Why I moved to Israel

I’m never quite sure how to answer the question of where I’m from. Throughout my life, I have lived in countless different places. My mother’s career in global pharmaceuticals took my family from Canada to several places throughout America, and across the ocean to Switzerland, living all over the world. I never had a solid understanding of where home was for me. The only constant in my life was my family, and our identity as Jews. A Jewish identity shaped as minorities wherever we were.

During the summer of 2022 I went to Israel on Birthright. While I had been to Israel twice before as a young child on family trips, until then I had never experienced as an adult what life looked like in a truly Jewish place. Immediately after the trip, I knew this was a place I wanted to explore further, learn more about, and deepen my understanding of the complexity and controversy surrounding the very existence of a Jewish state, in hopes that it would help me understand my place as a Jew in this world.

I applied and was accepted to spend my final year of university studying political science at the University of Haifa, one of Israel’s most diverse institutions. My hope was to learn about the experience of living in this land, surrounded by people from all different backgrounds and walks of life both within and outside of Israel. I still have the student visa from that program in my passport. It had a start date of October 7, 2023.

The night before, I was in New York surrounded by family and friends, having a goodbye meal before departing for Tel Aviv. That night was supposed to be a celebration. Right before I went to bed, I saw messages from the university WhatsApp group telling people to shelter in place and listen to the instructions of the IDF and home front command. Confused, I opened the news to see the terror happening in the country I was supposed to call home for the next ten months. That night, I did not get any sleep. I couldn’t take my eyes off my phone, witnessing the horrors unfolding, and my plans for the future disintegrating in real time.

I was devastated. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t leave my hotel room for nearly two days. Once I finally left my hotel and ventured onto the streets of Time’s Square below, hordes of people were gathered in protest against Israel. I saw teachers of mine from high school on social media praising the “resistance” when the blood of dead Jews was not even dry. I did not fly to Tel Aviv that October, but instead returned to Washington where I would have to finish my final year of university in residence. As if a switch had been flipped, I suddenly felt completely alone and isolated in the place I had lived for years. The place I thought I could call home.

On campus, people who I’d called friends for years suddenly turned their backs on me. I, like all Jews, faced a difficult fork in the road. In the face of alienation, I had to choose between abandoning Israel to placate those around me, or remain firm in my commitment to the Jewish nation. To my shock, many Jews I had known up to that point, including other participants from my Birthright trip, had chosen the former.

I would not allow myself to be bullied into turning against my values and my people. After a lonely year finishing my degree in America, I came to Israel in January 2025 on a Masa internship program, working for a tech startup in Tel Aviv for nearly six months. The two things that amazed me about this experience was the incredible resilience of Israelis, who remained steadfast in their pursuit of innovation despite the difficult circumstances; and the shared experience of my fellow program participants who all had similar experiences to mine after October 7, as minority Jews living all over the world.

My commitment towards Israel and the Jewish people only grew stronger during my time in Tel Aviv. In late March, Canada had called a snap election and was set to pick a new Prime Minister. Being born in Canada, I knew I had to do whatever I could to get the vote out, as Canada was - and still is - facing a crisis of antisemitism. In the 72 hours after the election was announced, I built IsraelVotes.ca, a website to help Canadian expats living in Israel get registered to vote. The site went viral, quickly getting over a thousand Canadians registered to vote from Israel. The project received media coverage in the Times of Israel, and I was interviewed by the Canadian Jewish News in Toronto. I quickly realized the power technology had to help organize and energize Jews politically around the world.

After the program, I moved to the United Kingdom to start a company called Alpha Grove, named after the street I was living on London. The purpose of Alpha Grove was to use artificial intelligence to collect, analyze, and quantify political speech online; to systematically track overall sentiment on any issue (Israel in particular), deconstruct the underlying arguments using first principles, and identify opportunities to rationally challenge the narrative.

Being in London opened my eyes to a different type of antisemitism I had not experienced before. I lived in East London, a heavily left-wing area, where I was surrounded by people that did not care much for Israel. I was aware of this, and I had hoped that my work would be able to help me find ways to influence their views by presenting a different, more rational perspective. However, I quickly realized what began with anti-Israel bias on the left, actually provided cover for virulent antisemitism from all sides. On multiple occasions I heard people claim that Jews controlled the American and British governments, that we owned all the banks, and that we’re responsible for all the poverty and misfortune in society. These were the opinions of regular, everyday young Britons, and they were never challenged or called out by their peers for their open and unapologetic hate. It got to a point that when my flat mates and I would host parties or have people over, I would take my Jewish and Hebrew books out of the bookshelf in the living room and hide them away in my bedroom.

By August, I decided it was no longer feasible for me to live in the UK, as I no longer felt safe. I made plans to move back in with my parents in September and determine my next move from there. But before I left for America, I took a ten-day trip to Israel to visit friends and family, and continue work on Alpha Grove. I’m writing this letter on day eleven of my ten-day trip. After all I had experienced over the past 709 days, I realized my story in Israel was not finished. After missing my flight, I am now beginning the process of making Aliyah; to make Israel, at last, my permanent home.