There are cities you visit. Cities you admire. And then, there is Jerusalem.
For me, Jerusalem was never just a place on the map—it was the place where something in me first awakened. I was barely three years old on my first visit to Israel, too young to understand politics or history, but old enough to feel that this place was different. Sacred. Mine.
The memories are hazy, but the feelings are sharp.
I remember the word glida. I didn’t know what it meant then, but I remember my parents and grandparents saying it with joy, pointing toward a little shop on a bustling Jerusalem street. And just like that, glida became my first Hebrew word. One that tasted like chocolate, vanilla, and home.
There are scattered fragments from that trip—visiting my grandfather’s office at The Jerusalem Report, where I’d sit wide-eyed among adults having serious conversations I didn’t understand. The strange thrill of using a public payphone, sliding in the colorful plastic card and hearing the beeps. I remember falling out of a tree and landing, painfully, on a bottle cap. And climbing down from one porch to another, because my baby sister dropped her bottle and I thought, in my toddler logic, that I had to save the day.
I don’t remember where exactly these moments happened. I couldn’t retrace the steps today. But I remember that they happened in Jerusalem. And even at that young age, the city imprinted something on me. These weren’t just childhood memories—they were the beginning of my lifelong connection to Israel, to our story, and to the unshakable idea of home.
Now, decades later, I write these words with a heavy heart.
Just this morning—on Yom Yerushalayim, the very day we celebrate the miraculous reunification of our eternal capital—I stood in Jerusalem to lay my beloved grandfather to rest.
It wasn’t the way I ever imagined spending this day. Not with celebration. Not with song. But with heartbreak. With memory. With the weight of goodbye.
I wasn’t walking her streets with my children or buying glida with a smile. I was standing at my grandfather’s grave, saying farewell in the city that shaped us both. The city he moved to when I was just a little boy. The city I followed him to, many years later, as a young adult—building my life just a short drive away, where I now raise my own children.
In their lifetime, he and my grandmother (may she live and be well) had the merit not only to live in the land they so deeply loved, but to see some of their children and grandchildren living here—and even great-grandchildren born here, rooted in the soil of the very dream they carried. They didn’t just dream of Zion—they lived it. And they lived to see their family become part of its future.
That legacy is a comfort. A blessing. A reminder that their dream didn’t end with them—it continues through us.
And still, saying goodbye hurts. But if there’s any place worthy of holding him forever, it’s Jerusalem.
This piece is for him.
He gave me my first taste of what it meant to be rooted in a place that isn’t just ours by history, but by heart. And that taste has never left me.
Jerusalem is in me. It’s in the words I speak, the life I’ve built, the memories I carry—and now, in the legacy of a grandfather I will never forget.
That’s the magic of this city. You can leave her for years, and still she waits for you. Still she calls you back. And when you return—whether as a visitor, a dreamer, or in the end, as dust—she receives you like a mother welcoming her children home.
And thank God for that.