By Hannah Taylor
Going into the weekend, I knew little about the community of the Alon Shvut. I knew we were visiting a community that was considered a settlement in the West Bank, but I did not know what that would look like or what kinds of people lived there. When we arrived at the neighborhood center we got off the bus and walked to our host homes. It gave us a chance to see the community as it prepared for Shabbat. The roads were mostly empty as people had stopped driving in preparation for the Sabbath. The architecture of the homes was beautiful and they stood on manicured lawns with well kept sidewalks. The neighborhood looked like a well-established community that had been recently built, not the temporary shelter that the term ‘settlement’ connotes.
When I arrived at my host family’s home I was welcomed by my host mom. She made me feel very comfortable in her home, despite having just met her. I prepared for Shabbat before leaving for the neighborhood’s center to celebrate Shabbat with some other fellows in a peer-led T’fillah. After services, I walked back to my host home to share a Shabbat dinner with my host mom. I attended dinner with another fellow, our host mom, her son, and her neighbor and her son. We started dinner with traditional Shabbat prayers and began our meal which was lively with chatter. We learned that our host mom had made Aliyah about five years earlier, a surprising decision to her. She had decided to visit Israel on a whim with her husband, along with her children, and they had a large amount of time to spend in the country. They decided to skip the typical tourist programs and visit the less explored parts of the country. They happened upon Alon Shvut, and my host mom described visiting the community as feeling an immense sense of peace. She felt much more comfortable in this community in Israel than she did in her hometown in the US. She enjoyed the slower pace and the welcoming feeling present throughout the borough. She decided to move to the community, and she said she enjoyed her life there much more. She explained that it was about thirty percent American immigrants, which were the only people I met.
Overall, the weekend was very peaceful and I enjoyed the experience of visitingAlon Shvut. I was struck by how much it reminded me of a gated religious community in the United States. It reminded me that there aren’t as many differences between Israel and the United States as I sometimes think there are.
