It’s impossible to meet Devorah Ahavah Gerzoff and not sense her vibrant energy.
Born Jewish, she came to embrace her Jewish identity very slowly. Gerzoff explained that she was raised in a household that didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays. “I’ll often say [about] my parents, though not communists, it was as if we were being raised in a household without real religion, because we didn’t celebrate holidays at all, of any kind, really. Birthdays. That was it.
“And we didn’t go to synagogue. We couldn’t afford it, but it was more than that. There was no interest in it. And my father was very sickly [due to childhood illness]. He had a heart condition all his life.
“We didn’t have a car, there was no money, and there were no celebrations. It was very sad, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out because none of my friends were too observant, either.”
She grew up in suburban Philadelphia in a neighborhood she described as “dominated by Jewish population but not religious at all.” When she was 10, her father, just 50, passed away. And a donation someone made in his honor to plant a tree in Israel was her first encounter with the country that would become her home seven decades later.
Her entire Jewish identity was based on cultural identification. “I identified as Jewish because [the family was] Jewish, but it had nothing to do with rabbis or education or anything. It was just a good feeling of having family around and Jewish music and something nice to celebrate.”
She married in her 20s and, early in her only pregnancy, her beloved brother died. Gerzoff didn’t have any spiritual resources upon which to rely.
“I was an English teacher, and writing poetry became a sort of therapy for me. It was a consolation in dealing with death, my father’s death when I was 10, and my brother’s death when I was newly pregnant with my daughter.
“I didn’t have faith in God. Nobody talked about God, except when somebody sneezed, they would say, ‘God bless you.’ I love to be funny about it. If something bad shouldn’t happen, they’d all say, ‘God forbid.’ That was the extent of the honorable mention that our creator of the universe would get.”
Gerzoff had no Jewish education whatsoever… until her “daughter’s friends were having bat mitzvahs, and I wanted her to have one. You always want to give your children something you didn’t have. You want them to have new and better. Any [Jewish] education she would get was more than I had.”
Rediscovering Judaism
At that stage, the now-divorced mother sent her daughter to Hebrew school at the Reform synagogue in their small New Jersey town. Her ex-husband “kind of had the same upbringing. It wasn’t important to him, but he didn’t fight me on it.”
Once her daughter started studying about her Jewish heritage, Gerzoff said to herself, “Geez, if I’m pushing her to learn something, what’s the matter with me? Why aren’t I doing something for myself? It began very gradually; I looked into educating myself about my faith.”
The local Reform rabbi “started a class in Kabbalah, and I loved whatever it was that he said. I thought, ‘Oh, this is Judaism in neon. I love it!’”
She found it intriguing enough to take another class, this time with a different rabbi.
“This rabbi had the gear, you know, with the black hat and the white shirt.” Asked whether she understood at the time that he was Orthodox, she replied, “No, I just knew that he had the outfit. You know, he had the proper uniform and the education and a little bit of an accent.”
She later learned that this second rabbi was a Chabad rabbi. “That’s when I discovered that my name wasn’t Deborah but Devorah.” Until then, she was called “Debbie, you know, like little snack cakes.” Now she insists on being called Devorah Ahavah because “you don’t leave off the love!” referring to her middle name, which means love in Hebrew.
By the time she was in her mid-30s, Gerzoff knew a few other Orthodox rabbis. Still single, she wondered, “Why isn’t anyone fixing me up? I wanted to get married again for sure. How do I find a Jewish match for myself? How do I do it?”
She met her current husband, Simcha Moshe Gerzoff, through an ad in a local Jewish paper. In 1992, he brought her to Israel. “My husband is an adventurer. We rented a car and traveled around. We kept coming to Israel every year for the next dozen years. That was the beginning of a love affair with Eretz Yisrael. We were addicted to our heritage.”
Simcha Moshe reported that “I wanted to make aliyah from when we met.” Despite his urging, he related that “Devorah Ahavah didn’t want to leave her daughter.”
Nevertheless, the couple grew in their Judaism. “We became more observant together gradually. We went to weekly Torah classes. Rabbi Moshe Ungar would get up at the end of class and ask who was coming for Shabbos.
“He was such a powerful speaker. He motivated me to be anxious for the lighter, brighter days, to go and spend Shabbos with them. It was amazing to me to meet other Jews who were on the same path,” he said.
Aliyah was always in the background. “We knew in our hearts and souls. The decision was inevitable. With every succeeding trip, we became more in love with our land.”
Once Simcha Moshe retired in 2020, aliyah became a front-burner issue. “I gave this a lot of thought all my life. There comes a time to let go,” Gerzoff acknowledged. She and Simcha Moshe came on aliyah, and her only biological daughter, now in her 50s, stayed in America.
“Why did we move to Efrat? Because our daughter Jenny lives in Efrat. And why did Jenny move to Efrat? Because her husband’s cousin, who lives in a caravan on a hilltop near Ramallah, told him you should move to a settlement. But we’re not the settler types. No worry. Efrat is just like a US suburb. It’s beautiful, and we love it here.
“Another thing we like about living in Israel is the delicious, fresh fruits and vegetables. We often shop at the organic market on Thursdays, where everything is straight from the farm. Yeshi the cheese man has the most delicious variety of dairy delights, [and there are] so many great kosher restaurants.
“If you want to dream and vision and picture a heaven on Earth, this is it. People are friendly and nice to each other.
“Being 80 means frequent trips to the doctor. It can be trying at times, but having a doctor in the family has often smoothed the way,” she said. Gerzoff now gets around with a walker. “Strangers on the street make you feel like family that wants to protect you,” she concluded.■
The writer is a freelance journalist and expert on the non-Jewish awakening to Torah happening in our day. She is the editor of three books on the topic: Ten from the Nations; Lighting Up the Nations; and Adrift among the Nations.
Devorah Ahavah Gerzoff, 79
From Cherry Hill,
New Jersey
to Efrat, August 2023
