Am Yisrael Chai

By Elysa Dombro

I recently found an old high school paper that I wrote

For a class project on ethnicity

Students dug deep in order to answer the ever elusive question

Where is your family from

and place a pin on the map of a country

that best represents their ancestry

I don’t like when people ask me

“What’s your ethnicity”

They think I have some easy answer

Some interesting tidbit about my family that tells them a whole lot about me

oh my great-grandparents grew up in Lithuania

so I consider myself Lithuanian

As if I could call myself Polish or Russian or Lithuanian or Spanish or Egyptian

While leaving out the fact that my family has been

kicked out of every country they’ve lived in

For being Jewish

My ancestors moved to the U.S. on the early side of the 20th century after dealing with discrimination and hate and poverty

In the countries they were born in

it didn’t matter that they had important roles in their communities

or that they built their houses on that land

It mattered that they were Jewish

And had Jewish blood

not what country they lived in

Or what land they farmed

what kind of blood do I have?

I ended up writing about Israel for my school project

Despite the fact that I had only visited there once

And haven’t had relatives living in that land

For a couple hundred years

Because when I think of a country

Where I can truly be me

Without fearing judgment for the Magen David on my necklace or

Dealing with explaining Yom Kippur to professors and GSI’s Israel

is the only one that exists

In college when I visit the Jewish state with

40 other American Jewish teens on my birthright trip

I think of my mother’s ancestors

Farming cotton in the land that became Israel

Speaking a language that I don’t know

Maybe if we’d been able to stay

I’d speak Hebrew and work on a dairy kibbutz

like the one I visit for the first time as a twenty-year-old

But we couldn’t and I don’t

And as much as it hurts to

Lack any sense of belonging to the countries my ancestors were from

Every time I light my Shabbat candles

Or tell someone what my necklace means

I know that where we lived doesn’t matter

It matters that I’m here

Here to stay

Am yisrael chai