One of the aliyah con-artists who pushed me to move to Israel told me that "everyone here speaks English." What's amazing is that he lived in Beitar where it seems to me that maybe 10% speak English enough to form a sentence. It's probably less. He happened to know a few olim from his neighborhood and talked only to them as he came to Israel after retirement as do many aliyah pushers and didn't have to work.
This week I went to see a neurologist who didn't speak English. Yes, even the doctors don't necessarily speak it, although I'll admit that a higher percentage do. The man looked over my tests results and explained his interpretation in words that I could not understand. I have no idea what he was saying. How's that for coming home?
Who else didn't speak English? The secretaries who booked my next appointment.
Also yesterday I received a call from an accounting firm. Guy didn't speak English.
Not just that but instruction books, ingredient listings, and websites are nearly always in Hebrew. When you buy American products, you'll find a big sticker in Hebrew covering the English.
The website of my phone carrier is all in Hebrew.
The instructions on my medicine is all in Hebrew.
Two days I go I attended a Chassidic farbrengen. It was all in Hebrew. I didn't understand a word. When everyone around me laughed, I wondered what they were laughing about. Were they laughing at me? They might have been because I stumble around like a fool here.
Yesterday, I tried to help my daughter with her math homework, all of which was in Hebrew, and it's not Hebrew you picked up while studying the Mishneh Berurah. I couldn't read the page. She had to translate for her now pathetic father. As if math isn't hard enough, try doing it in a language you don't understand.
Israel is not Germany, not Sweden. It's not a country of high education. Young people spend three years in the army and they are not learning English there. The army wastes years of their lives.
According to a 2011 Government Social Survey of Israelis over 20 years of age, 49% report Hebrew as their native language, Arabic 18%, Russian 15%, Yiddish 2%, French 2%, English 2%, Spanish 1.6%, and 10% other languages (including Romanian, and Amharic, which were not offered as answers by the survey). This study also noted that 90% of Israeli Jews. (Wiki)
You imagine Israel being full of olim because you know five who moved here. No, it's full of Israelis. Only 2% of the people list English as their first language, and only some of the Israelis learn English. You meet them from time to time.
You want to feel some humiliation? Try saying Atah midaber Anglit (do you speak English?) five times a day.
The strain is immense. People come back from a week in Italy and are overjoyed to be speaking English again. You can't live permanently in a country where you don't speak the language.
And don't assume that you'll learn Hebrew easily just because you can daven birchos hamazon. It's a difficult language. No, it's not an easy language because of verb roots or limited verb tenses. If you are a speaker of a European tongue, Hebrew is tough. The entire grammatical structure is different. It's hard to even look up words because the definite article precedes the noun and that same letter, hey, precedes many verbs.
There are no vowels in most Hebrew writing. I can figure out how to pronounce words in French, which has a challenging pronunciation, better than I can in Hebrew. In French, if you learn the rules, you can do it because the vowels are part of the word. Vous means you. You learn not to say the S. And you know ou is pronounced oo. How would you say this word: טוסט? Toeset? Tusat? Tavset? Tavsat? Actually, it's toast, the English word. You know the word in English but still struggle to figure out how to pronounce it.
Try this word: משעמם It is, mashemam, misemem, meshamas? Nope, it's mishamem, which means boring. And it's boring living in a country where you can't talk to anybody or read anything, where you spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how to say simple vocabulary so that you can learn basic words.
If you are over 40, forget it. You are not going to learn Hebrew no matter how hard you try. There are gadolim, geniuses who came to America and either didn't speak any English or didn't speak enough to feel comfortable speaking even privately to people in English. These are men who had all of shas in their heads, but they couldn't speak English because they arrived too late in life.
I'm warning you, look past all the fairytales you have been told about life in Israel, about how you are coming home and every Jew belongs there. Don't make life decisions on fantasy talk that can be encapsulated in short phrases. And don't assume that your so-called brothers will help you with anything. There is next to zero help offered in Israel by the government, by Israelis, by other olim even the ones you thought were your friends before you made the fateful decision, and by Nefesh b'Nefesh who are the biggest conartists that you will ever meet. In America, their ads pop up all over your computer screen. In Israel, they don't exist. Oh, they'll get you a buddy family. Our buddy family never made time to even meet us. That's our first buddy family. So we asked for a new one. They never met us, weren't available. We got zero help from either so-called buddy family. One of them knew me from my town in America. That meant nothing to him obviously. He just didn't care.
Most olim don't care. I had been told by one of my aliyah pushers - a different one- that the most idealistic people move to Israel. I can tell you that the craziest people move to Israel, and crazy people generally are not kindhearted. They are quite selfish usually, and olim are no exception. You hear the word 'my' a lot with olim: my land, my army, my country, my people. But they are not so interested in the people. They are interested in my.
Oh, they talk about the mitzvah of living in Israel? They portray it as a mitzvah. Few of them care about mitzvos. If they did, they'd care about the mitzvah of putting a stumbling block before the blind, which Rashi describes as giving bad advice. They'd care that olim collapse in to poverty, that their marriages crumble, that their kids struggle and too often go off the derech entirely. They really just don't care about all that because it doesn't fit into my.
When you get to Israel you will be on your own, and if you don't speak the language Lord have mercy on you.
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