Forget about reading and talking to people

You hear about these Anglo-communities and you expect Teaneck or Far Rockaway in Israel. Now, wouldn't that mean that the shuls have books in English. Well they don't have that here, even in Anglo shuls where shiurim and announcements are in English. That's even in so-called Anglo communities. Here's what you see on the bookshelves.

So unless you can open a book in Hebrew and translate, your Shabbos days will not be very interesting. 

This Anglo community thing is a myth. In both of the shuls shown above, I donated books in English, but they were removed from the shelves and don't appear anywhere in the building. 

I'm not even sure how to explain this. Why wouldn't an Anglo synagogue want English books? Obviously, gadolim don't disapprove of Torah books in English. Note the many haskamas on the Artscroll Gemara and many other books in English and other languages. I theorize that the guys who run the synagogues want to keep up with/be like the Israeli shuls where there is no English. If you walk into a non-Anglo shul you will not find even one book in English, not even a siddur. Nothing. And since everything in Israel is competitive, the Anglo shuls want to be like the Israeli. That's my guess. 

Just know, living in Israel requires that you speak and read Hebrew very well. An aliyah salesman, ie. an American oleh who believed everyone must live in Israel (he only retired there), told me that everyone in Israel speaks English. I have no idea how he could muster such a falsehood and live with himself. Most Israelis that I encounter do not speak English. This includes the staff at customer service lines. 80% of the time, when I ask if a person speaks English, the answer is no. And 18% of the remaining 20% is a struggle. This is not Switzerland. [Incredibly, this man lived in a city where less than 5% speak any English.]

Websites have translations in Russian, not English. Now and again you find a portion of the site in English but usually not. It's getting a little better in that regard, but not so much. When I got here 10 years ago, there was no English on the sites. 

Same with government service phone lines. Press 1 for Hebrew. Press 2 for Russian. On Charedi lines its Yiddish and Hebrew. They are not in English. Government documents are in Hebrew. Bank statements are in Hebrew. You get these letters and go into a panic because you have no idea what they are saying. This includes letters from the municipality in so-called Anglo communities!

Do you know Hebrew? Don't think it's easy to learn. It's a very different language from English. It's a Mideastern language. English is Germanic with vocabulary from French. Just because you can read the Mishnah Berurah doesn't mean you can function on the streets and in the offices of Israel. 

Ulpan is not some magical language acquisition program. Because they have their own word for the language program you imagine that it's magical, brilliant. Ulpan is just a language class where the teacher doesn't speak English. That doesn't help you. It just traumatizes you, like most things in Israel.

And they don't teach you how to read business letters in Ulpan. Rather, you get Zionist poetry.

If you come in the summer, there will be no Ulpan. And that's in cities that have it. Many do not. It's not like in New York where there are English as a second language classes going on all the time. When they have it there will be one offering. It matches your schedule or it doesn't.

And what about the teacher? The teacher will be an Israeli who is impatient, hot-tempered, and Zionistic. Israeli values, if you can call their attitude values, will come through.

Example: I had a teacher who explained all anomalies in the language as being 'cacha.' That means, just because, for no reason. I researched this and explained to her that there are linguistic reasons. Usually the anomaly makes the word easier to say. For example, Tehillim 119 says אַשְׁרֵ֥י תְמִֽימֵי־דָ֑רֶךְ. Why doesn't it say derech? It's easier to pronounce a patach after a tzeiri  than a segol (three dots) possibly because the tzeiri and segol are more similiar. It's easier to say t'mimei darech than t'mimei derech. The difference is subtle but it's there. It's easier to say Ruach than Rucha. It goes better on the tongue. More examples: ההרים - he-ha-RIM - the mountains rather than ha-ha-rim. החתול - he-cha-TOOL - the cat, החדשים - he-cho-da-SHIM - the months. It's easier to say. But then there's החכמה - hachoch-MA - the wisdom, because the o sound is a small kamatz, not a hataf-kamatz. It's easier to say. To this teacher it's all cacha.

This idea of everything being cacha is a kind of apikorsis. I think that Yad v'Shem, the Holocaust museum, should be renamed the cacha museum. To them the Holocaust just happened. One day the Germans just started to hate us. That's what you see in the guided displays, that's how the museum is set up. You walk along a path where history starts in 1933. No reason. Nothing to do with us sinning for a 100 years. Nothing to do with a small but powerful portion of the non-religious Jews in Germany running the dirty theaters, anti-religious press, and abortion clinics. The Holocaust was cacha. Just like the Hebrew language. Cacha. So we need a state and a big army to fight the cacha. No need for teshuva.

Even after I gave my argument about linguistics, this Ulpan teacher of 30 years stayed with her explanation. I didn't try to explain to Yad v'Shem that they should try a different approach, one that references the tochachas in the Chumash. 

Don't think Nefesh b'Nefesh will help you with Hebrew. Nefesh b'Nefesh will not help you with anything. They disappear once you get here. They advertise that they have tutors. That will amount to a few 20 minute meetings on Zoom with a teenage girl. Nefesh b'Nefesh and their mischaracterizations of everything, especially themselves, is a whole topic in itself. 

If you are coming above the age of 40, you will not be able to learn spoken Hebrew and written business Hebrew. You will not be able to help your kids with their homework, and their respect for you will suffer. You will not be able to speak to their teachers.

Yesterday I was at the Dead Sea. (Don't think I go every day. The trip takes 2 hours and I work 6 days a week. I haven't been there in 7 years.) There was a kid there, around the age of 10, who was wailing apparently because the skin on his back was burning him. I didn't know if he had a cut or a burn, but my Hebrew was too poor to discuss this with him. None of Israelis were helping him at all. I motioned that he should go under the outdoor shower. There were only 2 of them in the entire narrow walled up men's section that we were in, but the people using them wouldn't relinquish them. After a while, another man came over to help. I could tell that he wasn't Israeli because he didn't have that look of hostility that so many Israeli men have. So I said to this man in English, "It's frustrating that I can't talk to these people." He said, "It's the same with me." I said, "How long have you been living here?" He said, "You call this living?" He went on to complain about all the aggressiveness on the road, at the stores, "the lack of decency," he said. But I got it out of him that he's been here 20 years. Still can't speak Hebrew. Middle-aged people struggle with new languages. The result: You can't even help children.

When you walk down the street you will shudder if anybody asks you for directions because you won't understand what they are saying. You won't understand when the lady at the checkout counter tries to get you to buy 3 soups instead of 1 because there's a deal on 3. Your heart will race. Maybe you'll figure out the word soup after a few years. Even if you memorize the word, you still will not be able to understand people. Israelis don't enunciate their words. They talk rapidly in a mumble. 

It gets very lonely when you cannot talk to people, can't understand what's being said on the radio that's playing on the bus or in the taxi you are riding in, when you can't understand the newspaper that's sitting on the floor, can't understand the news program that's playing on the TV in the grocery store. I imagine that the experience is a bit like what a person with hearing impairment goes through, the isolation, not being able to connect to people. 

If you have teenage children, they will suffer in school because contrary to Zionist myth, children don't learn to understand by Chanuka and speak by Purim. They sit in school all day, bored. There are kids who go off the derech from this.

Not only that but Charedi schools at least in my city, don't participate in the city Ulpan. So all they get is 1/2 hour, twice a week, with a teacher who isn't trained to teach languages. He's just the rebbe that may know some English. This is entirely inadequate.

And if you send your kids to modern schools, ie. Dati Leumi, expect them to have boyfriends and girlfriends by the time they are teenagers. Expect the girls to dress immodestly and for the boys to join the army and have their religious level collapse.

You can't move to China if you don't speak Chinese. And you can't move to Israel if you don't speak Hebrew. There's 1,000 other reasons that Americans (North and South) and Europeans shouldn't move here, but the challenges with Hebrew are enough.