'Go big and go home': North American families make aliyah in the shadow of war

Two large tents had gone up on the grounds. One, on the grass, was for the children; the other, beside the synagogue, held the food, a barbecue of burgers and hot dogs, salads, and salmon.

A face painter worked on a patient queue of small clients. A photo booth was stocked with props from the journey everyone attending was about to make: a cardboard suitcase and placards naming various cities.

The mood was celebratory and loud with music. But running underneath it was something I can only describe as excited stress, the particular tension of people who have made the biggest decision of their lives and now have to execute it, box by box.

That was the afternoon NBN had built: a community pausing, mid-upheaval, to be told that someone understood exactly what they were going through, and would hold their hand the rest of the way.

The gathering was the New Jersey launch of Nefesh B’Nefesh’s 2026 summer aliyah season, held on June 2, alongside Israel’s Aliyah and Integration Ministry, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund, and JNF-USA.

More than 450 people came through the doors; a second event in Toronto the following night drew over 200 participants.

The round numbers, though, don’t tell the full story. Nearly everyone in it was a story caught mid-sentence.

Alana Goldsmith’s story involved reaching the packing stage. “That’s the million-dollar question,” she told the Magazine when I asked what makes the cut and what gets left behind.

“We’re bringing mementos, a little bit of furniture, and my kitchen,” she said. The family’s visas had come through the week before, and they flew to Beit Shemesh around two months later.

An educator of 18 years, Goldsmith described a decision 17 years in the making.

“It was never why or how,” she said. “It was really just a matter of when.”

Her son is 15, her daughter 12 – an age, she reckoned, where you can still settle a child into a new country before the joins begin to show. Her husband, a consultant, plans to look for work once they land, while she helps the children acclimate.

NBN had already lined up doctors in Israel for a family medical issue, she said, and taken the sting out of the paperwork. Her parents made aliyah two summers ago, and a brother and sister are there already. One sister is staying behind.

For Rebecca Catan, who flies on August 10 to Karmiel, the pull was harder-edged. She is still hunting for an apartment, which she put down, half-laughing, to the fact that “everyone’s going where we’re going.”

When I asked what had moved her, she didn’t pause. “Since the war started, I think we’ve just been more interested.” She and her husband want their children to grow up somewhere they feel at home, she said.

She lives, for now, in a community she described as friendly to Jews. “But I don’t think it’ll stay that way forever. And we want a forever home.”

That word, “forever,” kept surfacing. So did the war, though rarely as a reason to hold back.

Stan and Karen, a couple bound for Ramat Beit Shemesh, had done everything “except selling the house” – the one piece, Karen noted, refusing to move.

They had begun the process a year earlier. Two of their children and several grandchildren are already in Israel; four children and 16 grandchildren remain in the US, a split the family is still learning to talk about.

They had been in Israel, as it happened, two days before the war began, and spent it moving in and out of the reinforced safe room, right through to the airport on the way home.

“That’s part of life now, unfortunately,” Karen said. Had it given them second thoughts? It had done the reverse. “If you look at what’s going on in the world, in this country now, it’s probably the safest place,” she said. “Strange, but true.”

No one held that contradiction – the fear and the conviction side by side – more openly than Marla Rattenshark, who is becoming Mira when she lands.

Hers is a 21-year story of, in her words, “no more excuses”: a lone-soldier daughter already serving in Jerusalem, an older daughter about to begin graduate school there, and a son heading to a gap-year program.

She works for an Israeli organization, and said she had spent years feeling she was living a lie, comfortable in New Jersey. “We’re running away from nothing,” she was careful to add.

She had been in Israel during the war, running to shelters for the first time in her life. “It almost compromised my conviction,” she admitted. “It did, honestly.”

And then, in the same breath, she pulled herself back. “I do everything with an extreme,” she said. “They say go big or go home. I’m actually doing both. Go big and go home.”

A chef with a brand-new kitchen, a fitness studio, and a house with a backyard, she is trading all of it for a smaller flat in either Jerusalem’s Baka or Katamon neighborhoods.

Her wider family, secular Jews who she said do not identify with Israel, are unlikely to visit. “It’s going to be a little lonely,” she said, and did not attempt to soften it.

For Sarah and Steve Clark, heading to Netanya to be near a daughter in Zichron Ya’acov, the reasoning ran down the generations. Sarah had just retired after 38 years of teaching.

The idea, Steve explained, was to become a fixed point, “Saba (grandpa) and savta (grandma) as a base” for grandchildren who come to Israel for a gap year and, the couple hoped, decide to stay.

“We’ll bring the grandchildren over one at a time,” Sarah said. “So we’ll see what happens.” Of Nefesh B’Nefesh, she was unequivocal: it had been “holding your hand across the line,” an adviser once answering a handful of her questions with six links apiece.

Not everyone on the grounds was leaving. Aaron Bernstein has no plans to make aliyah; his daughter did through NBN a few years ago. He had seen an advertisement for the party and decided to come along, and to cheer on people he had never met.

“I’m here to support people,” he told me. “A lot of people are indifferent. You’re going to Israel. So what? And I think people should know that what they’re doing is exceptional.”

The companion beside him admitted she had never set foot in Israel. It was, she said, a dream. Next year, perhaps.

The same thread ran through nearly every conversation. Each of these people had, at some point in the last three years, been handed an obvious reason to wait. None of them took it.

The war came up again and again, in the safe rooms, in the news from home, but never once as a reason to stay. If anything, it had sped things up. It turned a “someday” into a date on a boarding pass.

The only person I interviewed in Hebrew that afternoon was Yohanan Mali, director-general of the Development of the Negev, Galilee, and National Resilience Ministry. To watch families make aliyah while Israel is still absorbing hard news, he told me, is deeply moving, and it sharpens the state’s obligation to give each of them a soft landing.

The security situation dictates the agenda, he admitted, and he hopes it will change. But the building does not stop. “Three years at war,” he said, “and we keep going the entire time.”

He listed the projects: a university going up in Kiryat Shmona, a planned rail line to reach it, and money going into health and education across the North and South.

“In five or 10 years,” he said, “you won’t recognize these areas when you see them.”

It is not an empty pitch. Through Go Beyond, a joint NBN and KKL-JNF initiative, some of this summer’s olim will settle not in the established Anglo enclaves but in the very regions Mali is working to rebuild. The families in that synagogue garden are, whether they would put it this way or not, part of a national project.

Near the synagogue, the photo booth kept a steady queue all afternoon: guests posing with a cardboard suitcase and a placard with the phrase “Now more than ever.” A dress rehearsal, in props, for a departure that for most of them was then only weeks away.

Many, by now, have made it for real and are quite possibly reading these words in Israel.