Todros gimpel makes a very good point about the “wearing down” effect. In the early years of our aliyah we made many glowing statements about how wonderful it is and how everyone should come. After you have been here for some time, fatigue can set in. Also, when you start to get into shidduchim for the kids, you discover you are seen as an outsider no matter how hard you have worked to integrate. We have had recent bitter experiences that made it clear to us how the community views us, and frankly the more we have tried to get “in,” the more we feel we really are strangers who will never truly belong here. Even extreme poverty we were willing to endure, but with our oldest OTD and some others looking like they are heading that way also, we wonder what was the payoff for all this misery. It just plain doesn’t seem to have worked. Yet it is no longer simple to leave either.
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