A boyhood friendship that lasts into adulthood is precious. A boyhood friendship whose paths mirror one another is rare.
On Nefesh B’Nefesh’s recent charter flight from JFK to Ben Gurion, it was just such a rare and memorable pair whose presence graced this special post-COVID flight.
To be sure, the flight was filled with passengers from all walks of life, a variety of compelling stories onboard, whose addition to Israel as its newest cohort of olim, immigrants, will undoubtedly leave Israel richer. Onboard were eight physicians, 19 more medical professionals (including psychologists and nurses), 40 future Lone Soldiers, 31 families whose youngest member was just two months old (the youngest of a group of 99 children aboard), and 48 singles. This diverse group hailed from 20 states across America from Delaware to California, Maine to Maryland, and Vermont to Washington. Their aliyah stories are endless.
Among them: A pair of Denver “boys” — today, grown men — each of them dads of their respective broods of four children, whose intertwined lives began in Denver but then somewhat diverged, found themselves making aliyah on the exact same flight to Israel.
Jonathan Teitelbaum, a Wharton Business School alumnus who works in investment banking, and Sam Lightstone, a software engineer, are both thriving professionals.
As young kids, throughout their teens and even young adulthood, they were joined at the hip. Everyone in their community knew you would find Sam where Jonathan was, and vice versa. As a duo, Jonathan and Sam go far in the recesses of their community’s memory.
They were good kids, with some mischievous hijinks they were famous for, laced into the narrative of their friendship through the years.
The root of it all was their famous and memorable DAT preschool story. During recess one day, Jonathan and Sam were blithely digging in the ground, two five-year-old boys playing in tandem without a care in the world, when lo, they dug in so deep, they eventually hit the DAT infrastructure and cut the wires to the DAT school intercom.
From then on the two were inseparable. From DAT in Denver to RMHA (today Denver JDS) for a year, onto YU’s MTA High School for Boys where they were roommates, to Sha’alvim Yeshiva for their gap year, and onto YU for college, Jonathan and Sam’s paths mirrored one another as they went through life’s formative years. The annals of the Jonathan-Sam stories grew.
To this day, Sam’s fun bedtime stories he entertains his children with consist of Sam-Jonathan adventures.
As time passed, they each charted the course of their lives, building families and their own plans.
Jonathan’s dream for aliyah began to percolate at a young age. When he became engaged to Basya Adler, they went as far as charting a very specific time frame: a ten-year plan to aliyah. As things fell out, remarkably, the Nefesh B’Nefesh flight was Jonathan and Basya’s 10-year engagement anniversary.
For Jonathan and Basya, uprooting their beautiful family to Israel has been long in the works. Jonathan had witnessed the lives of his role models living in Israel, how Jewishly immersive they were, and he felt inspired to act and raise his own children in Israel. His worldview of the classic triad, Am Yisrael, Torat Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael — the people, Torah and Land of Israel —propelled his vision and his commitment to his and Basya’s engagement pledge.
“Israel is where our [Jewish people’s] history is, and where our future is,” Jonathan comments. He often noted how tied in the Jewish prayers are with Jerusalem.
For Jonathan and Basya, Jerusalem was the compass of their lives, the place they’ve kept their eye on during their mutual ten year plan. Every change and joint decision they made, including relocating to Philadelphia for Jonathan’s MBA, centered around their vision for making aliyah within 10 years of their engagement.
In honor of their upcoming aliyah, they had commissioned a work of art to commemorate this juncture in their lives. It would be a visual reminder of the meaning to their migration from America to Israel. The backdrop is Jerusalem; the foreground, allusions to Joshua and Caleb, the two exceptional Jewish leaders who upon returning from their mission of spying out the land of Israel did not join the group-think negativity of the other spies. They went against the stream and instead spoke of the nobility of the land.
Sam married Leah and together they built their own beautiful family. Their future was in America. In fact, Sam and Leah had just custom-built their dream home, their “forever” home. Aliyah was far from their minds.
Then the Gaza war of May, 2021 broke out. The outpouring of poisonous anti-Semitism the conflict generated online was more unfiltered than usual. It was alarming. It was a wake-up call. In that moment, it made sense to Sam and Leah to move to Israel. Spur of the moment, Sam made the call to his employer: Would he be able to keep his job abroad and continue to work, COVID-style, via Zoom? Yes, came the fast reply.
So it was that Sam and Leah’s aliyah plans were launched into high gear only one year ago.
“No one believed us when we shared our aliyah news,” Sam said. “This was unexpected. We are doing this for our children,” he said, showing me a poignant poem that expressed the idea of children of olim inheriting their Israeliness, as opposed to undergoing the transition themselves, as their parents are now doing.
On board the flight, in their characteristic rapport, Jonathan and Sam joke, they can’t get away from each other even if they tried. The serendipity of their story and their paths converging on an aliyah flight elicits their mutual, affectionate chuckling.
Once the flight arrives, the impact of its emotional landing still resonating, the passionate and almost spiritual descent down the airplane steps, the contact with Israel’s warm air, this time and for the first time as Israelis — Jonathan and Sam await the oodles of luggage an aliyah flight unloads, as they sit on a nearby bench, reminiscing, their arms around each other for a quick photo.
Through the years, Jonathan and Sam’s friendship transcended proximity, even when their paths diverged, but then life handed them perhaps their most memorable common adventure of all: a joint aliyah onboard Nefesh B’Nefesh’s first post-COVID charter flight.
Bedtime stories for Sam and Leah’s kids just got a little more interesting. And the culmination of Jonathan and Basya’s 10-year aliyah dream just came true.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
