he said. “After that, I say that our home is in Israel.”
The minister noted the weekly Torah portion, in which Moses shares his final instructions with the Israelites in the desert and talks of the importance of Israel. “He intended our time,” Sofer told JNS in Hebrew.
“People who decided now to make aliyah write the history of Israel with their feet,” he said, back in English. “This is the future of the State of Israel,” he added, of the young immigrants.
‘It wasn’t overnight’
As he explained why he, his wife Simone Broide and their children decided to leave their home in the United States and move permanently to Israel, Rabbi Joshua Broide, founder of the Boca Raton Jewish Experience, handed JNS a notebook-sized, blue “my future Israeli passport,” which the Boca Raton Synagogue gave out at a farewell event for the family.
The small, plastic folder, which can hold a passport, includes the Hebrew traveler’s prayer and a quote from Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, the shul’s senior rabbi.
“There are legitimate reasons not to make aliyah,” the quote reads. “But there are no legitimate reasons not to be struggling with the question of when, not if.”
Broide had been assistant rabbi and outreach rabbi at the synagogue for 25 years. “It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t overnight,” he said, in an interview with some false starts due to turbulence. “We planned for five years to take this journey.”
It made it “much easier” that three of the couple’s six children had already made aliyah, and that Broide and his wife have two grandsons living in Israel.
Broide noted that Boca Raton Synagogue was the founding shul of Nefesh B’Nefesh.
Nefesh co-founder Yehoshua Fass “hired us when we first came to the community to work in the youth department,” he said. And co-founder “Tony Gelbart, who is sitting right next to him, was very involved in everything we’ve done since then.”
“We are going to take everything that we’ve done for the last 25 years in the community and build upon it, both in Israel and in Boca Raton,” he told JNS. He plans to fly back and forth “regularly” to continue the programs.
“There’s a big debate among rabbis in the American Jewish world about whether you encourage people to go to Israel: Do you lead the way, do you push them, do you wait for them to go?” Broide said. “I think we are doing a little bit of both.”
The chief operating officer of the synagogue, and his wife and family, in addition to the woman in charge of the synagogue’s programming and her family, also made aliyah on the flight, according to Broide.
JNS asked if institutional memory is a problem at the synagogue, given all the leaders making aliyah.
“Rabbi Goldberg had to write my letter that I am a Jew, and that was the hardest thing to get,” Broide told JNS. The new immigrant thinks his move might put some pressure on the senior rabbi. “I know that more than anything, he would love to join us today on this flight,” Broide said. “At some point, I believe he is going to be here.”
Simone Broide said that “we are so excited about living near our kids.”
She and her husband have always been the sort to make decisions and act, she said. Simone grew up in Teaneck, N.J.; he grew up in Elizabeth, N.J. “I always thought we would live in Teaneck next to my parents, next to my sisters,” she told JNS. “It did not start out that way at all.”
The couple moved to Baltimore for graduate school and his smicha at Ner Israel Rabbinical College. Then they got the call from Fass to move to Boca to be the youth directors.
“I remember thinking that doing this was a spontaneous idea to do in our 20s. We thought now is a good time,” she told JNS. “We thought we would be there for two years. We were there for 25.”
Joshua Broide thinks that a lot more people are making aliyah and not just saying they will. “Something has changed. Oct. 7 has changed. You have an American government, which is extremely supportive of Israel, and a war that will hopefully end with hostages coming home any day now,” he said. “I think it’s probably the best time in the last 2,000 years to return to Israel.”
“America is not as safe and comfortable as it used to be,” Simone Broide said.
She told JNS it is “very surreal” to be on a Nefesh flight after having watched such flights for so many years. After the plane landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport, Joshua Broide dropped to his knees several times to kiss the ground. One of his children joined him on one of those occasions.
‘Abba, is it safe?’
Dovid and Shoshana Tauber were on the flight with their four children, having lived outside Philadelphia for about five years. He went to medical school in Israel and intends to work as a pediatrician in Israel. Nefesh, which has been making a particular push to bring medical professionals to Israel, said that five physicians were on the plane, as were nurses, psychologists and physical therapists.
Oct. 7 didn’t change the family’s plans, but it “surely does make the decision feel different,” Tauber told JNS. “You don’t see people moving from a relatively safe area to a war zone, and yet here we are with 45 families making aliyah.”
Tauber was more concerned about his children’s education in the United States than about physical safety, although it had been “jarring” to see his children’s fear about Jew-hatred in America.
When he put an Israeli flag on his car on Yom Ha’atzmaut, his daughter said, “Abba, is it safe to do that?” he told JNS.
He looks forward to the “oneness” in Israel, where he noted that buses wish a Shabbat shalom on Friday afternoon and billboards offer well wishes ahead of Jewish holidays. “That’s the next level,” he said. “Every step and breath we take in Eretz Yisrael is a breath of freedom and godliness.”
‘Knowing we had a place to go’
Jack and Talia Borenstein, who also came from Boca, made aliyah on the flight with their three children. She was the director of member engagement at the synagogue. “A lot of new faces,” he told JNS. “The whole senior staff, almost, is coming to Israel.”
The family was in Florida for four years and in New York before that. He is a New York native, and she hails from Cleveland. The main reason they moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was for his doctoral internship in psychology.
His parents are originally from South America, and he brings a bilingual specialty to his work as a psychologist. The couple talked about making aliyah while they were dating. They’re both grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and both families lived in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s and found it difficult and left.
Talia Borenstein’s great-grandfather lived in Vienna, Austria, and colleagues told him in 1939 to take his money, put it in a Swiss bank and leave the country. He told his sons to go to Israel and offered them the money in the Swiss account to invest in land. They bought empty farm land in Ra’anana.
The Borensteins and their children will live on that land, alongside her brother. “These apartments have been ready for years, but knowing that we had a place to go to was a big help,” Jack Borenstein told JNS.
He added that over the last five years, his parents and four sisters made aliyah, as did his brother-in-law before Oct. 7.
Oct. 7 and being a graduate of Columbia University were both part of the equation, according to Borenstein. “Seeing all of the things going on with the campuses,” he said.
“I would say a lot of my psychology program was woke,” he said. Some former professors of his at Columbia and his academic adviser contacted him to express solidarity after Oct. 7, but seeing the Jew-hatred at Columbia impacted him personally.
“We see the encampments on the quad. I used to go there, sit there, study,” he said. “And walk to Butler Library. I imagine myself, what it would be like for me to have to walk into that library and to sit, that would be very difficult for me, how I would be taunted.”
“Florida is a total safe haven,” he said. “It was the total opposite.”
‘I would say it’s destiny’
Being on the Nefesh flight was more emotional than he anticipated. “Following in the footsteps of my parents and fulfilling the dreams of our grandparents, who didn’t make it,” he told JNS. “I would say it’s destiny.”
When they called his wife to process her paperwork on the plane, that also made an impact on Borenstein.
“This is a little bit morbid,” he said. “But the thought I had was that her grandmother was the 48th woman to go to Auschwitz. She was processed in Auschwitz. Now my family is being processed by the Jewish state—in our own land, in our own country.”
Nefesh B’Nefesh told JNS that immigration cards (teudot oleh) and ID cards (teudot zehut) were distributed on board and processed on the plane mid-air, a first for the organization.
Being on the flight also felt like camp, he told JNS.
“It feels like the bus or the plane to your summer program or camp,” he said. “Everyone has got their aliyah T-shirts. Everyone has the same color. Everybody is very friendly.”
“It’s almost like that summer camp vibe,” he said. “A little bit of nerves before the beginning of camp, but everyone is in it together.”
Elizabeth Snyder of New York was one of the single travelers who made aliyah on the flight.
“I’ve known for so many years, and I finally decided less than a year ago to take the plunge. Why wait any longer?” she told JNS after exiting the plane in Tel Aviv, and after extensive singing and dancing, accompanied by a live band, had died down.
A “whole buildup of things” contributed to her decision, she told JNS.
“I grew up with Israel and Zionism in my life, and every time I came here I felt such a connection like it was where I was meant to be, and it’s where I’m supposed to be living my life,” she said.
The flight was “really nice because everyone was coming here for the same reason,” she said. “It was very exciting and emotional for everyone.”
She aims to look for a job in technology in Jerusalem. “Hopefully, that all goes well, and I’ll build a community for myself,” she told JNS.
The charter flight was a partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael and Jewish National Fund-USA, Nefesh said.
“Today’s charter flight is not just a symbolic journey home. It’s a tangible investment in Israel’s future,” Gelbart stated. “These olim are fulfilling their dream of making Israel their home, just as many have done before them and many more will do so in the years to come. We’re truly honored to help them all turn those dreams into reality.”
