“Ayalah is being bullied and picked on. She hates it there. I made a terrible mistake”
Because I grew up in the house of a native Yerushalmi, hearing English spoken with an Israeli accent is something I can detect from a mile away.
So when Leah and Aharon appeared in shul on Rosh Hashanah, and we shared a few words, I quickly realized that landsleit had arrived. My wife made the arrangements, and the family was invited for a seudah during Succos.
Husband and wife were ex-pats from Israel, and each had their own unique spiritual journey. It was a second marriage for both. Yet the star of the meal and the most fascinating of the guests was their 12-year-old daughter, Ayalah.
After a few moments of conversation, I realized that Ayalah, a pure, pristine neshamah, was attending the public school across from my house. Here was a Jewish girl who was socially and ostensibly intellectually on par with children her age. Nevertheless, she was inexplicably (in my mind) enrolled in a school whose population was 99 perecnt Latino and 0 percent Jewish.
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