When we reached Naoki Akita’s home on the outskirts of Osaka, we removed our shoes at the door, put on house slippers and climbed the stairs to the third floor. It was early May, and my husband and I were on our dream trip to Japan.

Naoki’s mother, Akemi, was waiting for us. She sat on a tatami mat, stirring a thick green paste of matcha for the tea ceremony. But first, we met the extended family, those living and departed. On the wall in front of us was a Shinto shrine, topped with kanji letters that symbolize world peace. To the left of the shrine was a photo of a revered family member, a philosopher who had passed some 100 years ago.

Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion that predates Buddhism, has no scripture, codes or dogma. But practitioners honor the divine in nature. They also revere elders. On this night, we were the elders, honored guests in the three-generation, three-story townhouse, where Naoki’s parents share an apartment on the first floor. Naoki, his wife, Tomoko, and their 7-year-old son, Masaki, sleep on the top floor, with the kitchen and dining area on the second floor.

As friends of Naoki’s good friend in Ottawa, we received a coveted invitation to a Japanese home. Naoki’s sister, brother-in-law and teenage children were also invited to meet the Americans.

As Tevye proclaims in “Fiddler on the Roof,” what ties Jews together is tradition. But what creates bonds between cultures is the sharing of traditions. And in any culture, a good host glosses over the guests’ faux pas.

Before the visit, I knew to wear clean socks, dress modestly, bring gifts and bow frequently. I also knew not to ask for sugar for green tea, a gaffe equivalent to mayonnaise with pastrami. But I wasn’t prepared for ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging flowers.

Aki, Naoki’s niece, explained the ritual in English. Akemi carried in a tray filled with several empty vases and another vase filled with assorted long-stemmed flowers. I was to choose a vase and a flower. 

I selected a lovely white vase adorned with red flowers and then a pink-tinged carnation that would harmonize. But when instructed to cut the carnation’s stem, I cut it too short for the vase and shook my head in dismay. Allen did better. His yellow alstroemeria complemented a slender blue vase, and his cut was perfect. Then we were told to contemplate our flowers. I angled my carnation to one side, while the family reassured me.

Before the visit, I knew to wear clean socks, dress modestly, bring gifts and bow frequently.

Fortunately, I did better during the tea ceremony. Akemi placed a bowl of green matcha tea in front of each of us and Tomoko gave us a small candy to offset the bitterness. We were surprised that we were the only ones to be served tea, but that is the nature of the tea ceremony, which is designed to create a bond between hosts and guests and a peaceful respite from worldly matters.

After Aki and Tomoko placed small plates of food in front of the family shrine, we ambled downstairs for dinner, mostly prepared by Akemi. Other family members assisted in serving the Japanese pickles, tempura and vegetables, followed by brown rice, out of deference to their California guests. Luckily, Allen and I are reasonably competent with chopsticks.

When Akemi set a small bowl of chicken soup in front of me with tiny noodles, reminiscent of my favorite Jewish soup, I asked for seconds. Akemi beamed.

Naoki speaks English well, and Masaki was eager to try out his English. He asked if we like pizza. Tomoko, who is less confident in her English, used a mobile phone app to translate and communicate. 

But some customs are not in the guidebooks or on our phones. When Allen returned to the table wearing slippers relegated only for bathroom use, his faux pas resulted in good-natured giggles. House slippers don’t enter the bathroom, and bathroom slippers don’t leave. The Japanese are fastidious.

After dinner, we exchanged gifts. We brought Stanford souvenirs, a golden poppy towel and a National Parks calendar. But we were surprised that the family showered us with presents too: teas, matcha-flavored candy, brushstroke prints and small towels. 

Then we shared our music, singing “You Are My Sunshine.” Haruo, Naoki’s father, knows the song and joined in. As Naoki drove us back to our hotel, we sang “Old MacDonald” with Masaki, who had learned it in his English class. We laughed at Allen’s animal noises. 

After Allen and I emailed our thanks, Naoki thanked us too and sent photos. “My family was overjoyed, and it was a great dinner time,” he wrote. “My parents say it was one of the best memories they have had at the end of their lives. Please take care of yourself on your long trip. We look forward to seeing you again.”

Later, he sent another note with a picture. “Good morning,” he wrote. “Your flowers are doing well.”

The family had placed my too-short carnation into the blue vase along with Allen’s alstroemeria. They were in harmony.

The return of direct travel to Israel from San Francisco, a boon to the Bay Area’s large Israeli expat community and other frequent flyers, is still months away.

United Airlines announced Wednesday that the route “will be evaluated for resumption beginning in the fall.” Since 2016, it had been the only carrier to fly nonstop between Tel Aviv and San Francisco.

The update comes along with United’s announcement that it plans to resume daily nonstop flights to Ben Gurion Airport from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.

“United conducted a detailed safety analysis in making this decision, including close work with security experts and government officials in the United States and Israel,” the company said in a press release.

United and other airlines halted flights to Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack. 

El Al, Israel’s national carrier, flies nonstop between Tel Aviv and both New York and Los Angeles — but not San Francisco. 

United was the largest U.S. carrier serving Israel. Other major airlines that also flew to Israel, such as Delta and American Airlines, have not yet resumed nonstop routes. United said it will re-evaluate nonstop flights this fall, not only from San Francisco but also from Washington Dulles and Chicago O’Hare airports.

“Last year I indicated we’d be the first U.S. airline to resume flying to Israel and that time has come,” United CEO Scott Kirby posted Thursday on LinkedIn. “We will continue to monitor the situation in Tel Aviv and adjust the schedule as needed.” 

United’s first flights from Newark to Tel Aviv, set for March 2 and 4, will make a stop in Munich. The nonstop flights start on March 6.

Currently the State Department recommends that people “reconsider travel” to Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon and Egypt. Gaza and Syria are “do not travel” zones. Jordan is an “exercise increased caution” area. Cyprus is the only nearby country with no travel warnings from the State Department.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — As of November, Israelis will be able to enter the United States without a visa, a major change that Israel has long sought and that will ease travel for hundreds of thousands of its citizens.

Israel’s entry into the Visa Waiver Program, which now includes 41 countries, means that Israelis traveling to the United States will no longer have to go through a months-long visa application process that carried the threat of denial. It also means that Palestinian-Americans living in the West Bank and Gaza will be able to enter Israel after completing a form and a short waiting period. Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian travel were one barrier to its joining the Visa Waiver Program earlier.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the U.S. homeland security secretary, announced on Wednesday morning that Israel had successfully passed a three-month test of its commitment to treat Palestinian-Americans equally. As part of the program’s reciprocity requirement, The United States mandates that countries in the program allow U.S. citizens to enter without restrictions.

“In advance of this designation, Israel made updates to its entry policies to meet the VWP requirement to extend reciprocal privileges to all U.S. citizens without regard to national origin, religion, or ethnicity,” Mayorkas said.

Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog thanked Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for facilitating Israel’s entry into the program.

“Our people-to-people ties, which are the backbone of our special relationship, will only grow stronger,” Herzog said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Israelis and Americans will be able to more freely travel between our two countries, interacting and connecting on a personal and professional level.”

Under the program, citizens of member countries simply have to check via U.S. Customs and Border Protection whether they are eligible to travel visa free. Once they get the OK, they may travel to the United States for up to 90 days at a time over a period of two years.

“I fundamentally believe it’s like a win-win-win,” said Scott Lasensky, a former U.S. diplomat who now teaches U.S.-Israel relations at the University of Maryland, and who lobbied for years for Israel’s entry.

“Israelis from all walks of life, who see the United States as a comfortable welcoming place for whom it’s very difficult to travel to the U.S., it’s a huge win for them,” he said. “It’s a big win for Arab Americans. I don’t expect them to celebrate within the broader context of occupation and a very, very, very difficult and stagnant peace process. But it’s a concrete win, in day-to-day terms, for large populations of Arab, Palestinian, Muslim Americans who have challenges traveling to and through Israel.”

Israel’s membership in the program will take effect at the end of November, but its remaining in the program is not guaranteed. Mayorkas indicated in his statement that the United States will continue to monitor Israel’s compliance with its requirements, including equal treatment of Palestinian Americans.

“As is the process with all VWP countries, the U.S. Government will continue to engage with the Government of Israel while monitoring its continued implementation of all program requirements, including the reciprocity commitments it made to the United States on July 19, 2023,” Mayorkas said. Two decades ago, the United States removed Argentina and Uruguay from the program because their faltering economies led to a surge of their citizens overstaying U.S. visas.

How the United States judges Israel’s meeting of the reciprocity requirement is not clear; the memorandum of understanding the sides signed in July has not been made public, although versions have been leaked.

Another requirement for entry into the program is a visa refusal rate of no more than 3%, a threshold Israel met recently. Lower rates of travel during the pandemic may have enabled Israel to meet that requirement. A third requirement for entry into the program is intelligence-sharing standards, which Israel has in recent years made accommodations to meet.

Israel has sought entry into the program for decades, but has faced resistance for not meeting two key requirements: reciprocity and the visa refusal rate. President Joe Biden launched a cross-departmental effort to bring Israel into the program after he met in August 2021 with then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Arab-American groups tracking the program say Israel continues to discriminate against Arab Americans entering the country. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee on Tuesday filed a lawsuit to stop Israel’s entry into the program. In a press release, the group listed “the continued discrimination against Palestinian Americans from Gaza, the restrictions on how Palestinian Americans can cross checkpoints into the Occupied West Bank, the inability of Palestinian Americans to rent cars, and the invasive and inhumane treatment of Palestinian Americans when they try to return to the U.S.”

The agreement reportedly carves out an exception for U.S. citizens living in the Gaza Strip, only slightly easing the cumbersome requirements they must meet to travel through Israel to Ben Gurion Airport.

Pro-Palestinian groups say it will be difficult to dislodge Israel from the program once it is in, considering the vast amount of support that pro-Israel groups have garnered to get the country into the program. In June, 65  senators across both parties urged the Biden administration to bring Israel into the program. A small minority of Democrats have urged the Biden administration to toughen the reciprocity requirements before allowing Israel in.

The Torah column is supported by a generous donation from Eve Gordon-Ramek in memory of Kenneth Gordon.

Shelach
Numbers 13:1-15:41

This week’s Torah portion tells the story of the 12 spies that Moses sent to scout out the land of Israel. The story is regarded as one one of the biggest tragedies in our Biblical history. It is worth delving into the details in the hope of finding meaningful guidance for our own lives.

From the outset, it seems that there is some confusion as to who instigated the sending of spies in the first place. “Hashem spoke to Moses saying, ‘Send men for yourself and they will scout out the Land of Canaan that I am giving to the Children of Israel’” (Numbers 13:1). From the opening line, it seems like this is a directive from G-d Himself.

However, in the Book of Deuteronomy, we are giving a different account of what happened. “All of you approached me and said, ‘Let us send men in front of us and they will spy out the land and bring word back to us” (Deut. 1:22). The speaker here is Moses as he addresses the nation with rebuke and admonition. Moses tells us that it was the people who suggested the sending of spies in the first place. The Sages understand that when the text in our parshah reads “Send men for yourself,” it is hinting that G-d is allowing them to send spies but not commanding that they do so.

To what end were the spies sent? It seems that the people had one purpose, but Moses had a very different purpose in mind.

Moses was hoping that the men would go and bring back word about what an amazing place they were about to enter. They were supposed to act as the salespeople who would rally the people and inspire them to conquer the land. They were even instructed to bring back samples of the fruit that they found there in order to demonstrate what an incredible land they had found.

In Deuteronomy, when Moses recounts the events he uses a different verb to describe their mission: lachpor, which means to spy. It means to really dig into a place and search for vulnerabilities the way that an army would do in preparation for battle.

The men were looking to assess the military situation since they knew that they were going to have to take the land by force. That was not Moses’s agenda. He understood well that asking the spies to evaluate the prospect of a victory in war on human terms was not a good idea. Hashem had promised them a triumph. That was sufficient for Moses. It was not going to conform to the norms of battle. It was going to be a supernatural event.

Ten of the spies returned with a very negative report and caused national trauma. G-d was furious, and the result is that He punished that entire generation for their lack of trust by telling them that they will not be allowed into the land.

The spies went wrong in their initial assessment, but according to the prophet Jeremiah, there is more to it than just that.

Jeremiah is the author of the scroll of Eicha, or Lamentations. Jews all over the world sit on the floor listening to the scroll on Tisha B’Av. It is a descriptive account of the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

It is also written as an acrostic. The first chapter follows the order of the Aleph-Bet. The next three chapters do the same with one glaring anomaly. There are two letters that are out of order. The letter peh precedes the letter ayin. One might assume that perhaps the author just skipped kindergarten and missed those letters on that day and got them wrong. But he got it right in the first chapter, so it must be intentional.

It is also hard to point to a simple editing error since it happens three times with the next three chapters. The Sages ask, “For what reason did they place the peh before the ayin?” (Eikhah Rabbah 2:20) The answer they give is that it recalls the spies who put their peh (Hebrew for mouth) before their ayin (Hebrew for eye).

What Jeremiah is hinting through the letters is that they spoke and then they saw. Today we call that confirmation bias. They had decided on a negative attitude and therefore could only see the negative. We read this scroll on the 9th of Av as a remembrance of what started all the calamities that we mourn as a nation.

If there is any take-away for us from the episode it should be that we should work on being careful to be objective. In our time, we have a barrage of information that comes to us from all sources. It would be great if we could find a way to be objective in our gathering of information that informs our decisions.

PISAC, Peru (JTA) — About 20 miles northeast of the tourist capital of Cusco, the small Peruvian town of Pisac sits nestled among the verdant Andes Mountains. Lined with cobblestone streets and two-story adobe houses, the town offers a distinct blend of ancient Incan culture and breathtaking landscapes.

Pisac’s main square, Plaza de Armas, is often filled with Indigenous women pulling alpacas, local art dealers selling their handmade artisanal wares and kids playing soccer — nothing out of the ordinary for a tourist town in the Andes. But directly across from the plaza’s church, a recent addition to the square stands out.

A yellow flag with a blue crown is draped over the bannister of one of the two-story buildings flanking the square, reading “Mashiach” — “Messiah” in Hebrew.

The flag marks the building as an outpost of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has placed emissaries in dozens of countries. Opened in April, the Pisac outpost is Chabad’s third in Peru, after Lima and Cusco. Leaders of Chabad Cusco decided to send an emissary to open a branch in Pisac because of a trend that locals here have noticed over the past few years: the town’s popularity with Israeli tourists.

In Pisac, Hebrew is often heard more consistently on the streets than English or Quechua, the most widely spoken of Peru’s indigenous languages. The local Chabad rabbi said that 50-100 people pack his Shabbat services every week. Multiple restaurants have translated their menus to Hebrew. Dozens of yellow stickers are scattered around the town of around 10,000 featuring the face of the Chabad movement’s former leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, commonly known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

“I love it here,” said Liad Shor, a 26-year-old Israeli who has been in Pisac for more than a month. “Pisac is a very known place for Israelis to travel, so I wanted to check how it is.”

The town is increasingly becoming a part of the “Hummus Trail,” an informal route that many young Israelis follow after completing their mandatory army service. Functioning through word of mouth, the Hummus Trail has been used to refer to places in Southeast Asia, but in recent years it has been applied to regions of Latin America, too. Various stops across South America have become so popular with Israelis that locals have started to cater specifically to them.

But Pisac is not only a layover for young Israeli tourists looking for a few days of peace and quiet. Many slightly older Israelis, attracted to the spirituality infused in everyday life in Pisac — often involving locally-grown psychedelic substances — have chosen to call Pisac their permanent home.

Nitzan Levy, a 30-year-old Israeli from the Jerusalem area, is among the dozens of Israelis — possibly hundreds — who have moved to Pisac and the wider Sacred Valley region as an escape from Israeli society.

“I’m making up data, but it’s like 80% of Israelis are living with post-traumatic stress,” Levy told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I mean, it’s a tough environment to live in when you’re constantly in survival mode. So, living in alternative communities like here, or also like in Costa Rica, or in Guatemala, or in Thailand… you can get away from the intensity of it all and find your own healing. Because all of us have experienced war in some way or other and we need to heal as a society, but we cannot do it in Israel yet.”

The “healing” Nitzan refers to often comes in the form of what locals label “planta medicina,” or psychedelics such as ayahuasca and San Pedro. For visitors from around the world, not only Israelis, Pisac has become a haven for those who wish to have an encounter with these plants, which can temporarily alter one’s state of reality and heighten one’s senses. It is legal here to partake in plant medicine ceremonies, and many decide to do so to heal childhood trauma, cure deeply-rooted addictions or attempt to have an encounter with the divine.

Aminadav Shvat, a 36-year-old Israeli, also decided to settle in Pisac for the spirituality and plant medicine he found here. He was drawn to San Pedro, a psychedelic cactus indigenous to the Andes. He spoke to JTA while wearing tefillin from inside an Israeli restaurant he opened up in Pisac last year.

“When we try some psychedelics, we actually find a connection very similar to Moshe Rabbeinu with the sneh,” Shvat said, referring to the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush. “We strengthen the connection between humans and God.”

“So I came to the Sacred Valley to try San Pedro but I stayed because there is a community of people working on themselves spiritually,” he added. “There’s a lot of magic here.”

Shvat, who comes from a family of rabbis, opened a restaurant in Pisac to serve as a gathering place for Jewish travelers. He organizes Shabbat dinners that are occasionally frequented by non-Jewish locals and last year organized an “alternative” Yom Kippur service complete with a meditation by a river.

Rabbi Ariel Kadosh, the 25-year-old leader of Chabad Pisac and a former student at Chabad Cusco, had originally wanted to open up a branch of Chabad in Morocco with his wife Talia.

“At first, I had never heard of Pisac,” Kadosh said. “But after arriving here, we realized that people come to Pisac for spiritual experiences…so I think it’s a really good place for a Chabad.”

Kadosh disagrees with those who try to connect with spirituality through psychedelic substances, but he does welcome the opportunity to speak with travelers about god and other spiritual topics after they have a psychedelic journey.

He told a story of a spiritual seeker who wrote to the Lubavitcher Rebbe asking about the permissibility of using LSD as a means to connect with god. In response, the Rebbe said that the “Jewish way” is to attain spiritual heights through struggle.

“For me, specifically, I don’t think it’s right,” Kadosh said about the use of psychedelics. “The Rebbe says it is not our way.”

Despite the town’s peaceful facade, not everyone is happy with the influx of Israelis. Some locals expressed frustration to JTA with the young Israeli travelers, who they claim try to haggle excessively when buying things. Aminadav pointed to another phenomenon.

“On the corner of the street, I put a sign in Hebrew for my restaurant,” says Aminadav. “And someone put a sticker of the Palestinian flag with the words ‘Israel, killer state.’”

Although the Schneerson stickers outnumber the ones with the Palestinian flag, the latter can also be found throughout the town.

Then last week, reports of a violent attack inside the Chabad house circulated on social media. In a post in a community Facebook group, someone accused a Chabad student of attacking a woman and threatening her with a blade. Comments on this post ranged from disbelief to statements such as: “Isn’t that what they do in Palestine everyday?”

The Chabad leaders claimed that a drunken local couple entered the building at 2 a.m. and started to make antisemitc comments, adding that the student was simply defending himself. Local police said that neither side had reported the incident in the end.

The new Chabad leaders are undeterred by the recent tensions. Kadosh said that he plans on teaching Kabbalah classes on the roof of the new Chabad building and also wants to host nigun sessions, which involve chanting wordless spiritual melodies.

After working with Israelis for more than 30 years, Sergio Quispe Maita can understand “70 to 80 percent of Hebrew.” He began learning the language while working as a cook at an Israeli restaurant in Cusco called Nargila. He committed to learning three words a day, and now he converses in Hebrew at his very own Israeli restaurant in Pisac called Nafis.

Maita’s restaurant is attached to Colores Hostel, one of the most popular hostels in Pisac for young Israelis — to the extent that some in town have even labeled it the “Israeli hostel.” So the local restaurateur has daily opportunities to practice his Hebrew.

“Thank God, I speak the language, so I understand them,” he said. “And I know that with time, Pisac will be filled with many more Israelis because it is a small town and is very attractive to people looking to enjoy the quiet.”

Squished in a window seat on a flight from Heathrow to SFO, I have 10 hours to reflect on my star-crossed journey. My husband had booked aisle and window seats, hoping no one would come between us. Alas, a big burly guy claimed his seat just as we were about to take off. After a bout with Covid, I was returning home with muscle cramps and congestion. My husband, the only one in our Cornwall cottage who didn’t contract Covid, awoke the next day with a feverish flu. Go figure.

I should have anticipated the tenor of this trip when we were about to deplane in London and my husband couldn’t find his wallet, which contained his credit cards, cash and his driver’s license. It never made it to London. Instead, it was waiting safely in an obscure SFO security office. Despite our TSA PreCheck-Global Entry status, my husband was asked to empty his pockets, remove his belt and then take out his passport. He reclaimed his passport and belt but forgot about the wallet in a separate tray.

Over our 22-year marriage, with travel on five continents, adventure and misadventure has a way of finding us, whether it’s a pickpocket in Barcelona or an angry Roosevelt elk in the redwoods. But our week in Cornwall wasn’t supposed to be an adventure. Instead, I was looking forward to visiting gardens, galleries and rugged coasts, and wallowing in clotted Cornish cream.

My son and his family, who live in Yorkshire, had rented a three-bedroom cottage in Truro, where we would spend a week together. Not having seen my granddaughter since 2019, we were overjoyed when his family met our train on a Friday afternoon.

On Sunday morning, I awoke with a fever, tested positive for Covid and spent five days quarantined in an upstairs bedroom, looking out the window at a lone gravestone of a woman named Catherine. My son and my husband carried meals to me on a tray and communicated with me on Facebook Messenger. Meanwhile, I napped, checked the news on my iPad, did crossword puzzles and finished “Sarum,” Edward Rutherfurd’s 1,039-page novel that traces the history of the Salisbury region from prehistoric times to 1985.

Fortunately, I was never terribly ill. Fully vaccinated and double boosted, my case of Covid was the equivalent of a 24-hour virus. Had I been forearmed, I could have traveled with a just-in-case prescription for Paxlovid, which I was unable to obtain in the U.K. On the other hand, not taking it means I didn’t have a post-Paxlovid rebound.

RELATED: When CDC said ‘Don’t cruise,’ our sails were already up

But after ruining everybody’s holiday, I was plagued by post-Covid guilt.

Our rental ended the following Friday, and just as we were about to leave for the train station, my son texted us. He and his wife had contracted Covid. They couldn’t fly home to Yorkshire as planned, and the airline wouldn’t credit them for a future flight.

We offered to be caregivers and spend time with our granddaughter, but “Covid Cornelia” was as welcome as ants at a picnic. My son wanted us gone. Several days later, my granddaughter came down with Covid, delaying their return home by eight days. We could help financially — the delay cost them $2,000-plus — but we could do nothing to ameliorate a holiday gone awry.

My husband and I grabbed our suitcases and ambled down the hill to the railroad station a mile or so away because all the cabs were ferrying children to school. Still concerned about contagion, we canceled plans to dine in Bath with University of Glasgow housemate and famed astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Ironically, she emailed back that she, too, tested positive for Covid.

We made the best of our remaining time in the U.K. In Bath, we immersed ourselves in Jane Austen, Roman remnants and Georgian architecture, and relished a gooey-rich afternoon tea. Moving on to Salisbury, we explored ancient Sarum, the hilltop site of ancient ruins described in Rutherfurd’s book. And in Salisbury itself, home of a magnificent cathedral and the original Magna Carta, I had the best Sunday roast in my memory at our 16th-century inn.

Upon returning to London, we met up with my stepdaughter and her family, who were also visiting, and took our grandsons to the Churchill War Rooms, exploring the underground bunker where the prime minister and his officials holed up during the Blitz.

At the end of a long flight, I was glad to escape Britain’s blistering heat wave. Cornwall’s gardens will await another visit, but I looked forward to tooling around my own garden. Palo Alto is not too shabby.

Feeling the sand between her toes was Teva Goldstein’s favorite part of her December 2021 bat mitzvah on the island of Maui. She and her family all wore white, accessorized with purple leis.

The beach in Hawaii was nearly 4,000 miles from her home in Dallas, another thousand miles from where she had lived for most of her life in Maryland. Yet her family had chosen it to mark her bat mitzvah, the moment when she would symbolically assume adulthood among the Jewish people.

The path to the beach was long and winding due to the Covid-19 pandemic, pitted with setbacks and anxiety. But it had brought Teva and her family in touch with a former Bay Area resident who is turning Hawaii into a bar and bat mitzvah destination.

Finding Sandra Razieli helped them finalize plans that had been thrown into turmoil by the pandemic — twice.

Razieli moved to Maui in 2017, thinking that her skills as a yoga teacher would be how she made her living. She assumed that the b’nai mitzvah tutoring she’d done for two decades for families at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont would be of little use on Maui, where one unaffiliated synagogue and one Chabad serve the small number of local Jews.

“I didn’t know I was going to continue doing Jewish stuff when I got here,” Razieli said.

She was wrong. Not only did Razieli start picking up work through Beit Shalom: The Jewish Congregation of Maui, but she also has begun carving out a niche serving mainlanders who choose Hawaii for destination bar and bat mitzvahs.

So far, she’s officiated at six b’nai mitzvah, including Teva’s.

If Beit Shalom gets a call from someone considering traveling to Maui for a lifecycle event, the synagogue sends the caller Razieli’s way. She has also officiated at a few weddings, and has a few more upcoming in the next few months.

Razieli said the decision to lead beachfront b’nai mitzvahs wasn’t totally natural.

“At first, it was challenging for me to think of officiating b’nai mitzvah away from [a Jewish] community, since the whole point of it is to say ‘I’m stepping into my community,’” she said. “But some don’t have that community at home. I want to provide an experience where they feel honored and welcome.”

Razieli was recently ordained by the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute, a one-year online program that confers the title “rabbi” on its graduates. In the Bay Area, she led Jewish rituals and ran the b’nai mitzvah program at Kehilla, where she is known as “spiritual leader emerita.”

From her new locale, Razieli meets with families virtually, then makes custom prayer books for each event, asking families for their preferred language for God, for example.

Then she borrows the Torah from Beit Shalom for a ceremony at a beachfront restaurant  —  where the sight of a Torah scroll can definitely attract attention. “People are sunbathing and will see the Torah here,” she said.

And while that might seem discordant for some, she said, with such a stunning backdrop, it’s hard not to be in awe. “In some ways, it’s much more spiritual than being in a space with fluorescent lights,” she said.

That was the case for the Goldstein family, who ended up on Maui after canceling multiple other plans. First, a destination bat mitzvah in Prague was canceled because of the pandemic; then a rescheduled ceremony in Israel was scrapped because of the omicron variant.

During the first year of the pandemic, Teva and her family made the local news for creating and posting inspirational signs, such as “We are in this together,” around their Dallas neighborhood. But when the pandemic led to two bat mitzvah derailments, a now 15-year-old Teva was beginning to feel her resolve weaken.

“After learning two different Torah portions, and with everything still virtual, she didn’t even want to have one,” said her mom, Abby Goldstein. “That she didn’t feel much connection to it made us sad, so we decided it’s going to be low-key and easy for her.”

But Teva came up with one last idea, one that connected with her passion for the environment — perhaps preordained by her name, which means “nature” in Hebrew.

“I just wanted to do something out of the country, and since that wasn’t possible, it felt like Hawaii was the closest to out of the country I was going to get,” she said.

Abby booked tickets to Oahu. But after Teva found Razieli online, the family revised their plans one more time, making Maui their destination.

With little time to prepare, Teva was not interested in learning yet a third Torah portion, so she recited the blessings over the Torah rather than read from it. She and Razieli met a few times over Zoom to prepare.

“It was a really good experience. I liked how Sandra customized the service for me,” Teva said.

And the environment — far from what the family had originally anticipated — proved to be an essential element of the religious experience, Abby said.

“With such beauty, we were seeing God all around us,” she said. “At the same time, I felt such gratitude that even amidst the turmoil of the past two years, that we saw our daughter do this and make this connection with God. It was very meaningful for me to know that we didn’t give up, amongst everything, and I think it was for her as well.”

This piece first appeared in Haaretz and is reprinted with permission.

Donald Heller and Anne Simon had been talking for years about taking a trip to Israel together. An invitation to attend a wedding in the Holy Land provided the couple from San Francisco with the perfect excuse and so, when Israel finally reopened its borders to tourism on March 1 — nearly two years after the first coronavirus lockdown — they quickly booked their fights.

The plan was to spend the first few days of their 10-day trip in Jerusalem and the rest of the time in Tel Aviv.

What hadn’t been planned was that Anne would test positive for Covid the day before they were scheduled to fly back home and that Donald would catch it a few days later.

The United States is among the few countries in the world that still requires passengers to provide a negative Covid test result before boarding their flight. But since about 20 percent of all international visitors to Israel come from the United States, making it the single largest source of incoming tourism to the country, a disproportionately large share of those traveling to Israel these days are affected by this rule.

And because the United States requires that Covid tests be taken within 24 hours of flying, that doesn’t give those testing positive much time to prepare for the unfortunate scenario of being stuck in a foreign country for an indefinite amount of time, as this California couple was.

And their case is not that unusual.

According to the Israeli Health Ministry, since Israel reopened its borders, more than 3,800 tourists have tested positive for Covid while in the country. Assuming that around one in five are Americans, it can also be assumed that many hundreds of tourists have been forced to delay their return trips home because of the virus.

That should come as no surprise given that versions of the highly contagious omicron variant are still spreading through Israel. Indeed, according to the head of one of Israel’s largest incoming tourism companies, who asked that their firm’s name not be published, as many as 20 percent of his clients have had to extend their stays in the country after testing positive for the virus.

What are American tourists who suddenly discover they have Covid supposed to do? Where do they need to isolate? For how long? And what documents do they need to obtain so they can eventually fly home, and how do they get them?

Not speaking or reading Hebrew, there is no way we could have done this on our own.

Based on the experiences of Donald and Anne, getting answers to these questions is almost impossible if you don’t have Hebrew-speaking friends in Israel willing to help you navigate the bureaucracy. “Not speaking or reading Hebrew, there is no way we could have done this on our own,” said Donald, who retired in February after a career in academics that finished with 6½ years at University of San Francisco (where he was an education professor, a provost and vice president of academic affairs and a vice president of operations).

Fortunately for him and his partner, both in their early 60s, their symptoms were relatively mild and they did not need any medical intervention.

A day after Anne received her test results, she was contacted by a representative of the Israeli Health Ministry. That person told her that she would receive a phone call within the next 24 hours from a doctor at Bikur Rofeh, a private clinic that services patients who have no Israeli health insurance. But no phone call was received in that time, as promised.

During their initial exchange with the Health Ministry representative, the couple did not receive any information whatsoever about where they should isolate, or for how long. Seeing that little help was forthcoming, Donald used his phone to find a short-term rental on his own. They spent half a day resting at a hotel while waiting for the rental to become available, and only later learned that tourists with Covid are not allowed to stay at hotels. The Health Ministry representative had never informed them of that, they said.

During their period in isolation, Donald and Anne would receive several emails from the Health Ministry and Bikur Rofeh informing them of their diagnosis and eventually letting them know — after seven days had passed for each of them — that they no longer needed to isolate.

However, all of these emails were in Hebrew and none contained any information about what, if any, documents they would need to present at the airport in order to board their flight back to San Francisco.

The Health Ministry’s English-language website also turned out to be of little help. A section titled “Leaving Israel” offered the following information about what people in their situation needed to do: “Confirmed Covid-19 cases or individuals who are required to stay in isolation at the time of arrival at the airport or border crossing will not be allowed to leave Israel and will be subject to penalty according to law.”

It referred travelers with further questions to the website of the Population and Immigration Authority, which is all in Hebrew.

And what about the Tourism Ministry website? A link at the top does direct tourists to a page dedicated to coronavirus regulations in Israel. But they need to scroll all the way down to the bottom to obtain the number of an emergency call center for tourists who test positive for Covid.

When contacted, a call center representative was unable to answer a few basic questions about where tourists should isolate and suggested contacting the Health Ministry.

With the help of their Israeli friends, Donald and Anne would eventually learn that once they completed their isolation, they would receive official recovery certificates that would allow them to return home. Those certificates, however, would only be issued once they had spoken on the phone to a doctor who had determined they were indeed fully recovered.

Getting a doctor to call them proved to be yet another major challenge. Trying to find out why Donald and Anne hadn’t been called after they each completed their isolation period, their Israeli friends discovered that the Bikur Rofeh doctors will only call an Israeli phone number — which the couple did not have. Like many tourists, they used WhatsApp for phone calls while in the country. The Bikur Rofeh doctors said they could not put calls through on WhatsApp.

So in order for a doctor to be able to speak with and issue their recovery certificates, they had to devise an alternative form of communication.

Here’s what they did: Their Israeli friends used two cellphones — one on a call with the Bikur Rofeh doctor and the other on a WhatsApp call to Donald and Anne  — and placed those phones side-by-side on speaker mode. This is how they were eventually pronounced free to return home.

Asked for comment, the Health Ministry said in a statement that its English-language “Ramzor” website “contains all the necessary information.”

The statement continued: “According to the website, a person who tests positive and has begun their isolation is required to call the Health Ministry hotline, and the hotline will direct them to a Bikur Rofeh doctor who will speak to them and see to their release, according to the rules, once the isolation period is over.”

A thorough search of the website, however, uncovered no such information.

The Tourism Ministry, meanwhile, said in a statement that incoming tourists are invited to a booth located in the baggage hall at Ben Gurion Airport, where information about the rules that apply to tourists who test positive for Covid is available.

“It should be noted that all issues related to incoming tourists and the coronavirus are the responsibility of the Health Ministry,” the statement added. “The Tourism Ministry acts as a conduit, referring tourists to the Health Ministry website and call center for updated information.

Through a narrow, fraying sottoportico, or Venetian alleyway, and across a wooden footbridge, there is a wide square enclosed by rows of multicolored buildings.

Stepping into Venice’s Jewish Ghetto feels a bit like traveling back in time. On March 29, 1516, the Venetian Senate gated the city’s Jews here near a cannon factory, in one of the earliest examples of forced religious segregation.

In contrast to their Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and Christian neighbors, Venetian Jews were allowed to freely practice their religion as long as they remained inside the Ghetto, paid their taxes and rents (higher than other citizens), and stuck to a few occupations: moneylenders, doctors, traders and rag sellers.

They endured, and over time the Ghetto, crammed into the space of an acre, became the vibrant Jewish cultural capital of Europe. Early printing presses produced religious and secular works in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish within the Ghetto; the 1609 Venice Haggadah is one of the most famous examples of the book that guides the Passover seder.

Centuries later, much of the architecture is in a precarious state, and the local Jewish community is much smaller than it was. It’s taking action — small steps at first — to reverse those trends in the wake of the failure of other high-profile campaigns.

“The community’s population probably peaked around 1630 with about 5,000 Jews of German, Italian, French, and Sephardic descent. Before the Shoah, between 1500 and 1800, they lived here. Nowadays, we are approximately 450 Jews,” said Paolo Navarro, vice president of the Jewish Community of Venice organization.

Only about 30 of those 450 still live in the Ghetto square, making up about a dozen households. In recent decades, tourism has been a double-edged sword: it sustains an economy but has caused a citywide exodus of local Jews and non-Jews who find daily tasks, like shopping and errands, difficult in a city that receives tens of millions of tourists each year.

“It’s a social issue that affects everyone, not just the Jewish community,” Navarro said.

The buildings, which were wedged too closely together from the start, needed a long-overdue renovation to stay standing, especially as the city’s water levels continue to rise due to climate change. In 2014, looking forward to the 500th anniversary of the Ghetto’s creation in 2016, a group of philanthropists called the Venetian Heritage Council, led by the famed Jewish fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, announced a $12 million project to restore the ghetto. But the project fell through when the group couldn’t raise enough funds to begin the restoration.

That’s when the Jewish Community of Venice, a group that now owns much of the Ghetto’s real estate, decided to take the challenge into their own hands. First they renovated the Ghetto’s kosher bed and breakfast, the Giardino Dei Melograni, Garden of Pomegranates. This year they’re renovating the kosher restaurant next door, the Gimmel Garden, which has been closed for years, and the small-but-historic Jewish Museum, which catalogs Venetian Jewish history. Both buildings are scheduled to reopen this summer.

They hope the renovations will lure some new families into living in the confines of the Ghetto; the Community group owns enough housing to offer some to the families of new workers at the museum and other institutions undergoing renovation. From there, the Community dreams of a broader revitalization of religious Jewish life throughout Venice. In 2019, they hired a new chief rabbi, Daniel Touitou, from France, who in the 1990s was the deputy rabbi of Turin.

It’s an uphill battle — in addition to the waves of tourists, most Venetian Jews are disengaged from communal life these days, said Touitou, who is Orthodox.

“People, unfortunately, are not interested in living Jewishly,” he said. “The past is significant, but it cannot withstand the risk of assimilation in the absence of practice. Many Venetian Jews are losing interest in their identity.”

A tour

Thanks to the Covid pandemic, the Ghetto has been significantly quieter since 2020, its narrow streets not as congested. But its Jewish artistic and cultural heritage still permeates the walls of the decaying apartment buildings.

Sardines and sweets

A tour of the Venetian Ghetto begins at the ornate Bridge of the Spires, made of brick and white stone, in the city’s northwest corner. Then, along the Cannaregio canal, past tourists sipping coffee at cafes, an unassuming dark tunnel leads to the Jewish district.

Immediately upon entering, the first thing visitors notice are the aromas emanating from Gam Gam, a kosher restaurant managed by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The eatery features a menu of traditional Venetian, Israeli and Ashkenazi Jewish flavors, serving everything from sarde in saor — pickled sardines with onions, raisins, pine nuts — to deep-fried artichokes with lamb to holiday staples such as gefilte fish and latkes with applesauce.

A little further along the tiny alley, a sign in front of a square store announces its main specialty: Dolci Ebraici, or Jewish sweets. Giovanni Volpe’s store is the quarter’s most sought-after Jewish bakery. It’s not uncommon seeing someone outside nibbling on an impade pastry, reminiscent of other Sephardic ones stuffed with almond cream filling, or a piece of unleavened, citrusy bise — a small cookie in an “S” shape, a traditional Passover delicacy.

Synagogues

At the end of the lane, the Ghetto opens up into the square once inhabited by Levantine Jews, Sephardim predominantly from the Ottoman Empire. Hidden within ordinary-looking buildings in the square sit La Scola Spagnola (Spanish Synagogue) and La Scola Levantina (Levantine Synagogue), the last synagogues built in the quarter, in 1541 and 1580, respectively.

Coming from various regions of Europe, each Jewish group sought to retain its own traditions and community spirit inside the Ghetto. By 1571, there were five synagogues, each dedicated to a distinct ethnic group.

The Spanish Synagogue is the only temple that has been continuously used since its founding. Said to be designed by the famous Venetian Baroque architect Baldassare Longhena, the temple resembles the style of many contemporary Venetian monuments and palazzos. Carved wooden doors inscribed with Psalm verses welcome congregants. The bimah, or prayer podium, features marble columns, and the floor is made up of white and gray marble tiles, arranged in a concentric square pattern.

The Schola Levantina, rebuilt in 1680, is an elegant building also attributed to Longhena. Dark wooden panels clad the square-plan prayer room, and the 18th-century bimah stands in a raised polygonal apse, covered by a domed skylight.

Of the remaining three temples in the Ghetto, La Scola Grande Tedesca (German Synagogue), erected by Ashkenazi Jews in 1528, is the oldest. The bimah and Torah ark sit opposite of one another, and the long walls house 16th-century benches that are adorned with lion claws and flower designs. A skylight ceiling floats above the Venetian terrazzo floor, adorned with mosaics of multicolored marble. The building it is in also houses the aforementioned Jewish Museum.

The contemporary community migrates between the synagogues: they use the Levantine Synagogue in the winter months because it is heated, and the Spanish Synagogue in the summer since it stays cooler.

An artisanal culture

A thriving culture of Jewish artisans and craftspeople is still present along the Ghetto’s entangled streets. A few blocks away from the synagogues, the couple Michal Meron and Alon Baker run The Studio in Venice, a gallery and store showcasing a diverse collection of colorful art, from original paintings depicting Jewish holidays to prints celebrating the cats of Venice.

Their most popular creation is the Illustrated Torah Scrolls, which takes inspiration from all 54 weekly Torah portions and the Ten Commandments, painted on a single canvas scroll with wooden rollers. It took Michal, who is from Austria, four years to complete and is available in various print duplicate sizes.

“Congregations and yeshivas that purchased one primarily used it as a teaching tool for children,” said Baker, a native Italian from Trieste.

The couple, who previously lived in Haifa, also sell prints that utilize micrography, a Jewish calligraphic technique that uses minuscule Hebrew letters to construct documents, like a ketubah marriage contract, or artworks and designs.

Several factors, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have strained local businesses here.

“Few European Jewish tourists here buy Venetian Judaica art,” said Davide Curiel, owner of David’s Shop, which designs Jewish art and Judaica.

The Curiels arrived in Venice 500 years ago from Curiel del Duero, Spain, and have been making glass Judaica in the city’s famed Murano style ever since. Doriana, Davide’s sister, is the mastermind behind the meticulous creations.

By blowing glass in various colorful patterns and forms, the duo creates menorahs, shofars, mezuzahs, dreidels, kiddush cups and more using centennial glass techniques; their shop is only one of two that still make Judaica out of glass in Venice.

“My sister will be retiring in a few years. I’m 62 years old and have no children. When you work with glass, you create something remarkable and special. Once we’re stopped, the heritage and legacy behind our craft will be completely lost,” Davide said.

On March 28, top diplomats from the United States, Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel gathered in Sde Boker, in the Negev Desert, for the first Israeli-Arab summit of its kind on Israeli soil. Though it did not produce any solutions to the region’s most pressing challenges, including issues around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, it was an important demonstration of the shifting attitudes in parts of the Arab world toward the Jewish state.

“Just a few years ago, this gathering would have been impossible to imagine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference. He cited the Abraham Accords, the 2020 treaties normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states, as well as the 1978 Camp David Accords as important milestones along the way. But he also acknowledged that “these regional peace agreements are not a substitute for progress between Palestinians and Israelis.”

At the moment, Israel is experiencing a new wave of Palestinian terrorism that has left 11 Israelis dead and may have been inspired, in part, by the Negev summit.

This is what peacemaking in the modern Middle East looks like: incremental progress followed by a violent backlash.

Last month, I traveled to Israel to visit family in the Tel Aviv area. On an impulse, my mother and I took a side trip to Egypt. We flew to Cairo on Egyptair, something that has only been possible since late last year, after Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Sharm el-Sheikh. (Before then, an Egyptair affiliate ferried tourists and businesspeople between the two countries on planes that did not bear the Egyptian flag.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by J. The Jewish News (@jewishnews_sf)

Driving around the famously chaotic capital city, home to 10 million people, we saw evidence of the fraught history between Egyptians and Jews, one that goes all the way back to Biblical times.

Out of the car window, we spotted the 6th of October war memorial, which valorizes the Egyptian military for attacking Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973. There was Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising in 2011, during which protesters burned Israeli flags. (When I asked our tour guide, Rasha, what impact the revolution had on Egyptian society, she replied, “Only negative impact. Tourism disappeared, unemployment went up, and the prices of goods skyrocketed. It was a disaster.”)

And there, inside the Egyptian Museum, were statues of Ramses II, the ancient Egyptian king often identified as the Biblical pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites during his reign (1279–1213 BCE).

We also saw evidence of something more hopeful. The famous Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo was closed for renovations, but two Muslim men sitting outside the gates greeted us with “Shalom” and excitedly showed us video of the synagogue’s interior on a mobile phone.

Following the establishment of Israel, nearly all of Egypt’s Jews were forced to leave the country, according to Samy Arie, a third-generation Egyptian Jew who showed us around Sha’ar Hashamayim, a synagogue built at the beginning of the 20th century that is still in use on High Holidays. Today, there are more synagogues in Cairo (13) than there are Jews. “It’s a sad story,” Arie said.

And yet: One takeaway from my short time in Egypt is that no matter how acrimonious relations between two nations have been over the decades (or millennia), there is always a path toward reconciliation and peace. This was true for Egypt and Israel. It was true for Jordan and Israel. And it is true for the Palestinians and Israel. But charting that path is tricky, even perilous, and therefore must be prioritized — at the next Negev summit, but ideally before.

The Torah column is supported by a generous donation from Eve Gordon-Ramek in memory of Kenneth Gordon.

Vayishlach

Genesis 32:4-36:43

This week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, contains one of the most famous moments in the development of our people.

Jacob wrestles with a man and proves himself to be a strong and unrelenting warrior. Our ancestor holds on for dear life, even when the man touches Jacob’s hip socket, dislocating his leg.

It turns out that the man who is wrestling with Jacob isn’t merely a mortal man, but an angel. The angel rewards Jacob for his tenacity by telling him that he will receive a new name, Yisrael, meaning “one who wrestles with God.”

It is the name by which we are identified.

We often think of this story as a triumphant one. After all, Jacob comes out of it with a new name which promises an ongoing relationship with God.

However, on closer inspection, this is, in many ways, an uncomfortable story to read.

The dreamlike state that Jacob is in reflects his exhaustion — physical and emotional. Two parashahs ago, Jacob stole the birthright from his brother, Esau. And since then, he has been on the run, trying to escape from his outraged and deceived twin brother. Perhaps Jacob is tortured by what he’s done, by the deception and dishonesty that split his family apart …?

This week, we encounter Jacob, just as he prepares to lie down in his camp to sleep for the night: Hu lan balaila hahu bamachaneh. But in the very next verse, Jacob wakes up — in the middle of the night — and moves his entire party, including his two wives, two maidservants and 11 children.

Now … I have only two children, but I know how hard it is to get them organized and out the door! So I can imagine what it took to move a family of 11 children! And why in the middle of the night?!

Apparently, this move cannot wait until morning. Jacob’s demons pursue him wherever he is. And in the middle of the night, our tortured ancestor and his large family “crossed the Jabbok river.” A guy who could rest at night would not have been engaging in this enormous — and dangerous — journey (before the advent of headlamps) if it could have been avoided.

But the plot thickens.

After this dramatic and exhausting trek across the river, Jacob is described as being “left alone.” How could that have been? Two wives, two maidservants and 11 children, plus household goods, animals, etc. would not have crossed a river quietly and easily. Nor would they have set up camp quickly on the other side. They’d be soaked and scared and wide awake.

I imagine there would have been total chaos.

But the Torah says that Jacob was “left alone” … just Jacob and his conscience.

It was in that time and place of total solitude that Jacob wrestled. Was it with a man? An angel? Himself? What if, late at night (when we all imagine things) Jacob, too, imagined a wrestling match? Maybe his opponent was his conscience or morality or God …?

It seems an ironic but important end to the wrestling match that Jacob’s opponent blesses him. Perhaps Jacob needed a blessing to assuage his guilt or to begin his own teshuvah.

When I read this story this year, it feels a bit different. Maybe as this pandemic has dragged on, I’ve felt the absence of anxiety-free sleep take its toll on me. I recognize how tumultuous anxious nights can feel. Like Jacob, I find myself waking up sometimes, unsure where reality and imagination begin and end. Stress manifests itself in many ways — including physical pain, anxiety, sleeplessness. Jacob seemed to have all of those markers.

Over thousands of years, the Torah has held up a mirror to humanity, showing us that human behavior hasn’t changed much.

Like Jacob, we, too, continue to wrestle to understand the world and our place in it. And we try to make choices that allow us a good night’s sleep.

Jacob’s wrestling wasn’t in vain. It allowed him to become Yisrael — the patriarch of the people of Israel.

Wrestling is about engagement with one’s own core.

This story reminds us of the sacred work of engaging with ourselves and others. And, ultimately, with the choices that we make as we travel on our own journeys.

After more than a year and a half of largely closed doors, Israel just moved one step closer to allowing tourists back into the country — as long as they are vaccinated.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet and the country’s health minister Nitzan Horowitz approved a plan Thursday that would allow foreign tourists back into the country beginning Nov. 1. The plan still has to be formally approved by the government.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, tourists have only been allowed to enter the country with special approval and have been subject to mandatory quarantines and multiple Covid-19 tests. Entry permits have been granted only to certain kinds of people, including immediate family members of Israeli citizens.

That has left millions of Jews around the world cut off from the country to which barrier-free travel has been a hallmark of Jewish life.

Under the new plan, vaccinated tourists will be able to enter freely and will not have to quarantine after arriving.

It is unclear whether children under age 12, who are not yet eligible for vaccination, will be able to enter the country under the new plan. Children 5 and older are expected to become eligible for vaccination next month, but they will not be able to be fully vaccinated until the end of the year and no timeline yet exists for vaccination of younger children.

There could also be complications for tourists coming from countries where booster shots are not yet widely available, including the U.S. where only certain categories of people are currently eligible for boosters. Based on emerging evidence about waning immunity, Israel requires booster shots six months after vaccination, and tourists whose last shot was more than 180 days ago are not eligible for entry under the new plan.

Birthright Israel is resuming its organized trips this fall. This comes on the heels of an earlier decision in August to cancel 42 trips this summer because of new Israeli rules that require Americans arriving in Israel to quarantine for a week.

The organization announced Thursday that participants who have been fully vaccinated in the past six months will not have to quarantine on arrival for the trips, which will likely resume Oct. 3. However, they will still be subject to PCR and serological tests upon arrival and wait for the PCR results before beginning the trip.

That contrasts with the current policy for U.S. travelers to Israel, who must enter quarantine upon arrival.

Birthright restarted trips in May — the first since the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020 — before the abrupt summer cancellation.

On any given afternoon, hundreds of visitors to Key West patiently line up for selfies next to a brightly painted, 12-foot-high concrete buoy that marks the southernmost point in the continental United States.

Just behind this landmark, a less obvious monument overlooks the Atlantic Ocean for a few days a year: a menorah erected during Hanukkah by Chabad Jewish Center of the Florida Keys & Key West. Billed as “the nation’s southernmost menorah,” the gimmick is just one way that Rabbi Yaakov Zucker attracts Jews among the 2.5 million tourists who flock to the Keys annually.

“For a while, there was also a ‘southernmost Christmas tree’ and then they stopped putting it there. But I’ve continued my menorah tradition. People like these things,” said Zucker, 49, who often cruises up and down Duval Street, the epicenter of Key West’s famous party strip, in a modified golf cart, chatting up Jews and trying to convince men to put on tefillin.

Key West is the southernmost among a string of islands off the southern coast of Florida (called the Keys) that are linked to Miami via a 113-mile highway that crosses the water. While the pandemic devastated local tourism last year and large cruise ships have yet to return, Key West’s hotels are again packed with visitors. Most are Americans who arrive by car from the mainland, but the number of international visitors is growing.

Once Florida’s most populous city in the 19th century, Key West today doesn’t even rank in the state’s top 150. But among its 24,000 or so residents are about a thousand Jews, about one-third of whom are Israeli expats, according to Zucker. Another thousand or so Jews are scattered elsewhere in the Keys, mainly in island towns such as Islamorada, Key Largo, Marathon and Tavernier.

“When I first came to Key West, I called my dad up and said, ‘They must really love Jews here. Every store has a mezuzah,’” recalled Sam Kaufman, the vice mayor here and a regular at Chabad services.

That tradition dates back to the 1920s, when the local merchants’ association ruled that only people who resided permanently in Key West could operate businesses on Duval Street.

“The Jews weren’t full-time residents because there was no rabbi and no kosher food. So they left on Thursday night by boat and came back on Sunday,” Kaufman said. “After that ruling, the Jews became full-time residents.”

The Chabad center, housed in a former Lutheran church on Trinity Drive, is a relative newcomer to Key West. But Jews have lived since 1886 in this laid-back fishing town nicknamed the Conch Republic, which has inspired hard-drinking celebrities from novelist Ernest Hemingway to songwriter Jimmy Buffett. That’s the year a massive fire destroyed Key West’s commercial district, creating opportunities for Yiddish-speaking peddlers and shopkeepers from New York, according to Arlo Haskell’s 2017 book, “Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers and Revolutionaries (1823-1969).”

In the 1890s, some of these early Jewish pioneers helped buy weapons for José Martí’s anti-Spanish revolution in Cuba, only 90 miles to the south. And in 1899 — just two years after Theodor Herzl’s first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland — the Federation of American Zionists opened a Key West branch to raise funds for an eventual Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Congregation B’nai Zion, a nonaffiliated synagogue with about 100 members, is the oldest synagogue in South Florida. Established in 1887, it occupies an entire city block along United Street, not far from its original location at the Sidney M. Aronovitz U.S. Courthouse, named after a prominent Jewish lawyer and third-generation Key West resident.

“A lot of Jews come to Key West to disappear from the radar,” said the synagogue’s Israeli-born rabbi, Shimon Dudai, 76. “Most of the time they become family.”

There can be a disconnect between the Israelis and local Jews, though, Dudai said.

“Local Jews don’t mix much with the Israelis,” he said. “When I first came here, I went to every store and met all the Israelis. I knew they were not the kind of people who would come to a place considered Reform. That’s the reason we’re not affiliated, although my congregation welcomes all streams of Judaism.”

Meir Mergi, 42, is originally from the Haifa suburb of Kiryat Ata. He’s lived here for 20 years, selling T-shirts, other clothing and local souvenirs at his Duval Street shop.

“I never planned to stay in America. It was supposed to be a three-month vacation,” Mergi said. “Key West is the best place to be if you want a quiet life. I’m very happy here.”

From April to June of 2020, as coronavirus infections spiked across South Florida, Key West and the other islands were closed off to nonresidents. Police blocked the Overseas Highway at the boundary with Miami-Dade County.

“If you didn’t show an ID that you lived in the Keys, you couldn’t get in,” said Zucker, who is also a chaplain with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. “To get back into town, I had to write our Israeli guests a letter that they were coming to see me.”

These days, Kaufman is optimistic about the future. Crime is low and Key West is packed with visitors.

“There’s pent-up demand for tourism, it’s a safe place and it’s drivable,” Kaufman said. “During spring break, hotel rooms were going for $1,200 a night, so we’re not really suffering.”

In fact, some Jewish retirees moved to the Florida Keys during the pandemic to escape public health restrictions up north.

“I must have gotten at least 30 phone calls from people wanting to move to the Keys from New York and Chicago,” said Zucker, who hosted over 100 people at Chabad’s Passover seder this year. “After coronavirus, they want to be off the grid. They don’t want to be in big cities. People saw what happened, and nobody has insurance that some new variant won’t happen again.”

The Keys Jewish Community Center, located at Mile Marker 93 along the Overseas Highway, is the only synagogue between Key West and Homestead on the Florida mainland.

The congregation’s president, Joyce Peckman, who settled here in 2003 from New York, said that about half of the 170 member families have second homes elsewhere, with some of them spending only a few weeks a year in the Keys. The JCC once had a Hebrew school with 10 children, but they all grew up and moved away. More than half intermarried, she said.

“If I had young children, I would not move here,” Peckman said. “The vibe here in the Upper Keys is very laid back. People came here for diving, fishing, relaxing and getting away from it all. But there are very few Jews, and if you have kids, you want them to be someplace where there are other Jewish kids.”

Gili Sanouf, a 17-year-old senior at Key West High School, agrees. An Orthodox Jew, Sanouf had his bar mitzvah celebration at the local Chabad. He spends his after school hours selling T-shirts, fridge magnets, Mile Zero bottle openers, bathing suits and Christmas ornaments at Happy Rooster, the souvenir shop owned by his parents, who came here 20 years ago.

“There are really no Jewish kids my age here. There’s only bars and drugs; it’s very limiting,” the teenager said. “After graduating, I want to go to Israel, join the army and focus on cybersecurity.”

Sanouf brightens whenever the occasional Israeli tourist walks into his shop and he gets the chance to practice Hebrew. And nearly every day, non-Jewish tourists inquire about his kippah.

“They ask me, ‘What’s that thing on your head?’” he said. “I explain to them that there’s something above me, and that I’m not the only thing that matters.”

Because of Covid, travel has been limited. You can’t really go to Morocco right now to see the Jewish quarter. Nor can you stop by Kurdistan to catch a glimpse of the tomb of Nahum.

Or can you?

Well maybe you can’t do it the traditional way, but S.F.-based JIMENA has launched a program attempting to create the next best thing. The organization, whose acronym stands for Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, is taking small groups of young adults for online “trips” to Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen and Kurdistan.

And it’s no mere slideshow and lecture.

“A Journey through the Middle East and North Africa” consists of three sessions per country and includes videos made especially for JIMENA, as well as live discussions with activists, curators, musicians and rabbis living in those countries. It’s all designed to make participants feel like they’re there.

“It’s not like every other virtual program they attended in the last year,” said Sapir Taib, program director at JIMENA. “It’s an opportunity to meet people on the ground.”

The first “trip” began in April. On a journey through Morocco, a group of people between 21 and 35 years old watched as singer Tamar Bloch (known by her stage name “Lala Tamar”) stood in an echoey tomb in the Jewish cemetery of the port city of Essaouira and talked about the once-thriving community.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, more than half of the population was Jewish,” explained Bloch, a Moroccan Israeli singer who lives in Morocco. “It had a big impact on the way of life, the way the people were living here, the coexistence.”

Bloch’s city tour took the group to an ancient synagogue being watched over by an elderly Muslim woman (who inherited the job from her father) and through the halls of the Beit Dakira museum (built around a synagogue). After the tour, she joined the Zoom call live to talk about the gnawa music she studies in Morocco.

While the current trip is full, there are opportunities to “visit” Tunisia in May, Yemen in June and Kurdistan in July. For details, visit jimena.org or contact Taib at sapir@jimena.org.

The program is sponsored by a grant from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation for young adult programming (hence the 21- to 35-year-old age restriction).

JIMENA is making the tours a bit more real by sending a gift basket to each participant; for Morocco, it was tea glasses and tea, which will be used by group members when they are together online.

“We’re trying to pick objects we can have an experience around,” Taib explained.

That’s really the point, Taib said. While it’s difficult for people to actually travel  and experience these countries in person right now, they can still take this opportunity to get a little bit of a taste of them, one that will maybe teach them something new and give them a break from their everyday surroundings.

“It’s something different!” Taib said.

San Francisco and Haifa make for obvious sister cities for a number of reasons — and their mutual affinity for art is one of them. They’ve officially been linked as such since 1973.

But what do San Franciscans know of the work of Haifa artists?

On Jan. 17, there will be an opportunity to take a peek, thanks to an online program from the S.F.-Haifa Sister City Committee and the S.F.-based Israeli Consulate serving the Pacific Northwest.

“San Francisco and Haifa Connect Through Art” will offer free virtual tours of two museum exhibitions in Haifa, as well as the current Levi Strauss exhibit at our own, temporarily shuttered Contemporary Jewish Museum.

The Haifa Museum of Art will present “Spaces in Turmoil,” an exhibit that explores artists’ responses to the global pandemic. It opened in September.

“The coronavirus crisis and its widespread effects have revealed the fragility of our existence in our most private spaces, as well as in the general social order,” writes curator Svetlana Reingold. “This is a period of fear and insecurity, yet also one of potential insight. It allows us to see through the cracks in the foundations of our existence and reexamine them, though the encounter may be distressful and shocking.”

One theme that emerges is the weakening of boundaries between man and nature, with animals invading the spaces vacated by humans under quarantine.

As is typical for this 70-year-old museum, the show combines new works by contemporary Israelis with selected earlier pieces from the museum’s collection of more than 7,500 artworks by Israeli and international artists.

In the same program, the Haifa City Museum will offer a virtual tour of its groundbreaking new show “What Will the Neighbours Say?” Curated by the museum along with the Haifa Queer History Project, the show offers the first comprehensive display of gay history in any Israeli museum, according to a museum description. It tells the story of the LGBTQ community in Haifa, which has long been active (be it covertly or overtly), and explores this community in the context of Haifa’s history and social fabric.

The CJM’s contribution will be a tour of “Levi Strauss: A History of American Style,” an exhibit that went virtual shortly after its delayed opening in mid-October, when the CJM reopened at reduced capacity (only to be forced to shut back down in late November). The exhibit is scheduled to run through Jan. 31.

The program, which will occur on Zoom on the opening day of the Haifa LGBTQ exhibit, will take place at 10 a.m. PST Jan. 17. Israeli Consul General Shlomi Kofman will participate, as well as the artistic directors of the museums.

Register or get more information here.

There is a strip of land about a mile wide and 120 miles long in Northern California, a vein that hugs the western edge of the Sierra Nevada, stretching from tiny Georgetown in the north to tiny Mormon Bar in the south. It is where, once upon a time, fortunes were found — or lost — overnight.

This is the Mother Lode, an area that once held some of the richest deposits of gold in the world. During the Gold Rush, a 30-year period that started in 1848, a very lucky miner could uncover a gold nugget as thick as his thumb.

Jews were among the thousands who descended on the area, coming to make their mark and make some money, too. Some were escaping the political upheavals in Europe at the time, fearing a possible resurgence of antisemitism after a period of relative calm.

They made their way from Germany and other Central European countries to the Golden State, a journey that was far from easy. Some crossed the Atlantic, then trudged over the continental U.S. Others took a boat around Cape Horn in Chile before the Panama Canal was built. Either way, most landed in San Francisco, continuing the trek eastward to Gold Country on horseback.

The Gold Rush lasted until the late 1880s, but in their wake Jews left behind cemeteries, buildings and memories. Over two days in late October, a road trip covering 500 miles included stops at some of these historical sites: starting in Stockton, where the proud caretaker of the Jewish cemetery showed how he tends to the gravestones; to the West, deep into Gold Country, where small Jewish cemeteries are present in Sonora and Jackson; up north to a 25-member synagogue in Marysville whose building was once a saloon; and finally to San Leandro to tour the “Little Shul,” the oldest known synagogue in California still standing. (The first synagogue in the state was Sacramento’s Congregation B’nai Israel, built in 1852. Two months after the shul was established, most of it burned in a fire. A plaque commemorates the site.)

The tale of the Jews in California Gold Country is largely one of reinvention. Those who came found a society that viewed their contributions to the frontier in a positive light.

“It was a real release from the onerous lives that they left behind in Europe,” said Jonathan L. Friedmann, president of the Western States Jewish History Association and director of the Jewish Museum of the American West. “There was so much more freedom of movement, freedom of self-expression.”

While some Jews gravitated toward cities and other populated areas, many embraced the opportunity to establish themselves in burgeoning communities.

A few worked in the mines, but most ended up selling clothing and tobacco to cater to the region’s surging population. In fact, Jews dominated those sectors. It was not unusual at the time, writes Robert E. Levinson, author of “The Jews in the California Gold Rush,” to see 10 advertisements for Jewish-owned clothing or tobacco stores in a local newspaper, “and perhaps one from a Gentile.”

Organized antisemitism in Gold Country was rare, according to Levinson; this relief for Jews came largely at the expense of their Mexican  and Chinese counterparts, who faced extraordinary prejudice and even lynchings. Jews, however, were able to assimilate and become part of the dominant white class. If there ever was an occasional antisemitic incident, newspapers were quick to come to the Jews’ defense.

The Jews in this population weren’t particularly religious. Only two towns in the Mother Lode, Jackson and Placerville, had synagogues.

Today, what remains of Gold Rush-era Jewish history resides in cemeteries near the old mining towns. The cemeteries are a fitting representation of the end of the Gold Rush, when Jews turned to richer opportunities in Bay Area cities.

A good place to start this trip through history is Stockton, known during the Gold Rush as one of the “economic appendages” of San Francisco, providing an inland port along the San Joaquin River for the Mother Lode region.

Sheldon Barr is caretaker of the oldest continuously operating Jewish cemetery west of the Rockies. Barr loves overseeing the place. He loves it so much he even has a plot reserved for himself and his wife, Arlene. For the last 20 years, Barr has made it his mission to keep the cemetery in tip-top shape. He walks through the 300-square-foot space, noticing everything. At one point, he bends over to prop up a bouquet of flowers that had fallen over next to a headstone.

“I take a lot of pride in it,” said Barr. “Maybe too much pride. It’s important. No Jew can let a Jewish cemetery go in disrepair.”

In 1851, a Jewish society was established in Stockton called Ryhim Ahoovim, Hebrew for brotherly love. That same year, a cemetery was built after the death of a Polish Jewish merchant named Solomon Friedman. Since then, about 600 Jews have been buried at the cemetery, Barr said. Tillie Lewis, a successful female entrepreneur who died in 1977, is interred there. Close by is the tomb of Charles Brown, a distinguished Civil War veteran who died in 1911. Barr has even seen his own family and friends buried, including Lillian Friedberg, his mother-in-law, and Joel “Sandy” Senderov, the cemetery’s previous caretaker.

In 1855, about 40 members of Ryhim Ahoovim established a synagogue and formed its first congregation. With no sawmill in the city, lumber was shipped around Cape Horn. Congregants helped haul the pieces from the Stockton waterfront to save money on transport. By 1900 the shul had been named Temple Israel, moving from location to location over the years until finding a permanent home in 1972, a 10-minute drive from the cemetery. Barr is a congregant.

Stockton’s Jews also built a JCC in 1926, designed by the city’s “architect laureate” Glen Allen. In 1964 it was purchased by the Stockton Civic Theater and repurposed. Located on a corner next to an apartment complex, the original JCC building stands out with its imposing, beautiful orange-yellow brick facade and blueish-yellow stained-glass windows above the door.

The facility is currently used for housing for low-income residents. Sitting by the front door below the carved-in-stone “Jewish Community Center” sign was one resident who said he likes to take photos of the building at night, when the light inside illuminates the stained-glass windows.

As you leave Stockton’s shallow, flat valley and drive toward Sonora, also known as “Queen of the Southern Mines,” you gain close to 2,000 feet of elevation. The town’s Hebrew Cemetery is located near the main street. To enter, you must first go to the sheriff’s office and ask for the key. Then, it’s just a minute-long walk around the corner of the Tuolumne County Jail, where you come upon a roughly 50-square-foot plot surrounded by a stone wall and high trees.

Sonora’s official city historian, Patricia Perry, knows a thing or two about the place. Soft-spoken and curious, she comes ready with a 3-inch-thick binder full of stories and pictures of those who are buried here.

“It’s just a real treasure,” she said.

Perry moved to Sonora in 1984, and after retiring became the city’s historian in 2002. Even though she is not Jewish, she’s always been fascinated with the history. Growing up in a neighborhood in Burbank, she said the sole Jewish family there was ignored by the rest of the community.

“They seemed like really nice people to me, but nobody would talk to them,” Perry recalls. “And I just thought that was very weird. And so when I was at San Jose State, I took a few classes in Jewish history. I think these people have a lot to be admired.”

Sonora’s first Jewish congregation formed in 1851. Members of the Hebrew Congregation of Sonora did not build a synagogue but instead met at the local Odd Fellows building for services. The cemetery was built in 1853 and was in use during the Gold Rush years.

Each of the 70 or so graves comes with a story. Perry shared one, that of George Morris, whose family owned a store at Chinese Camp, about 20 miles from Sonora. In 1895, an unknown assailant shot and killed Morris during a robbery of the store. The Morris family hired a detective, who pinned it on the McReynolds brothers. The detective convinced Ada McReynolds to write a false confession blaming her brothers for the murder, with the false promise of a $5,000 insurance policy payout. Ada wrote the confession but then later recanted. One of her brothers committed suicide at the jail, while the other was later let go.

“It’s just one of these big unknowns,” Perry said. “It’s one of these stories that keeps on giving.”

Perhaps the most prominent Jews of Sonora were the Baers, who have a family plot at the cemetery. Meyer Baer started a clothing business in 1851 on the city’s main drag on South Washington Street. It stayed open until 1995, a nearly 150-year run.

Meyer’s son Julius took care of the Sonora cemetery until he was in his 90s. In the 1960s, he was interviewed by Robert E. Levinson, who undertook a vast study of Jewish Gold Rush history in the 1960s.

In 1962, Levinson helped establish the Commission for the Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks, along with Seymour Fromer, co-founder of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. The commission oversees seven Jewish cemeteries in the Mother Lode region: in Sonora, Placerville, Nevada City, Mokelumne Hill, Marysville, Jackson and Grass Valley. They vary in size and upkeep needs.

The Jackson Pioneer Jewish Cemetery, for example, is located in Amador County, considered the heart of the Mother Lode. Also known as Givoth Olam, Hebrew for Hills of Eternity, the cemetery is a quick drive from the center of Jackson yet somewhat hard to find. Surrounded by cypress trees and a wrought-iron fence, the cemetery has 32 gravestones on a plot of land about the size of a tennis court. It was established in 1857 by Congregation B’nai Israel, the first synagogue in the Mother Lode. The building became a private home in 1888 and was razed exactly 100 years later.

Two hours north of San Francisco is Marysville, an important transit stop during the era that lies along the Yuba River, also known as the “Gateway to the Gold Fields.” The Hebrew Cemetery takes up a corner of the city cemetery, located right off Highway 70. Four large brick pillars hold a gate with two Stars of David (the gate is originally from a Jewish cemetery in San Francisco). The cemetery was built in 1855 by the Marysville Hebrew Benevolent Society and used until 1945. It was abandoned and fell into a state of disrepair until 1995, when the commission took it over. The site has about 50 graves.

“We’ve always kind of felt like we are the caretakers,” said Miriam Root, co-president of Congregation Beth Shalom. Some of the members of the synagogue, with help from the city, periodically visit the cemetery to keep it free of weeds and the headstones clean.

Root continues the legacy of Jewish practice in Marysville. Beth Shalom is a Reform shul of about 25 older members and is located near the town center and the Yuba River.

From the outside, the synagogue looks more like a place where you would ask for a beer rather than a bracha. In fact, Ed Walls built it in 1905 as a saloon and called it Ed’s Place, according to Root’s son Garret, a senior architectural historian in Sacramento. Walls advertised the saloon’s all-night hours and cold beer, but he only employed white labor, suggesting an anti-immigrant sentiment, said Garret Root.

“I’m guessing he didn’t care for Jews either, so there is some irony in that,” Root said later by email.

The upstairs rooms were rented out to newly arrived immigrants and laborers. (There is a possibility it was used as a brothel, but that appears unlikely based on Root’s research.) In 1921, the saloon became a boarding house for laborers, including Japanese, Indians and Mexicans. It changed again in 1940 when the nonprofit Twin Cities Rescue Mission took over the building. It was unused from 1982 until 2003, when Root’s congregation established itself there.

The Jewish story of the Mother Lode is a brief one, ending in the late 1890s. By then, most Jews had left the region. Much of the surface gold had been snatched up, and prospectors looked to other states for mining ventures. Jewish merchants found it much harder to run their businesses. Their clientele shrunk considerably, and with the growth of agriculture in the region, their goods became useless to the self-sufficient farming communities.

So they turned their sights on the cities, especially San Francisco, which had become an economic juggernaut following the Gold Rush. They were looking for better business opportunities, education for their children and a place to practice their Judaism more freely.

In San Leandro, that came in the form of the Little Shul, a hidden gem in the backyard of Temple Beth Sholom.

A little over 1,000 square feet, the Little Shul was built in 1889 by members of the San Leandro Hebrew Congregation, which had been established just a year prior. They paid a single dollar for the land. In 1952, the building was purchased by First Baptist Church, which burned the original pews for firewood. Later in the decade, the Magnes museum bought it, later selling it back to Temple Beth Sholom for, you guessed it, a single dollar.

“Everybody who walks in there is like, ‘Oh, this feels so good,’” said former congregational president Julie Rubenstein. “It’s so cozy. It has a funny smell to it. I know that smell every time I walk in there. Just smells like old books and weird paneling.”

The entrance to the Little Shul is through a set of golden-brown wooden arched doors, which lead to a small anteroom, where a list of the synagogue’s founding members hangs on the wall. The main room is basked in natural light, with large latticed windows on both sides and a replica ark from the original time period on the far end. The 1970s-style wood paneling from a renovation during that decade encompasses the space.

Beth Zygielbaum, the director of operations, said that when she first joined the temple five years ago, she and others wondered what they should do with the Little Shul.

“Should we be using this?” Zygielbaum recalled. “Should we be saving this thing for services?” The congregation soon decided that the space would work well for a preschool classroom, Saturday services and special occasions. On this Friday it was vacant, with a box of markers and crayons sitting idly along with a used milk crate full of children’s books.

“Those founders are smiling when there’s a bunch of kids in there,” said Zygielbaum.

Chevy Fleischman and a friend travel far from their home country of Israel each year to celebrate their birthdays together. Last year they flew to Morocco. The year before they had vacationed in Peru.

For the next adventure Fleischman, an Orthodox mother of five, is hoping to visit a country that’s closer to home but Israelis couldn’t even enter until recently: the United Arab Emirates. She’s looking forward to lounging on the beach, exploring the streets of Dubai and enjoying views of the desert.

She’s also excited to visit a place where she won’t have to lug a suitcase full of kosher food, as she has on previous trips. Dubai’s first kosher restaurant, Kaf, opened recently in the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Multiple hotels are also offering kosher food.

“We’ve wanted to go somewhere else in the Middle East for years, but I was born in Israel and couldn’t go places,” Fleischman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We have been waiting for an opportunity to travel to [another] Mideast country and experience it, and as soon as we heard Dubai was going to open up, that was on our bucket list.”

The UAE, a small and wealthy nation just over three hours away from Tel Aviv by air, is hoping to be the next hot tourist destination for Israelis. The two countries signed a normalization agreement on the White House lawn this year that allowed full diplomatic relations and trade between the countries. The treaty was a historic breakthrough in Israel’s decades-long quest for relations with the Arab world.

For ordinary Israelis, perhaps the biggest change is the added destination to their itineraries. Because Israel is so small, international travel is common, and Israelis love to take advantage of cheap flights to nearby Europe and elsewhere. Young Israelis recently discharged from the army often take longer trips to far-off places like India or South America.

The UAE hopes to market itself as a cheap and easy option for a weekend getaway, especially as Israelis chafe at months of being cooped up at home. Israeli airlines have already registered significant interest from would-be travelers, and airlines are exploring the potential of the UAE as a spot for corporate retreats, group tours and package deals. An agreement waiving visa requirements between the two countries was signed in October, making it easier for Israelis to travel to the UAE than to the United States.

The first planeload of Israeli tourists arrived in Dubai earlier this month. On Monday El Al, Israel’s national carrier, announced that it would be offering 14 flights to the UAE every week starting next month. Other airlines also plan to launch flights between the two countries beginning in December.

It’s unclear how the pandemic and the economic crisis it sparked will affect tourism numbers. But some Israelis are already making plans.

“The people seem to be warm and friendly and [the] sights well worth seeing,” said Rona Michelson, an Israeli tour guide. “The Emirates look as if they have lots to offer.” Michelson said she is already planning a tour there but did not offer a detailed itinerary.

Any tour would likely include the city’s major sightseeing and retail attractions, such as the Burj Khalifa, the Louvre Abu Dhabi art museum, the indoor Warner Bros. World theme park and the Dubai Mall, which boasts some 1,300 stores. Tourists may also visit the Palm Jumeirah archipelago, a chain of artificial islands.

But some Israelis are wary of patronizing a constitutional monarchy known for its repression of civil liberties. According to a report this year by Human Rights Watch, freedom of expression in the UAE is limited and “especially in cases related to state security, individuals were at serious risk of arbitrary and incommunicado detention, torture, and ill-treatment, prolonged solitary confinement, and denial of access to legal assistance.”

“Israelis do not understand that Emirati people are not like the Palestinian or Egyptian people they’ve come into contact with,” said Claire Blumenthal, a Jewish American who has lived in both countries for extended periods. “Drinking is not illegal, but if you’re in the street you cannot act as if you’ve had a drink. You’ll be fined and jailed.”

Penalties for smoking weed can be even more severe, she said.

“This is not Sinai,” she said, referencing the Egyptian desert adjacent to Israel where Israelis have long traveled to get high. “This is Dubai. You’ll get jail for life. While Dubai is a major party scene, you cannot do anything out in the open, and I need Israelis to know and understand the place they are going to.”

Traveling to the country may also pose a danger to women. In 2016, a British woman was arrested after reporting being raped by two of her countrymen while on vacation in Dubai. According to Human Rights Watch, “women who report rape can find themselves prosecuted for consensual sex instead” under an article of the UAE penal code that prohibits “indecent assault.”

“Dubai struggles to maintain its promoted reputation of being tolerant, modern, progressive and focussed on happiness and positivity, while it regularly victimises women for reporting crime,” Radha Stirling, the founder of the advocacy group Detained in Dubai, wrote in the Independent, a British newspaper, in 2016. “All of the glamour, glitz and fireworks displays in the world press cannot disguise the negative image that incidences like this one generate.”

Thani AlShirawi, a founding member of the recently established UAE-Israel Business Council, said the UAE is making an effort to teach its citizens “indoctrinated tolerance” toward foreign visitors, including Israelis. In addition to kosher food at hotels, an Emirati soccer team, Al-Nasr Dubai, just signed Dia Saba, who plays on the Israeli national team.

AlShirawi believes Israelis will feel even more comfortable visiting his country than Egypt and Jordan, neighboring states with whom Israel has been at peace for decades, because Israel and the Emirates have never fought a war.

“We have to give a lot of credit to our leadership because they have indoctrinated tolerance and to accept everybody,” he said.

Members of the Jewish community in Dubai, which has remained mostly under the radar until recently and which is composed of expats from around the world, are also excited about the potential influx of Israelis. According to estimates, up to 1,500 Jews live in the UAE.

“I think what we’ve done up until now is build the basic structure for Jewish communal life, but in the future the structure will be used to create a fully fledged and mature community,” Ross Kriel, president of the Jewish Council of the Emirates, said in August. “We imagine schools, a vibrant community center, multiple places of worship, kosher restaurants and all the dimensions of vibrant communal life.”

Regardless of what the country offers, and when exactly they’ll be able to go, some Israelis are thrilled simply at the prospect of being able to travel to another country that is so close but had been closed off until this year.

“I’m extremely excited about it [and] will fly at the first opportunity,” Yoni Mann, an American immigrant living in Jerusalem, told JTA. “It’s exciting to finally see what looks like a warm peace brewing with our Arab cousins.”

Non-Israeli passport holders who do not come from countries with low coronavirus infection rates will be banned from entering the country until at least Oct. 1.

The United States is among those not on the so-called green list of countries with low rates.

Among non-citizens who can enter the country are nuclear family members of Israelis having lifecycle events such as births and weddings. In addition, thousands of yeshiva and university students have entered Israel in recent days for the start of the school year.

All Israelis and non-citizens entering the country must go into a two-week isolation, except those that arrive from countries on the so-called green list. That list includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy and Germany.

The Israel Airport Authority made the announcement on extending the ban on Sunday.

Israel has banned entry for non-citizens since early March, though a plan is set to be introduced by the end of the month that would allow the entry of foreign tourists.

In recent months, Israel has worked to loosen some restrictions while preserving others, creating a patchwork of policies that have left Jews worldwide confused about whether they can visit Israel and what is required to enter the country.

Like many French Jews, Agnes Mimoun used to take her ability to freely travel to Israel for granted. Getting here was as easy as booking a ticket online and grabbing a cab to Charles de Gaulle Airport for the 4 1/2-hour flight to Tel Aviv.

But for the past month, this mother of three from the heavily Jewish Paris suburb of Sarcelles has been desperately trying to convince the Israeli Embassy in Paris to let her enter the country to attend her son’s wedding next month.

“They don’t answer, either by phone or by mail,” Mimoun complained. “On their website there’s an option to make an appointment, but it’s only in October. I feel like I’m trying to get out of Egypt. It’s very stressful not to know if I’ll be able to be there.”

Mimoun’s experience is far from unique.

In March, with Covid-19 cases mounting, Israel, which has always billed itself as a refuge for world Jewry, shut its doors to non-citizens, effectively barring half of the world’s Jews from the Jewish state during one of the worst public health crises in decades.

Jews around the world were disappointed. One prominent French Jewish media personality called the ban an “existential issue” in an April interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, saying it was unprecedented for Israelis to bar visitors to protect themselves from other Jews.

In recent months, the country has worked to loosen some restrictions while preserving others, creating a patchwork of policies that have left Jews worldwide confused about whether they can visit Israel and what it takes to get there.

Multiple high-profile cases have drawn attention to the difficulties of coming and going amid the current restrictions. In one, first reported by Reuters, it took months for a 3-year-old Israeli girl who had gone to visit her grandmother in Ukraine to be able to get home because her grandmother could not escort her under Israel’s rules. In another, Indian citizens who study and work in Israel were unable to return to their jobs and schools because of the ban on non-citizen entrants.

And a small but significant number of couples — those with one member who is not Israeli, whose interfaith or same-sex marriages are not recognized by Israel’s rabbinic authorities — have also been separated because of the travel restrictions.

“It’s really a scandal,” an Israeli human rights attorney said last month about the separations.

As Israel’s coronavirus response has evolved, the government has taken some steps to address family reunification. On July 13, the Population and Immigration Authority announced that limited classes of non-citizens, primarily nuclear family members, would be allowed into the country for lifecycle events such as births and weddings.

RELATED: ‘Does he remember me?’ For some Israelis, Covid-19 has meant separation from their families

But navigating Israel’s bureaucracy is difficult at the best of times. Now, with the country in crisis, many are finding navigating the new regulations to be intensely frustrating and difficult.

Anyone coming for a family event must fill out an online form, provide a copy of their passport and ticket, and get special medical insurance to cover them if they get Covid-19 in Israel. They also must prove a familial relationship, submit copies of the Israeli ID cards of the people they are coming to visit and provide the address where they will quarantine for two weeks upon arrival.

Grandparents coming to meet new grandchildren must obtain a doctor’s note stating the due date. People traveling to celebrate a bar or bat mitzvah must supply an invitation. Israelis who wish to bring in their spouses from abroad must submit paperwork to the Interior Ministry — and provide a copy of their ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract, which not everyone has.

One French Jew told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she has spent the last month seeking permission to visit her pregnant daughter in Israel but has run into obstacle after obstacle.

“They always tell me that there is something missing,” the woman said about officials at the Israeli consulate. She asked to be identified only as Joelle because she did not want to jeopardize her efforts to gain entry.

“I submitted all of the paperwork at least five times,” she added. “It’s very frustrating. I’m not asking to come on vacation and suntan on the beach. My daughter is giving birth soon.”

Israel continues to allow new immigrants into the country through a process that now includes a quarantine period. (Most of the new immigrants who have arrived began the process before the pandemic, although a group that helps North American Jews make the move says applications reached record levels in recent months. Applications from French Jews have tripled this year, according to a report by the French news agency AFP.)

Fed up with trying to get a permit to visit, Joelle considered applying for Israeli citizenship in order to make it in time for her grandchild’s birth. It didn’t come to that; after weeks of grappling with documents and bureaucrats, she successfully navigated the new rules and now is in quarantine in Israel.

The process could soon become easier for grandparents of babies born in Israel since March 1. Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a member of the Knesset, posted a video message on Facebook on Tuesday announcing a new process for bringing grandparents into the country.

“After hundreds of you reached out to my office, and after weeks of hard work, I am so happy to report that your parents will now be able to come meet your new babies and that you will be able to get the hug and the help you deserve!” Cotler-Wunsh said in a message addressed to those  have immigrated to Israel. Applications must be filed by Sept. 18, she said.

But even as lawmakers come up with case-by-case solutions, another policy is exacerbating tensions around Israel’s pandemic travel restrictions.

In June, the government announced that some foreign university students — primarily graduate students involved in research projects — could begin returning. After some back and forth, the government also included students coming to study in the country’s yeshivas and seminaries in what has become a rite of passage in the American Orthodox community.

Now more than 17,000 foreign students are in the process of flowing into the country, even as other Jews abroad are unable to gain entrance. Dr. Ronni Gamzu, a leading physician who was appointed in late July to get Israel’s coronavirus outbreak under control, expressed concern about the yeshiva plan but said the decision had preceded his appointment. He said inspectors would be deployed to make sure the students adhere to public health regulations, including studying only in small pods.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri defended the decision to allow in yeshiva students, calling Israel “the national home of all the Jews in the world” and comparing it to a mother who cannot reject her children.

Yet the parents of yeshiva students will not be allowed to visit under Israel’s current rules. That has even parents who are happy that the pandemic has not derailed their children’s plan to study in Israel unnerved by the travel restrictions.

“I’m so happy that she’s going,” said Rina Greenwald of Cedarhurst, New York, whose daughter Eliana is planning to spend her second year at an Israeli seminary (women’s yeshivah). “She’ll grow as a person and in her love of Israel.”

But while she was happy that her daughter would be able to return, Greenwald also said that she found it disturbing that travel to Israel — including her own — is still restricted.

“It’s a little bit scary,” she said. “You want to know you always have Israel there for you.”