Where What When

Apartment Living in Israel

With the corruption in Israeli politics the Israeli press has recently begun to look back nostalgically at a prime minister whom they once reviled as being a fascist. Everyone in Israel knows that Menachem Begin was enormously honest, and that “he and his wife Aliza raised three children in a tiny two-room apartment on 1 Rosenbaum Street in Tel Aviv.”

If, for the past 50 years, the key to success in Israel politics has been having a high-profile military career, all that is now changing. I think that 30 years from now, successful prime ministerial candidates will have to prove two things: that they raised a family in an apartment with no more than three bedrooms or, preferably, in a trailer home on a wind-swept hill in Judea and Samaria (Israel’s modern-day version of the Log Cabin), and that they were arrested at least twice protesting the Disengagement.

I was never arrested, but I am raising a family in a three-bedroom apartment, so in 30 years (when, G-d willing, I am 81 years old), perhaps I will be prime-ministerial material.

When I came to Israel in 1982, and when I bought an apartment in 1986, most Israelis lived in apartments of three or four rooms, and they still do. At the time, exceptions included some inhabitants of Samaria, and some inhabitants of a very small number of towns within the “old borders” of Israel, such as Savyon, famous for its lavish homes and lifestyle. The classic essays of Ephraim Kishon about apartment living (translated by Miriam Arad for many American Jewish newspapers) were a central part of Israeli culture, describing an experience common to all.

Nowadays, there are many alternatives. In Kiryat Arba where I live, you can buy a house, detached or semi-detached, and you can buy a terraced luxury apartment with its own private lawn and garden, choosing the number of rooms you want. The existence of these alternatives has caused many apartment dwellers to ask themselves each day a question they never thought to ask before: “Should I stay put? Or should I perhaps find a way to move to larger, more private living quarters?” Nowadays, every apartment dweller with the means to make such a purchase engages in occasional soul-searching about his chosen living quarters.

Certainly, as a child growing up in a beautiful four-story home on Glen Avenue, I never imagined I would move to Israel and raise a family in a three-bedroom apartment. As a 15-year-old, the first time I visited summer-camp friends in New York and saw them living in apartments, I was in shock. “How can people live like this,” I asked myself. I had always supposed that staying in Baltimore in the kind of home I grew up in was a Jewish duty, a tradition going back thousands of years.

Then, at age16, I came in contact with Rabbi Chaim Druckman, an Israeli Torah educator, and I began to think that perhaps there were other ways of looking at things. Eventually, I moved to Israel, and here I am, in Kiryat Arba, in a three-bedroom apartment. And I would like to put in a good word for the Israeli apartment.

In yeshiva I was taught that marriage, and life itself, constitute a test, a refining process to round us out and bring us at the end of our lives to shleimus, human perfection. There is much about apartment living, especially in Israel, that leads one forward in this process.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a squeamish, somewhat introverted person, afraid of people older than myself, afraid of Israelis, afraid of anything technical, and somewhat lacking in self-confidence. I still tend somewhat in those directions (although there are a lot fewer people older than me now), but I have changed. One element that has helped me to change is my contact with the “va’ad habayit,” the Israeli “house committee.”

Let me preface what I am going to say by pointing out that Kiryat Arba, at 1100 meters above sea level, has the coolest, driest air anywhere in Israel except for the Golan Heights. During the summer, when people in Tel Aviv are sweltering, we are enjoying pleasant weather, similar to Jerusalem, but the slightest bit cooler still. The flip side is that four or five months of the year, we have to heat our apartments or we suffer. Temperatures rarely go down below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, but in our stone buildings, it can become very unpleasant if you do not heat.

Our building was built in 1976, five years after Kiryat Arba’s founding. It was built with a central heating system, consisting of large steam radiators. This system worked much more efficiently than did the use of individual space heaters. With steam radiators, the entire building became warm and stayed that way. Yet by 1982, the system had broken down. The residents of the building did not understand what was wrong, and the fix-it man was inexperienced at the time. After spending much money, the effort to fix the system was abandoned.

In ’86, when we purchased our apartment, the people in the building had despaired of ever using the central heat again. Several other buildings had turned off their central heat as well. Two apartments on our top floor were chronically empty, the apartments being considered uninhabitable during the winter.

For eight years I remained silent, living with this situation. We heated with space heaters, gas heaters, or blow heaters, which warmed up their immediate proximity but nothing more. Then I decided to push the building into action. Some new families had moved in, who did not remember the aggravation of 10 years previous. I found support among them for examining what was involved in starting the central heating again. For months I researched the issue, spoke to fix-it men, asked questions of other buildings that still used their heat. I then called in heating repairmen to give me estimates for starting the system again. Then I called a meeting of the building’s residents, and for almost an hour described what I had learned, about water tanks, burners, pumps, radiators, fuel tanks, hoses, water pressure, the best hours for heating, and expenses. One resident said, “Rafi! You did a whole doctoral dissertation on this!” In a word, I convinced everyone. Israeli “post-dated checks” were collected to pay the man who would set the system going.

A few months later, winter arrived, and there was great rejoicing as the whole building heated up for the first time in 13 years. I had the nachas of making a place in Eretz Yisrael more pleasant for 20 families. Like the early pioneers, I had figuratively “drained some swamps” and “redeemed some of Eretz Yisrael.” The system has worked during the 13 years that have passed since then.

For 10 years, I ran the house committee. People would come to me asking for more hours of heat or complaining about problems with their system. I had to collect money from people, and decide when and how to let some people pay more slowly. When something broke down, I would immediately get three or four anguished phone calls. There were elderly people in the building, a few of them living alone, whose lives literally depended on this heat. It was a real responsibility. I thus became a person to whom 20 families looked for answers.

No words can describe how good this entire experience was for me – and it happened in an apartment building.

One parenthetical story: I remember one fellow, a young chasidic soldier, 19 years old and penniless, who had come out of Russia a few years before, without his non-observant parents. He was renting a top-story apartment, in which he was not often present. He refused to pay for fuel. But before I realized how adamant he was about that, I visited him a number of times with increasingly strident requests for payment. Finally I realized that I was going about it wrong. I relaxed and thought the whole thing through once more. Purim arrived, a holiday intended for increasing Jewish unity. I took a bottle of something strong up, and that Purim morning we drank together, and when we were done, all the problems between us were ironed out. Today, 10 years later, this fellow is married in Kiryat Arba with a number of children, and he always smiles at me when he sees me. Of course, I never did get him to pay (I ended up going to the owners of the apartment), but that’s besides the point.

Living in an apartment changes the way you relate to people. If you like your neighbors, or learn to like them, everyone can become like family. You sit in your living room, and you hear marbles fall on the floor above your head, and you know that the perpetrator is little Yitzchak in the apartment above, who plays with your own child of the same age all summer long, and whose father is your walking partner and sometimes chavrusa, and you derive a certain enjoyment from hearing those marbles. From another part of the building, late one afternoon, you hear drilling. You’re not bothered by the noise. Rather you say, “That must be Klein. His mother is visiting them in two weeks from the States, and they want things to be in tip-top shape.” You find yourself rooting for the Kleins to finish their renovation in time to please Mom. Developing such a mode of thought certainly cannot be bad for a person, and it comes from years of living in an apartment building.

In an apartment building, you have a lot of daily contact with the families around you. If you are missing a carrot, you immediately go out without hesitation and borrow one from the neighbors next door or upstairs. Two days later they come to you for milk.

I will never forget the Gulf War of 1990, when Scud missiles were falling on Israel. The older children in our building organized recitation of tehilim by all the building’s children. I was sorry that there was a war, but I was very pleased that the situation had brought all the children together in a holy commonality of purpose.

In conclusion, I have expressed my own take on why I think apartment living in Israel has been good for me. We genuinely like our neighbors and wouldn’t want to leave. I doubt apartment living is for everyone, and I do not doubt that there are other ways to improve one’s character besides living in an apartment building. Still, considering that many people coming to Israel end up living in apartments, I think people should be aware of the positive aspects of apartment living, and I think these are many.

Raphael Blumberg’s book about Rabbi Baruch Milikowsky will hopefully come out this summer through Urim Publishers.

Top

Article List - April 2007