The Land of Israel: A country founded on the principal that no Jew will ever be persecuted again. After the tragedies of the Holocaust, the Jewish people needed a place to lay their head, a place to call their own.
In recent years, anti-Semitism has been on the rise all around the world, and even in the Jewish state, where non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Bloc begin to deface cars with swastikas and hurl rocks through windows. The political and social ramifications begin to take the country by storm. However, Jewish people around the world are standing strong. They know the strongest answer to anti-Semitism is aliyah to the Holy Land of Israel. 
They know the strongest answer to anti-Semitism is aliyah to the Holy Land of Israel.
Eighteen-year-old Meir Kramer is no stranger to hatred. He was born in raised in Broughton Park, a suburb of Manchester, England, where being a Jew felt like a capital crime. However, Manchester never truly feels like home to the Jews who live there: It is home to one-quarter of England's anti-Semitic incidents - and England isn’t known for its dearth of such incidents.
London, which harbors many Muslim extremists, is home to 45 percent of England’s anti-Semitic incidents.
Whether the opposition comes from the Muslims in London or from neo-Nazis in Manchester, the result is the same: The Jews who live there are belittled, taunted, and literally kicked while they are down.
Throughout his entire life, Meir has been treated horrifically because of his kippah and ritual fringes (tzitzit). Although he was legally free to practice his religion, he wasn’t “socially free” to do anything remotely Jewish; every action brought verbal and physical harassment.
"In England, I was constantly called a 'dirty Jew'" Meir says. "I've had eggs thrown at me. The skinheads [anti-Semites] come into Manchester specifically to harass Jews. In some way or another, every Jew in England has been attacked."
The anti-Semitism was so bad that Meir would do everything he could to hide his identity. "I wore a hat wherever I went; I used to hate going around with a kippah [skullcap] on my head," Meir states. "I desperately wanted to get out of England."
Anti-Semitic attacks became commonplace for Meir and for all the Manchester Jews. "Eventually, I just learned to deal with it," Meir recalls. "It became a part of my daily life. England is not a peaceful place to live. There's so much crime in addition to the violent anti-Semitism that I experienced. “
However, Meir did not always turn the other cheek.
"The one time I actually fought back, there were three Nazis screaming obscenities targeted at Jews. I believe they were drunk because they didn't realize that there was a shul [synagogue]. Hundreds of men were leaving after prayer. I was part of a group that chased them and surrounded them. Once they were cornered, all three begged for their lives. They tried to tell us that they just wanted to say hello," Meir said with a slight smile on his face. It was obvious that he was happy that he finally stood up to the people that tried and tried again to oppress him.
"We told them, 'You're lucky that we're Jewish, because we would have beaten you up right here, right now.' It felt wonderful to fight back."
Even though Meir found the strength within him to stand up to his oppressors, he was near his breaking point. One year before he left Manchester for good, Meir and a friend got off a bus to go bowling one night, and a group of neo-Nazis jumped them.
"I don't know why they didn't attack me, but they gave my friend a black eye," Meir says. "These attacks add up after a while, and after that, I simply couldn't take it anymore." At the age of 15, Meir Kramer left his family and relocated to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he thought he could feel free to be a Jew.
"I actually enjoyed New York a lot," Meir told Arutz-7. "Crown Heights and upstate New York were fun places to live."
However, Meir wasn't as free as he thought he would be. Residual anti-Semitism from the 1991 Crown Heights riots resulted in the same calls of "dirty Jew" and swastikas on synagogues.
"Although I was never personally attacked, I have plenty of friends who were," according to Meir. "A lot of my friends have gotten in fights with African-American people in Crown Heights. A lot of the residents of upstate New York would harass us as well. We'd have a lot of comments thrown at us."
After spending three years in New York, Meir realized from painful personal experience that "the only true home for a Jew was in Israel." Last year, he relocated to Jerusalem. He is currently learning at Nishmat Shlomo in Tzfat, three hours north of Jerusalem.
By making Aliyah, Meir can finally fight anti-Semitism without fists or nasty words. He's in the midst of taking his Army test to see where he is best fit to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. He hopes that he can fight in the front lines and defend the first country that he can truly call home.