By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood (08/31/2007)

From www.chicagojewishnews.com

When Shirah Ozery counsels Chicagoans who are thinking of making aliyah-moving to Israel-she'll be speaking from personal experience.

She's an American Jew who became an Israeli shortly after the Yom Kippur War and now wants to help other Americans considering that choice.

Ozery is the new shlicha aliyah, or emissary from the Jewish Agency, for Chicago and the Midwest. Based at the Israel Aliyah Center (847-674-8861 or www.aliyah.org)) in Lincolnwood, she has just arrived for a three-year stay.

Besides those considering making aliyah, Ozery also invites anyone who wants to visit Israel or participate in any kind of Israel program to talk to her.

This is her second posting as a shlicha-she spent three years, from 1990 to 1993, on the job in Miami-and she believes she's a natural to serve as "a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora," as she puts it, for Chicago's Jewish community.

Ozery, who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., first visited Israel on a summer program when she was 16. She returned to spend her junior year of college at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"Between those two trips, a bug got into my system and no doctor could cure me," she said during a recent interview. "I became an Israel-phile. I had Zionist blood in my body."

After graduating from college with a degree in English literature and teaching, she returned to Israel for another summer program, planning to return to the States and start working on a master's degree. Instead she decided to remain in Israel for a few months more to study.

Then, in October 1973, the Yom Kippur War broke out. "There I was, 21 years old, a tourist," she says. She remembers calling her parents on Yom Kippur-since they couldn't turn on TV or radio they knew nothing about the war, but figured if the phone was ringing, it had to be important.

"My mom, like any other Jewish mom, said, come home," Ozery recalls. "I said, I am home."

"I had an urge I can't really differentiate myself," she says of her feelings during those tense days. "As an American Jew, I had to stay. If I should walk out and leave at that moment, I could never look my friends in the eye." She "decided right then and there" to become an Israeli. "I didn't have closure in the States, but I became an Israeli citizen," she says. "I was 21 and starting my life in Israel."

She enrolled at Hebrew University and took a degree in social work, a profession she would serve in for the next 12 years. In 1976, she married Menachem Ozery, an Israeli of Yemenite descent born while his family was on the way to Israel from Yemen under a program called Operation Magic Carpet. He was five days old when he arrived in the Jewish state.

"I was the first non-Yemenite to marry into his community," Ozery says. "His parents said, she looks very nice but she doesn't look too Jewish. My parents came for the wedding, and his family finally realized that we have one common language and history when my father got up to make an aliyah at the Torah," she says. "The entire community said, ahh, she must be Jewish. My father said to my father-in-law, 'We all have one book.'"

Shortly afterwards, the Ozerys became founding members of a small moshav (collective farm) in central Israel, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Named Kfar Ruth, its main crop was roses for export and for Menachem to use in his business as a floral designer for b'nai mitzvahs and weddings. There they continued to live and to raise their three sons: Boaz, now 27, a graduate student in communications at Bar Ilan University; Ofer, 26, a third-year law student in Israel; and Alon, 21, an officer in the Israeli army.

"Usually it's the kids who leave home; this time it's the parents," she says. Her husband is with her in Chicago.

As for Ozery, she decided after 12 years of a social work career that she "wanted to make a change in the social fabric of Israel." She felt she would make a good shlicha because "I could be encouraging and supportive. I grew up in the States, made aliyah on my own, raised three children in Israel. I would be coming full circle."

After a rewarding three years in Miami, she returned to Israel and continued to work for the Jewish Agency, eventually becoming the director of the country's largest absorption center, which she calls "a microcosm of aliyah." It was a temporary home to people coming from 24 countries, including war-torn Sarajevo, Syria and Iran.

After that assignment, she served as director of donor missions for the Jewish Agency, hosting Jews from around the world as they visited Israel. She also led missions to Argentina when that country was in the throes of an economic crisis and to the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as developing a program called Faces of Aliyah, in which Israelis visit U.S. communities to speak about their country.

Ozery visited Chicago on one of these trips, and the visit corroborated a favorable impression she had formed of the city's Jewish community when she met Harvey Barnett, a former Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago president, during a mission to Argentina. Now, she's happy to serve that community herself.

Her focus here, she says, will be on getting as many Chicagoans as possible to visit Israel and consider making aliyah.

"It's important that we invite people to come and taste Israel and see if it's right for them," she says. "My aim is to encourage as many people as possible, especially young people, the returnees from birthright. That's a tremendous reservoir to tap on: birthright whet their appetite. Now let's see them come back, volunteer, study, work, eventually hoping to open the door to aliyah. I don't expect to have an Operation Moses or Solomon or Operation Chicago, but for anyone who wants to come there's an opportunity."

Her forte as a shlicha, she says, is to "tailor-make the programs, hold the hand of the new immigrants."

She likes to tell potential olim (immigrants to Israel) about how different it is to arrive in the country as an immigrant rather than a tourist and to be chaperoned to the "immigrant hall" in the Tel Aviv airport. "It's the only international airport in the world that says, welcome home. It doesn't say welcome to Tel Aviv, welcome to Israel. There's something very special about that," she says.

She also hopes to convey the message that "there's an Israel for everybody," from young people who have their whole lives before them to retired persons (her own parents made aliyah 14 years after she did). And on the upcoming 60th anniversary of the Jewish state, "I look forward to tremendous renewal and hope," she says. "I'm very optimistic."

She takes the same upbeat attitude about the weather in her new city, which greeted her with one of the most destructive storms to hit Chicago in years. Recalling that she was in Florida when Hurricane Andrew struck, she says, "It's so much better that it's only a storm and not a Kassam rocket. Whatever is coming out of the sky is not directed at me or at the Jewish people. It's inconvenient, but it's not out to get me."