Where is home?
Voyage Journal 1-Diaspora
Where is my home? Why have I never had a permanent home? Since childhood I’ve always found myself on the move, never in one home for more than a few years. Is it in my genes to be the Wandering Jew? I was born in Israel. At the age of 5 I had to leave my home due to my mother’s health condition, a holocaust survivor from Hungary. She hospitalized in a mental institution for a year and I was put with some remote cousins away from home. Since then I never felt that same feeling of “a home”. Actually that old house in Kiryat Ata, which was built by Arab builders in the 1940s, became to me a sort of an ultimate home that I’m still yearning for. Up to this day, my wife and our 3 children, find ourselves moving to a new rented house about every 2 years and still don’t have a house of our own. (Nowadays we hear every day in the media, news about young passionate citizens who set tents in many Israeli cities to protest against the unburnable prices of rent. In the 1950s and 60s the main goal was to supply accommodation for every one, but today lust for greed leaped the prices and many Israelis see this jump in accommodation prices as business opportunity rather than a basis for a family growth).
Being an Israeli for me is living in a Paradox: Since very early age I’ve always felt that I hold a special responsibility: for past Jewish generations, for the safety of my country, for the founding fathers of Israel etc. Founding Israel had a huge promise in it and a commitment too: to be a just moral state and a safe place for the Jews, a fortress. But now it seems to me that Israel has forsaken its initial promises, we are merely left with the stronghold premise alone. I have a hard time believing in the path Israel is taking and yet I can’t see myself living elsewhere
For the last 12 years I've been working on a long documentary film that is very precious to me. "Where is home" deals with the relation between our private home and homeland in its various implications... Learn More
