Elanit Weisbaum and her husband, Eitan Mendelowitz, are trying to decide if they will continue to live in Northampton. Weisbaum says she hopes they stay.
“This feels big,” says Weisbaum, 46, who moved to the city after her husband landed a job as a professor at Smith College. Back then, they packed their bags, and got on a plane from Los Angeles to Boston, and drove to Northampton to begin their new lives. Seven years and one child later, they find themselves free to move back to L.A., if they want, to their extended families. Or anywhere, really.
“The idea of reinventing myself is fun,” Weisbaum said in a recent interview. “But what gives me real happiness is people, community, emotional connections. I feel like I’ve done a good job finding this here.”
It is no wonder Weisbaum seeks a close-knit community; it’s what nourished her throughout her youth. Born in Los Angeles, she moved to Israel with her mother and twin sister, Deena, when she was 9 years old.
A year later, when they returned, Weisbaum said, “My mother was so freaked out about the freedom that my peers had around L.A. at such a young age, that she reached out to the Jewish community and found a youth movement called Hashomer Hatzair, which we ended up joining.”
Hashomer Hatzair is an international group of secular Jewish youths and young activists with socialist values, whose ranks had swelled during the Vietnam War. (Incidentally, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was a member of the group in Brooklyn, in the 1960s.)
“It was all about sharing, education, and politics … but with a lot of Israeli song and dance. I was 10 years old, going to political protests, and reading Marx,” Weisbaum recalled. “Though we would celebrate Jewish holidays together, and learn modern Hebrew, it wasn’t about worship. For me, God has always been in community, and people coming together and trying to make change.”
Eventually, Weisbaum and her sister became chapter leaders, roles they left when they moved back to Israel when they were 15. There, the twins lived, worked and studied on the Kfar Blum, and the Beit Hashita kibbutzim, both in northern Israel. Their parents were not with them; rather, they had den mothers who were the directors of the program, and each student had an adopted family.
“When we lived on the kibbutz, we were actually living the values we had learned in Hashomer Hatzair,” Weisbaum said. “We did chores together, shared everything, and had meals together in the community room. … It was such an extraordinary experience to be 15, be so free, so accepted, and part of such a close community. My heart is still very much there.”
By the time Weisbaum was 20, she had moved back to L.A. to help her ailing father, and ended up staying. Her father’s death a year later upended her life for several years, and, she says, she was never able to recreate the sense of community she had found with Hashomer Hatzair in Los Angeles, or in the kibbutz in Israel.
Then, in 2008, she moved to Northampton.
There, she says, she has become a member of a strong community. She’s found people who she loves deeply, she says, and with whom she can discuss things that are important to her — like finding a path to peace in the Middle East — an issue very close to her heart.
“Living in Northampton is, for me, very reminiscent of living on the kibbutz,” Weisbaum said. “My daughter, Amalya, is open and wondrous, and probably freer and safer here than so many places. Things feels easy, comfortable, and full of love here. I really hope we can stay.”
Keegan Pyle can be reached at ValleyStoryPlace@gmail.com.