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A Long Way to Find Your Bashert

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March 23, 2020
Seven-day old Liam Chai Izyaev peeks out at the world while his great-grandfather, Tom Tugend, anxiously awaits the mohel. Photo by David Yungman

When someone in a Jewish family marries his or her bashert, the Yiddish designation implies that the union of the two lovers was pre-ordained by divine providence.

Such a coupling was a fairly simple matter in the olden days, when most folks tended to live, marry and die in the villages of their birth.

But nowadays, the encounter of two loving souls easily can occur continents away from their respective birthplaces and seem so unlikely as to beat the odds of any Las Vegas bookie or, for the more devout, point to supernatural intervention.

Such thoughts occurred to me recently while nervously holding a 7-day-old boy, who was blissfully unaware that a mohel — a ritual circumciser —was about to cut off part of his tiny masculine appendage.

In addition, with the coronavirus barring easy travel for many people these days, it struck me that the ease of finding a mate in the four corners of the Earth might be suspended — temporarily, I hope.

Liam Chai, whose name we learned at his bris (circumcision), is my first great-grandchild and represents the fourth generation in our current family, all of whose members are happily alive and coherent.

But to stage, this happy event required enough long-distance traveling to give new meaning to the term “wandering Jew.”

Our family’s tradition of long-distance searches for a mate was set by the first generation to settle in the United States.

To stage this happy event required enough long-distance traveling to give new meaning to the term “wandering Jew.”

Rachel (nee Spitzer), the family matriarch, was born in Jerusalem and was assigned by the Israeli foreign ministry to work at the country’s consulate in Los Angeles.

I was born in Berlin. A year after my bar mitzvah, my family — “encouraged” by the Nazi regime — left for the United States and settled in Bryn Mawr, Pa., near Philadelphia, four months before the outbreak of World War II. After a wartime stint in the U.S. Army, I came to Los Angeles, where my parents had settled.

Our oldest daughter, Orlee, met her husband, Danni, at a Los Angeles dance. However, his parents had emigrated from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Israel, and after a flight of 2,524 miles, settled in Rishon L’Zion near Tel Aviv, where Danni, now my son-in-law, was born.

Like many young Israelis, Danni decided to explore the world after his army service. He hitchhiked through Europe, then took a ship to New York. He crossed the country by car and finally came to a stop in Los Angeles, where he fulfilled his destiny by meeting Orlee.

Fast forward three decades, when Talia, the oldest of Orlee and Danni’s three children and the oldest of my eight grandchildren, decided that she was bored with her native Los Angeles. So she set off for Israel and, after a flight of some 8,000 miles, settled in the town of Rehovot under a program to teach English to Israeli children.

In another part of the world, in the Russian resort town of Pyatigorsk, near the Caspian Sea, a Jewish boy was born in 1984. Six years later, his mother and her two children immigrated to Israel and, after a flight of 1,518 miles, settled in Rishon L’Zion.

If you think that the American girl and the Russian boy, whose respective birthplaces were 6,909 miles apart, met and married after a six-month courtship, you guessed correctly.

Officiating at Liam’s circumcision was Dr. Andrew Shpall, a urologist who honed his skills as a mohel over some 2,000 circumcisions. Hopefully, he will still be practicing his craft a couple of generations hence, when our descendants likely will marry someone from the moon or Mars — provided they are Jewish, of course.

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