“Coming to Israel in an organized framework like the Jewish Agency’s Na’aleh program made things so much easier. It’s a wonderful thing to bring young people here when they are at the age of deciding what they want to do with their lives and who they want to be.”

Sometimes life has a way of returning us to our roots and that is just what happened for Ray Kinan, 28. His maternal grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, were traditional in their Jewish observance, but his mother decided not to follow in their path. “Growing up in Kovno, Lithuania, I knew that I was Jewish but we didn’t really talk about it or about Israel. We weren’t part of the Jewish community and didn’t celebrate Shabbat or holidays,” he says. More