Intro comment 1: This post was originally written on Quora as an answer to this question: What was it like for a Russian Jew to escape to Israel in the 1990s? It was updated a bit, but the general gist is the same.
Intro comment 2: Today is June 24. On June 24, 1991, I emigrated with my parents from the Soviet Union to Israel. I recall it every year. Sometimes I celebrate it a bit, and if I were more of a party person, perhaps I’d celebrate it more. I now live in the United States for family and academic reasons, but I consider myself absolutely Israeli, and so does my whole family. This is the story of why and how I moved to Israel, and, whether you like it or not, it is a central part of my identity. More than a million other people have similar stories, but this one is mine.
In the 1980s, most Jews in Russia were barely distinguishable from Russians. We spoke the same language, we ate the same food, we read the same books and newspapers, we watched the same television shows and movies, we studied in the same schools. Most of us didn’t care about any religion or have ever visited a synagogue.
The closest that most Jews ever got to Judaism was eating matza, but it was not a part of a proper Passover seder, but simply “Jewish biscuits”. Some Russians ate it, too. We never had it at home, but I remember occasionally eating it when we visited my father’s sister. Neither we nor her family kept kosher; we ate pork and lard like all Russians without ever giving it any thought.
What was Jewish in us, then? For most people, it was the non-Russian last name and the “Ethnicity” field in the passport (национальность). It was a weird thing to bear. It’s not like there was violent antisemitism and discrimination everywhere, but some cultural antisemitism was constantly around. People would say a little “hmm” about your last name or about your passport. I was too young to experience it firsthand, but Jews complained about being denied certain jobs and admission to universities. I did suffer direct physical, verbal, and psychological violence as a child. Much of it was just usual bullying, the kind of which nerds like me suffer all over the world; it’s a horrible, horrible thing, but not all of it was antisemitic. However, enough of it clearly was.
In 1985, my father decided to stop being overweight and started dieting and getting into shape. He loved it so much that he wrote a letter about it to the USSR’s biggest sports newspaper, and it was published. A few years after that, he found out that by law, people whose letters were published by a newspaper are entitled to some payment. So on a nice spring day in 1990, he went to the newspaper office to collect it and took me along. And so it happened that Moscow’s synagogue was on the same street. He never visited a synagogue before, so he went in out of curiosity. It was open, but mostly empty, except a guy who sold some calendars, yarmulkas and booklets about Judaism in a tiny store. After some time, a young woman came in, and my father talked to her a bit. Immigration to Israel came up, and she said that it’s fairly easy to submit the request to the Israeli consulate. That was the first time I heard about it.
A few months later, I went to a summer camp in Crimea. A bully there kicked me so hard that I landed in a hospital. My father flew to me from Moscow a day later. After a few hours he casually told me, “Oh by the way, remember that woman from the synagogue? I submitted the immigration papers to the consulate like she suggested”.
I don’t remember whether we ever mentioned it in our conversations back then, but it was clear that we all had enough of this bullying, enough of which was antisemitic. We can’t change our ethnicity, and Russia can’t change the way it treats people who aren’t Russian in the foreseeable future. It was time to leave for a place that we could really call a home.
Like everything else in the Soviet Union, emigration out of it was insanely bureaucratic. The amount of paperwork for getting a visa that allows one to leave the USSR is incredible: You had to submit letters, forms and reports to the police, the education offices, the labor organization authorities (in communism, all labor is controlled by the state), notaries, the bank (there was only one), and so on and so forth. I was a curious child, and I followed it. It took many months.
Probably the funniest piece of it all was an “Invitation letter”. You are supposed to have a reason to leave the Soviet Union—after all, who would want to leave the most wonderful country on Earth? A legitimate reason is an invitation from a relative, but we had no direct relatives in Israel. The government of Israel knew about this nonsense and had an easy way of providing sham invitation letters from “relatives” to Jews who wanted to immigrate. I’m pretty sure that the Soviet authorities knew that it was a sham, and I guess that running this bureaucratic freak show was more important to them than actually running the country. I remember the day when this “invitation letter” arrived. In an unusual foreign air mail envelope, the kind of which is rarely seen in the USSR; with a big menorah in the background—it was the first time I saw what the coat of arms of Israel looks like; with a very dry and legalese text; and with the very important words “immigration for permanent residence in Israel”. I was full of joy and wonder. I still remember the name and the address of the “relative”.
The months it took to prepare for leaving the Soviet Union were useful for studying Hebrew. Luckily, language is the thing that I am most curious about, so it didn’t feel boring or difficult at all. A thing that gave me even more motivation is the short article about the truly incredible and inspiring life story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, which appeared in the beginning of one of the first textbooks from which I learned.
I started taking Hebrew classes in December 1990, and by the summer I already knew the basics. My father took these classes, too, but it’s harder for older people in general, and he was busy with other things, so I quickly became more advanced.
In June 1991 it was time to move. We packed. My father’s friends from work were outstandingly nice—they organized a little goodbye party and a little bus to help us get to the airport with all the stuff. (This is yet another opportunity to remind the reader that most Russian people are actually not hateful, racist, antisemitic bullies. There were enough bullies in that country to make us stop calling Russia “home”, but most Russian people are kind and reasonable. Also, I guess that I should mention that in the Russia of 2024, those bullies are the government, but even that doesn’t mean that it represents all Russian people.)
There were no direct flights from USSR to Israel back then. We took the Hungarian MALEV airline to Budapest, paid by the Jewish Agency. In Budapest there was a long wait, but everybody on the plane was going to Israel and people waited patiently. We took our dog with us, and I remember that the Hungarian flight attendants were very nice and let us carry our dog on board and brought her food and water.
I thought you’d like to know that I’m crying as I’m preparing to write the next paragraph. For real. This is my life story.
The flight was rather uneventful. But when we were approaching the destination and the coastline of Tel-Aviv became visible, the whole plane went ecstatic. People were screaming with joy, applauding, hugging. People who never met before or after that day, but who were connected through this common thing called Aliyah, or, as it was often said in Russian, Repatriation. Somebody shouted, “I congratulate you all upon arrival!”, and somebody else corrected him: “Upon the return to our historical homeland!”
This may sound like too much drama, but it was real.
In the airport, nice Russian-speaking people from the Jewish Agency helped us with the initial immigration paperwork. It took a few hours.
From the airport we were supposed to go to some actual, but very distant relatives whom we had never met, for the first few days until we would get our own place to live. We only had their address in Jerusalem. We gave it to the lady from the Jewish Agency, and she booked a taxi for us. While we were waiting outside for the taxi, she ran to us and said that they called her and told her that they can’t actually host us, and that she organized a hotel room for us in Haifa. We didn’t have a choice, so we went to Haifa. We never met these people and I don’t remember their name. I’m not angry at them, though from time to time I do wonder who they are.
Here’s the complete list of the possessions with which we came:
- Suitcases with some clothes and bedsheets.
- A box of soap. For some strange reason, my parents thought it would be hard to get soap in Israel. They were wrong, of course.
- A collection of Soviet special-issue coins that my father very meticulously put together over many years.
- A collection of stamps that I very meticulously put together as a child.
- A crate of Russian books.
- 300 U.S. dollars in cash.
- A dog.
Knowing that Jews are coming from Russia with very little, the Jewish Agency provided us with a few thousand shekels to start out the life in the new country. I am deeply grateful for this.
We spent the first few days in that cheap, rundown hotel. I remember the first things we bought in a grocery store: a Lahit soft drink (similar to cola), cottage cheese, and sliced bread. I particularly recall how proud I was when I managed to read the “cottage” label in Hebrew—half a year of ulpan studies in Moscow did pay off.
We desperately needed every penny, and after getting my agreement, my father sold my stamp collection to somebody for a few hundreds of shekels. I was never actually into proper philately—I just liked looking at the foreign languages on the stamps, and now I had more than enough texts in a new language to read, so I agreed easily.
After a few days in the hotel, we went looking for an apartment. Somebody offered us to live in a very bad, cheap one-room apartment for free to see whether we wanted it. It was awful, but cheaper than the hotel. We stayed there for a couple of weeks until my father managed to get us into a program that lets new immigrants live very cheaply in a kibbutz, and in July we moved to Hahotrim, a kibbutz near Haifa. We stayed there in a mobile home, which was clearly very simple, but surprisingly suitable for living.
In the first few weeks, while my Hebrew was still far from perfect, I sometimes resorted to English, which I knew better—I had learned it in a good school in Moscow. Kind people in the kibbutz helped me with some private Hebrew language lessons for free. (I am deeply grateful for that, too. In the summer of 2023, a few days before I moved to the United States, I went there and thanked them in person. They were genuinely happy to meet.) By the time I went to school in September, I was fluent enough. My parents went to study Hebrew in an ulpan. My mother came to Israel without knowing a single word of Hebrew, but in the ulpan lessons she started catching up quickly. My father found a job at a factory in the kibbutz, and his Hebrew studies became patchy after some time, but eventually he caught up as well by watching football, reading a lot of newspapers, and, somewhat surprisingly, reading a bilingual Bible.
In any case, my Hebrew was much more advanced than my parents’, so I helped them a lot with chores and paperwork, especially when it required language knowledge. We also got a TV, and I interpreted films and news for them. (Many years later, I learned that children helping adults is a very common pattern in immigrant families.)
After a few months, we settled in. And after two years, we took out a large mortgage and bought an apartment. Even though I was only fourteen, I did most of the mortgage paperwork. My parents still live in that place.
Getting integrated into Israeli life, or, as they say in Israel, absorbed, was not without challenges.
For several years, my parents struggled with shitty jobs that aren’t related to their professions until they found decent careers.
I was still a nerd, so I suffered bullying in Israel too, but at least it wasn’t antisemitic. Very rarely, it was anti-Russian. I can recall one time when somebody called me “a stinking Russian”. I got very angry and replied, “I may be stinky, but I’m not Russian”. I have nothing against Russians, even though some of them have something against me; but I am not Russian.
In 1998, soon after I started my military service, my ID card was stolen, and I used the opportunity to change my name from Alexei Aharonson to Amir Elisha Aharoni. “Amir” comes from Amir Kertesz, an Israeli musician that I love; “Elisha” comes from “Alyosha”, the diminutive version of my Russian name Alexei; and “Aharoni” is a more Hebrew-sounding version of Aharonson. By that time I was fully fluent in Hebrew and absorbed, and I had some fun with my friends in the army as they were getting used to the new name.
In 2002, I started dating a young woman who was born in Israel to parents who emigrated from Iraq in the 1950s. We got married in 2006, our children were born in 2014 and 2018. I speak Russian to them and she speaks Hebrew. When they were learning to speak, they called her “máma”, which is the Russian word for “mom”, and they called me “ába”, which is the Hebrew word for “dad”.
Because I loved languages for as long as I remember, I studied General Linguistics and Hebrew at the university. I now know Hebrew grammar better than an average Israeli. Thanks to this and to some experience with programming that I acquired in the army, I eventually found a job developing language-related software for Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia’s general multilingual and multinational nature, and my position’s particular multilingual focus, I made a lot of friends around the world, some of them from Russia. My family members still call me Alyosha, but Russian friends that I made since then call me Amir.
I follow news from Russia every day. Though I am not Russian, I still care about that country very much. Amusingly enough, thanks to the Internet, I learned much more information about Russia since I left it than I did when I was living there, but the feeling of living there cannot be learned from Wikipedia or other websites, so occasionally I find myself being a sort of cultural ambassador of Russia, hopefully a good one. I make software to improve Russian language support on Wikipedia despite the complicated history of Jews in Russia. I make software to improve the Hebrew language support on Wikipedia despite not having Hebrew as my mother tongue. Quite often I think about these curious cultural conundrums, but really it’s about the decisions you make in your life; to emigrate from one troubled country to another troubled country, to study a language, to develop a new identity without discarding your old one, to choose a less-than-obvious career path, to do something that you care about even if people don’t expect it.
I get to travel abroad quite a lot in the last few years for work, and I still get emotional every time the plane approaches the coast of Tel-Aviv.
Aharoni in Unicode 