We’re marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel with a year-long celebration! Keep an eye out for “Memphis Celebrates Israel at 70” branding at your synagogue, at events around town, and online. In this My Israel Story series, we’re asking Memphians to tell their personal Israel stories. Do you have a story to tell?
Our Israel Story
Our story started before World War II. My grandmother was thankfully very smart, and she saw the writing on the wall in Poland. She had one child at the time, my aunt, and she knew she didn’t want to raise her children in a country where the dogs had more rights than Jews. Her siblings all eventually got out and went to America, but she went to Israel. When I was little, instead of going to camp, my younger brother Ari and I went to visit her. She lived in Ashdod, three blocks from the beach. She was the one who really instilled a love of Israel in us.
Growing up in Memphis, I went to Yeshiva, but I really didn’t want to go to seminary when I graduated. Instead, I went to Bar Ilan University (The image above shows Ronit with her friends on the school’s campus). It had a religious component to it, but it was a smaller school. I went for the one-year program, but then I went back and I stayed for 3 1/2 years until the Gulf War happened, and my parents made me come home. I had already met my husband – although I didn’t know he was going to be my husband at the time – and I really didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t have a choice. I left Israel in January of 1991 and Menashe came to America in August of 1991. We got married in January of ’92, but there’s a lot that happened in between.
Menashe’s mother was Orthodox, and she kept the religion going in the family. Unfortunately, she passed away when my husband was 19. I was good friends with my dorm advisor, who happened to be one of Menashe’s best friends. Many times, I went down to talk to her, he would either be there or he would show up, and we just knew that Hashem (G-d) wanted us to be together. I laugh about it now because I was painfully shy when I was young.
Bar Ilan used to do these singles’ Shabbat weekends in Yerushalayim, and a girlfriend of mine really wanted to go. They weren’t really for me, but she convinced me to tag along, and he was there – not at that Shabbat but at a neighboring hotel with his (at the time) girlfriend and her family. He ended up breaking things off and he started dating me, because he realized he wanted to be with me. I laugh because he says he can’t even remember what her name was. Looking back, I understand that Hashem wanted us to be together.
When we saw one of our friends that didn’t get to go on the weekend trip she asked, “How was it?” Menashe looked at me and said, “Ask Ronit, she knows why I had such a good time.” And the truth is, he and I actually never really spoke. We were like little kids with our friends running interference: “He’s interested, are you interested?” “She might be interested if you’re interested,” just back-and-forth. So, I turned to him and said, “Other people told me why you had a good time, but you didn’t.” There’s no way that shy little me would’ve said something so flirty and direct – it had to be divine intervention, there’s no question. And it had to happen in Israel, because that’s where he was!
Because of the war, he got called up to reserve duty right after I came back to Memphis. While he was away in reserve duty, he wrote me a nine-page, hand-written letter, and at the end of it he asked me to marry him. Back then it was very expensive to call Israel, and it was hard to get a connection. A three-minute phone call could be $20. My parents let me call him every Friday, standing there on the corded phone, with my father hovering over me saying “Get off the phone, long enough” while tapping his watch.
I got the letter on a Tuesday and I wanted to talk to him right away. I couldn’t tell my mom I needed to accept his proposal, and we actually fought about it. Eventually, I called and accepted his proposal via phone line. That was in February, and then in May when the war was over and everything was quiet, I went and visited him for a few weeks. We went shopping for a ring, and I wore it all over campus and around our friends and his family, but when I left to return to Memphis I left it with him. I still hadn’t told my parents we were engaged! Eventually my mother went to meet him, and when she came back she brought the ring.
We’ve been married for 26 years and we always said we would go back to Israel, but life just happened. We started having children and went to school here, and now our children are growing up and getting married, too. But Memphis feels like my second home. If my husband said, “I want to go back to Israel tomorrow,” I would’ve been packed yesterday.