For me, being in Israel is as much (or more) about connecting with my Middle Eastern roots as it is about my Jewish heritage. The smell of familiar Arabian spices, dishes and delicacies my grandparents loved, the sound of Arabic language and music that filled their homes, the Arak my grandfather liked to sip, the dates, the roasted seeds, the mud-like coffee, the backgammon games, the loud voices -- is all around me in a way I don't remember from my time here 40 years ago. Today, the Jewish market Machne Yehuda in Jerusalem is culinarily almost indistinguishable from the souk in the Muslim quarter of the Old City. But besides these impressionistic feelings, I've had some powerful moments of deep connection, like when I discovered that one young shopkeeper had been among the very last Jews to leave my grandparents' hometown of Aleppo, Syria, only 8 years ago. Like my mother's father, he had first gone to Argentina and Mexico before finding a new home in Israel. In his shop he sold the same kind of apricot "leather" (we called it amardine) I treasured as a child, and so many other sweet temptations. Then there was the experience of seeing the Aleppo Codex at the marvelous Israel Museum. This treasured ancient manuscript (http://www.aleppocodex.org/links/6.html) is the oldest existing complete Hebrew bible and was kept for centuries in the crypts of a synagogue in the city where my ancestors lived from the time they were run out of Spain during the Inquisition. It was thrilling to think that I was looking at a manuscript that might have been touched by my very kin in the Middle Ages or that my grandfathers might have been instructed from it while training for their bar mitzvahs at the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, where the codex was so guardedly kept. Three years after his bar mitzvah -- around the time of World War I -- my father's father left Syria to build a better life in New York. But he never for a minute forgot his Sephardic roots and while growing a successful garment business, he began funding Jewish causes both at home and in his spiritual home, Israel. His proudest achievement was helping found a school for disadvantaged immigrant children in Jerusalem called Boys Town. It has grown into an 18-acre technical training institute, housing and educating more than 1,000 boys from 45 countries, 75% of them on full scholarship. Many of them live there year-round. Seeing my grandparents' names on the academic high school building was another one of those powerful moments of connection. My grandfather signed the diplomas of every Boys Town graduate every year from 1948 until he died at the age of 96. Now my father has taken up the mantle. When I stood only a few miles from the Syrian border last week, looking at the plumes of smoke representing the sectarian strife that has torn the country apart and ruined Aleppo, I was overcome by sadness. The proverb "Plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose" seemed apt -- and not just because my grandparents probably learned this in their French schools. Translated, it means, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Here in the Middle East, this truth seems encoded like some kind of cultural DNA and as imperishable as the Aleppo codex itself.
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