Israel occupies a divided place in Devorah’s life: it is the country her community teaches her to regard as forbidden before the Messiah, yet also a land of Jewish roots, family memory, and pilgrimage. The tension between prohibition and attachment makes the country more than a distant setting. It becomes a measure of the boundaries governing what the community may believe, where its members may go, and what futures they may imagine.

A Forbidden Land

In the Satmar Hasidic community, opposition to Zionism shapes the meaning of Israel. Each Israeli Independence Day, Satmar men travel to Manhattan to demonstrate against the State of Israel. Devorah’s grandfather, Zeidy, joins them. The Satmar Rebbe’s teaching, as she has received it, rejects the idea that Jews can bring about their own redemption by establishing a state: redemption must await the Messiah. The community’s position therefore makes opposition to Israel a religious duty rather than merely a political disagreement. Devorah finds the parade striking, but its message seems familiar to her; she has grown up believing that the State of Israel should not exist.

The doctrine is reinforced in homes and schools. Devorah describes a copy of Vayoel Moshe, the Satmar Rebbe’s anti-Zionist manifesto, as a fixture in every Satmar home. Its account presents Zionism as a movement that gained power after The Holocaust and condemns the use of Jewish suffering to support its aims. These are the claims through which the community teaches Devorah to understand Israel’s creation; the narrative also shows how those claims become personal, reaching her through the people whose suffering and authority she trusts.

Memory, Loss, and Inherited Belief

Bubby’s account gives anti-Zionism an especially intimate and painful force. She tells Devorah that Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis were turned away from Israel and sent back to the camps, and that Zionist leaders wanted a different kind of Jew from those raised in religious communities. In Bubby’s telling, children were taken while young enough to be remade, and parents accepted separation in the hope that their children might survive. Devorah learns at school that children were beaten and abused until they renounced their faith and pledged themselves to Zionism. These assertions are presented as the family and school narratives that shape her understanding, not as an independent historical investigation.

The cost of that inherited history is visible in the photographs Devorah keeps in a paper towel in her top drawer. They show Bubby’s dead relatives, including a baby who was killed at two years old. Devorah looks at their faces, weeps, and puts the pictures away before her sobs become audible. Bubby’s grief and reluctance to speak of her family make Israel and Zionism inseparable, in Devorah’s childhood understanding, from the murdered relatives whose absence fills the family’s past. She comes to believe that Jews and Zionists are distinct, even incompatible, and that Hasidim alone are truly Jewish. Her willingness to join the protest, despite women’s exclusion from it, reflects both that conviction and her wish to honor Bubby’s losses.

Prohibition and Pilgrimage

The rabbi’s ban on travel makes Israel a place that is present through absence. Even students with relatives there may not visit; doing so risks permanent expulsion from school. Devorah experiences the rule as unfair because the country is also the land associated with the history her teachers celebrate. She knows that some families evade the restriction by taking circuitous routes, and she hears that thousands of American Jews are preparing to travel for Lag Ba’Omer.

Her aunt’s pilgrimage shows how the prohibition can be selectively relaxed. A year before her son was born, the aunt went to pray at Rabbi Shimon’s grave in Israel. Tradition, as Devorah describes it, leads infertile women to pray there for a son and promise to return when the child is three for his first-haircut ceremony on Lag Ba’Omer. The family regards the boy’s birth as miraculous and expects the promised return. Zeidy approves of the journey despite the general rule: the possibility of having a child can justify setting the prohibition aside. Israel is thus not simply inaccessible. Its religious significance can authorize travel when reproduction and family continuity are at stake.

Family Futures and the Meaning of Israel

Israel also enters the family through marriage. Moshe becomes engaged to an Israeli girl, a match Devorah understands as a last resort, shaped by assumptions about poverty among fathers in Israel. The marriage means that Moshe will have to move there to live near his wife’s family. For Devorah, that relocation brings a concrete consequence: she expects never to see him again. The country that community teaching casts as a political and religious threat is also where family members may build households and where a difficult relationship may be left behind.

Later, Israel’s significance is measured against the future Devorah fears for her son, Yitzy. As he approaches the age when he will enter cheder, she imagines him confined to religious schooling and male authority while she remains in the background. Her question is how she could condemn him to the same narrow life while seeking wider horizons for herself. The account does not make Israel the destination of her eventual departure; rather, it places her wish for freedom beside the community’s competing claims about land, belonging, and religious inheritance. Israel remains at once a prohibited homeland, a site of family ritual, and a symbol through which Devorah confronts what kind of life she and her son will be permitted to live.