He stole my money, I stole his dignity — and then it all fell apart
As told to Ruti Kepler by Aharon Kliger
Photos: Menachem Kalish, family archives
I
’m not one of those “sharing” people who tells his secrets to the person next to him on the bus, or whose work colleagues know everything about his personal life. In fact, I’m quite the private type. So the story I’m about to share isn’t about my need to talk things through, or even to clear my conscience. It’s about an obligation to pay back something I stole in the only way I know how — although I’m not sure what I took from another Yid is something that can ever be returned.
I was born 39 years ago in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot Polin (the architectural award-winning hexagonal “egg carton” enclave on the hill that you can see from the Ramot Road and the northern neighborhoods), the oldest of ten closely spaced children, in a house well-acquainted with poverty. Abba was from the old-timers, the holy men of Jerusalem whose world contained nothing but Torah and avodas Hashem. Ima was a hard-working, resourceful homemaker who knew how to stretch whatever we got — the Bituach Leumi stipends that helped us scrape by through the month, the weekly Yad Eliezer food packages, the occasional tzedakah coupons we’d apply for — and that’s just how it was, all through my childhood.
That’s not to say we weren’t happy. We’d slide down the angled, peeling walls of our “egg carton” apartment, root around for treats in the food packages we received, and read lots of books, borrowed from neighbors or from the library (but never actually spending money to buy them for ourselves).
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