‘Resilience — it’s like in the water here’
Olah from South Orange talks about life in Israel now
Rachel Lissack grew up in South Orange, but she’s a Tel Avivian now.
That move around the world to the place that she feels very deeply is her home wasn’t the result of carefully laid plans as much as an inevitable response to an undeniable pull.
“The air feels different here,” she said.
So now that Israel is under attack, she’s living the same balancing attack as most other Israelis, she said. “Day to day, it’s obviously not nice, there is some fear, but there’s also a need for balance. You show up for work, you are resilient, the show must go on — but we’re juggling so many balls right now.”
Part of the magnetic tug bringing her back to Israel came from her education, and part of it came from her family.
Ms. Lissack’s immediate family — her mother, Lisa, her father, Robin, and her sister, Ilana — were members of Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, and she went to school at the institution that was called the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union; the school was renamed as the Golda Och Academy in 2010, and she graduated from it in 2013.
The school, like most Jewish day schools, engrains a love of Israel in its students. And Ms. Lissack’s father’s family was Israeli; Robin Lissack was born in Israel, but his family moved to Montreal when he was 2 years old, and he never moved back.
His father, David Lissack, survived the Holocaust in hiding. His mother, Naira Persitz Lissack, was brought to Palestine from eastern Europe when she was a toddler. She’s almost 95, and she lives in Montreal now; in a brief interview, she talked about her time in the Palmach.
“It was 76 years ago, and I was 17 1/2 then,” Ms. Lissack said. “I remember that I was standing in the road from Gaza to Beersheba. I was in communications.” They’d watch traffic going by, and report on the movements they saw. “But then the Arabs caught a woman somewhere in the Negev, and they raped her. So the army said that all women who were in dangerous places had to be in a safe place. So they sent me back to the kibbutz, Kibbutz Dorot, and I worked in communications there.”
They moved to Montreal because her husband wanted to earn a doctorate in psychology, something he couldn’t do in Israel then. “I was a teacher for many years, and I used to be the principal of a school,” Ms. Lissack said. “My husband was a famous psychologist. But we never made it back to Israel.”
Her mother, on the other hand, “had no idea about living in Israel, but she came here for a year abroad in college, got her master’s, and just fell in love with it. She always says that the Holocaust can’t happen again because we have Israel.”
Robin Lissack lives in Florida now, but Lisa Lissack made aliyah, just like both of her daughters.
Rachel, meanwhile, earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, and went to work first for Deloitte and then for Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which sent her to its office in Israel for a year.
Then the pandemic happened. “I got stranded here,” she said, if you call being forced to live someplace that has always pulled at your heart being stranded there.
And also, “I met my partner,” she said. She and Idan Zipris — whose mother’s family is from Romania, but he is eighth-generation Israeli on his father’s side — plan to get married in December. “I can’t imagine being a mother anyplace other than here,” she said.
“The question for me was always my career,” she said. Now she works for OneStep, a startup “that I loved for years, and now I have the opportunity to join them in establishing the company.”
So what’s it like in Israel now?
She thinks about her grandfather, and how he was prescient when he left his family and ran away, and how that allowed him to survive the Holocaust. Should she learn from that example? “After October 7, I wondered if we were being stupid in not leaving. The question I kept asking myself was if Israel were not here, with all the antisemitism in the world, what would it look like for the Jews?
“We are lucky enough to have a safe room in our house. About 40 percent of Tel Avivians don’t have one, so they are always running to public shelters or the basements of their apartment buildings or staying with friends.
“Here, there’s always the mentality of how can I help? And there’s community.”
Her fiancé is no longer in the reserves, and that makes life easier for her now, she added. “During October 7, he left — he was in miluim — and he was gone on and off for four months, he’d be back every two weeks or so. And then it stopped, and then it started again.
“I’m lucky with that,” she continued. “My friend Julie, also from New Jersey, was pregnant with her daughter, and her husband was in Gaza. He’s a medic.
“Her husband came back, and now they have a beautiful baby girl.
“There always is a feeling of guilt — no, not of guilt, it’s hard to say what it is — because you know that someone else always has it worse. I know that people are struggling much more than I am. I have a mamad. I know I’m safe. My fiancé is not in miluim anymore.
“One of my best friends, Audrey, who also is from New Jersey — they have two kids, and her husband is stuck in the U.S. and can’t get home.
“But resilience — it’s like it’s in the water here.”
Talking about Israel’s attack on Iran, Ms. Lissack says that “the common sentiment among the olim” — the immigrants to Israel — “who I know is that there was no choice. Imagine if Iran had nuclear capability.
“In the United States, you always have left versus right, Republican versus Democrat,” she said. “There are always opposing views. Here, there is unity when we are fighting for survival.
“In the end, we need a Jewish state if there isn’t going to be another Holocaust. If the Jews have a home, that unites us. And this is when we need to come together.
“I think that the Jews in America need to remember that this is their war, too. And that Israel is for you, and for your children. That is important to every Jew.”
And Ms. Lissack pointed to another sign of Israel’s resilience. “OneStep participated with the Tamid internship program,” she said. Tamid is a selective intense eight-week summer program for highly motivated college students.
“We went to Tamid’s opening event. There were 144 kids there.
“That’s just life in Israel. Life is just going on.”
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