A best friend is revealed as a long-lost sibling
Imagine having a dream where you discover that your best friend is really a long-lost sibling you never even knew existed.
That your chavrusa and best buddy from yeshivah, the one who sat with you at every meal and shared your dorm room and late-night DMCs, turns out to be your big brother. It sounds like a plot so far-fetched that only the Supreme Author could have thought it up — but for two fellows named Ofer Shushan and Lior Alhanati, it was a dream come true.
Lior Alhanati’s unconventional attire — a flowing Tanach-inspired tunic and a tarboosh crowning long, twisted locks, sparkling eyes, a grey-streaked beard and spiraling peyos — testifies to a life of searching for connection. Indeed, he’s been many things over the years: farmer, shepherd, equestrian therapist, landscaper. But his most profound self-definition, he says, is one that eluded him for 30 years: Brother.
Lior’s personal odyssey began 48 years ago, as an underweight, chronically-ill baby (he’s now a broad, strapping six-footer), whose emotionally-depleted and financially-destitute parents couldn’t cope with this third child in as many years. When he was two years old, the Social Services Office in Teveria, where the family lived, was alerted to the difficulty, swooped in and, with the father’s permission, took Lior away and placed him in a children’s home.
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