Since many older people have made Aliyah during the last few years, I thought I would tell you a story that would help you get your friends and family to join you and make Aliyah as well. Basically, why come and live here?
It was around 1998. I had previously left IBM where I fixed large IBM systems and became a technical writer. I used to work from home and take on different projects, mostly ones that had to be completed very quickly. One day I got an urgent phone call from an agency to see if I could write a special document in a matter of days for GE Medical design lab in Haifa. I promised to be there early the next morning when they opened at 8am.
I arrived at their very large building complex in Haifa and was told where my contact person worked but when I arrived nobody was there, so I sat down and waited. Towards 9am two older men arrived dressed only in bathing costumes, flip-flops and holding a towel around their necks. When they saw me they introduced themselves and we sat down to talk about what they needed.
What they wanted was an engineering document in book form that explained why the head office of GE Medical in the US should budget the new design of a P.E.T. CT (Positron Emission Tomography + Computed Tomography) machine which would have a very smart software system, and why GE Medical should pay for building the newly designed machine. Let me explain what a P.E.T. CT is. P.E.T. CT is a non-invasive imaging technique that uses radioactive tracers to produce three-dimensional images of metabolic and physiological processes within the body, rather than structural anatomy. It incorporates a CT as well so that the location of any detected cancer cells could be shown on the outline of your body.
They offered me coffee the old way, made in a finjan, and while we were drinking coffee, we chatted about this and that. It seems they were early pensioners from the now defunct Israeli company Elscint, once a world leader in the development of medical imaging, including MRI and CT scanners, before most of its activities were sold to GE Healthcare or, as I knew it then, GE Medical and Philips Medical Systems.
I asked where their notes were. They gestured to a huge cardboard box in the corner of the room. I finished my coffee and went to have a look at what they had there. It was full of hundreds if not thousands of "Sticky Notes". I am very rarely taken aback anymore but panic crashed down on me and then I started to laugh. At first, I thought it was an elaborate joke but, when I laughed, they waved off my shock and told me to go down to the lab to speak to another member of the team as he would be able to help me. So off I went looking for this guy with a strange sounding name in the lab located in the basement. Following their instructions I entered this very large room with one guy sitting at a system console. I asked if he was part of the P.E.T. CT design team. He smiled and said yes. I asked him if he could help and enquired what he was doing. His answer was another surprise, as he said he was beta testing their new P.E.T. CT machine and waved towards it sitting next to him. There it was, a new machine with some parts still wrapped in plastic.
Thinking back, I wish I had a picture of my expression when I realised they had built it and were testing it before they had submitted a request for funds to design it. I asked him why they needed me and the answer was that they had requested five million dollars to start production and that they hadn't received any request to start designing a new machine yet. So they needed the document as soon as possible. I asked where the parts came from and he told me they took them from their stores and, so far, nobody had missed them.
We sat for an hour or two and made a rough draft and when I asked if I should take a few photos, he suggested against it as "they were hopping mad over there already".
So here is the thing. Israelis are different from the people you used to live amongst. There are many reasons for this, but it all comes down to the same thing. The old joke about us Jews being like fertilizer and should be spread sparsely over a large area is not true. Jews in their own land, together, solve problems on the fly and, because of our history, most times hierarchy is completely blurred. So much so that in most Israeli hi-tech companies you cannot tell who the CEO is.
I congratulate all of you on coming to live here, and some of you bringing up your children here, because our future is the brightest it has ever been.
Although this story is from 1998 nothing here has changed, if anything it has got a lot better.