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For Angelenos considering aliyah, there’s a fair for that

Alan Greenstadt, a 69-year-old former CEO with experience in aerospace, defense and telecommunications, has been thinking about making aliyah for three or four years now.
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March 16, 2016

Alan Greenstadt, a 69-year-old former CEO with experience in aerospace, defense and telecommunications, has been thinking about making aliyah for three or four years now.

He has concerns — like how to find work in Israel that he really enjoys — but resolving such worries wasn’t what he found most helpful about the March 13 Spring Aliyah Fair put on by aliyah organization Nefesh B’Nefesh at the InterContinental Los Angeles in Century City.

“[The fair] has been helpful to me not because I’m getting answers to questions I already had, but because I’m getting questions I didn’t know I had,” he said after a session titled “Building Your Career in Israel.” “Part of this process is learning what you don’t know.”

The fair attracted about 250 young adults, parents with children, middle-aged Jews and retirees. Some wanted to learn more about the realities of life in Israel; others already were planning the move and wanted to get a head start on finding a moving company, submitting resumes and a host of other to-do items. 

Inside an entire wing of the hotel’s main floor, there were seminars on job hunting in Israel, government benefits, higher education, the Israeli military and health care. More than a dozen companies and groups offered insurance advice, shipping and logistics needs, financial consulting and more.

“It’s been a great day. I’ve got many brochures and a lot of notes, a lot of contacts,” said Baruch Howard, who retired four years ago as a general contractor and now lives in Long Beach with his wife. They are hoping to start anew in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot by the end of the year. 

In the “Building Your Career in Israel” session with Israeli job-search expert Rachel Berger, Howard asked about the demand for handymen and learned that he may want to form a corporation in order to limit his personal liability.

Berger, who helps find jobs for immigrants, walked through several examples of people with unique sets of circumstances who were looking for work. She said one person, for instance, who is a real estate analyst had to go to an ulpan to learn Hebrew before he could work. Another woman, Berger said, found a job in social media relatively quickly because she spoke Hebrew and English.

“It was a position that she did not believe she had the ability to gain … but because she had the skills of [being fluently] bilingual, and she could also write in English, it worked to her advantage,” Berger said. “So start learning Hebrew!”

The 60 or so people sitting in on that session, most of them middle-aged and seniors, asked very specific questions about their own situations. One woman said she was offered a job but was alarmed by the difference in gross (pre-tax) and net (after-tax) income. A man was curious about Israel’s mandatory retirement age of 67. Berger explained that thaecutoff applies only to government employees and public education employees.

As the session ran past its scheduled end time due to so many people peppering Berger with questions, one woman exclaimed, “It just seems that there are two Israels: the one that you guys handle and then the one that exists.”

“There are 50 Israels!” Berger said. “There aren’t two Israels; there are 50 Israels. It depends where you get a job.”

A spokesman for Nefesh B’Nefesh said that last year the group brought about 3,800 olim (people who make aliyah) from North America, and it anticipates similar figures for this year.

Robin Silver, a freelance writer who lives in Orange County, said she’s considered aliyah on and off for years and that she’s in the middle of the aliyah process with Nefesh B’Nefesh. Two of her children are already in Israel — one lives in Jerusalem and the other is in the army. Silver said she would want to live in Ra’anana, a heavily Anglo city north of Tel Aviv. 

She said the information she got at the fair on shipping things to Israel was particularly useful and joked that the event was surprisingly orderly.

“It’s been very organized, actually, which is very impressive for Israel.”

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