Yad Vashem Oct. 12, 2026
Steve Ornstein – The Uniqueness of Living Here: A Personal Reflection on Home, Blessing, and the Warnings We Cannot Ignore
Jerusalem Oct. 12th 2026
I sit on my bench in the garden in Kfar Saba in the late afternoon, the light softening over the trees, and I listen. Hebrew drifts up from the street. Someone’s children are laughing. A neighbour calls out a greeting. The ordinary rhythm of an ordinary day. And yet nothing about it feels ordinary to me, not after all these years.
I made Aliyah with Liz and our three young children in 1979. We left, returned for family reasons, and eventually came home again because this place had already claimed us. Liz is gone now, but the life we built here remains. Our children are grown. The grandchildren still run through the door the way they once ran to their Savta. This land is not an idea for me. It is the place where my life finally made sense.
What is unique about living in Israel as a Jew is almost impossible to explain to someone who has never experienced it. It is not the beaches or the start-up culture or the food, though those things are real. It is the quiet, constant knowledge that you are not a guest. The Jewish calendar is not something you carve out of a Christian or secular year; it is the year itself. Hebrew is not a language you switch into for synagogue; it is the language of the street, the bank, the army, the argument in the café. When you walk to shul or simply walk anywhere, you are not calculating how visible your kippah makes you. When your children or grandchildren serve in the army, or when you hear the news of another rocket, the fear is real, but it is ours. It belongs to a people defending their own home, not to a minority hoping the host society will protect them.
This is the blessing of having our own country. After centuries of exile, pogroms, expulsions, and the Holocaust, we have a place where Jewish life is not conditional. Where we decide our own fate, for better and for worse. The noise here is constant: political, security, social. We argue ferociously. We are imperfect, stubborn, and often exhausted. But we are free. That freedom is not abstract. It is the difference between being a tolerated minority and being a sovereign people. It is the difference between hoping the next generation will still be able to live openly as Jews somewhere else, and knowing that here the next generation will grow up speaking Hebrew, celebrating our holidays in public, and defending this land if necessary.
And that brings me to the warning.
The antisemitism that has surged across the West since October 7 is no longer fringe. It has become normalized. Jewish students hide their identities on campuses. Synagogues need armed guards. Families in cities from London to Sydney to New York calculate whether it is safe to wear a star or speak Hebrew in public. 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than thirty years—Bondi Beach, Manchester, Washington, Boulder. Reports from the major Jewish communities outside Israel show incident levels still far above anything seen before 2023. The language has shifted too. “Globalize the intifada,” “From the river to the sea,” and open celebration of October 7 are no longer shocking to large segments of the public and the media. Anti-Zionism is frequently treated as a respectable political position while functioning as a socially acceptable way to target Jews.
What is especially troubling is the response, or the lack of one, from too many Western governments. There are statements, task forces, and occasional condemnations. Yet the practical reality for many Jewish communities is a sense of complacency at best and double standards at worst. Universities that police every other form of bigotry often treat antisemitic harassment as protected speech. Streets where other minorities would receive swift protection see prolonged inaction. The message that filters down is that Jewish safety is secondary to other political considerations. History has taught us what happens when governments and societies decide that Jewish discomfort is an acceptable price for other priorities.
I do not say this with anger. I say it with the clarity that comes from living here. In Israel we face real enemies and real threats, and we confront them openly. Outside, the threat is often subtler at first—social exclusion, institutional bias, the slow acceptance of hatred, until it is not subtle anymore. The uniqueness of this country is not that we are immune to danger. It is that we have the tools, the responsibility, and the collective will to meet it as a free people.
I remain grateful every day for the privilege of growing old in the land of our people. The daily kindnesses, the mixture of languages, the knowledge that we are writing the next chapter of an ancient story, these still astonish me. I have no desire to be anywhere else.
For those still living in the diaspora, the situation demands clear eyes. The blessing of a Jewish state is not only for those of us who live here. It is a refuge, a voice, and a reminder that Jewish existence does not depend on the goodwill of others. History is not finished with us. The question is whether we will meet it with the same clarity and determination that brought us home in the first place.
Am Yisrael Chai.
