A few weeks ago, Joel Tenenbaum, 81, and Marilyn Berkowitz, 84, arrived in Tel Aviv on an El Al flight from New York ready to start their new lives in Israel.
They had met through JDate five years earlier. Each was widowed; Tenebaum had been married for 47 years, Berkowitz, known as Lyn, for 49.
A retired New York trial lawyer raised in Brooklyn, Tenenbaum always had felt an affinity for Israel — fueled since childhood by Hebrew school and the movie “Exodus.” Berkowitz, a former university dean’s assistant in New Jersey, had been a frequent visitor to Israel ever since her son moved here in 1991.
Both are longtime volunteers for the Israeli nonprofit organization Sar-El. They now share a rental apartment in Tel Aviv’s trendy Florentin neighborhood, close to the ulpan where they will soon enroll in an intensive Hebrew language program.
“A lot of our contemporaries have gone to Florida,” Berkowitz said. “But I think they should become sandbirds, not snowbirds.”
In fact, more and more older American Jews are opting to spend their golden years in the Jewish state.