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Waking up to beach views in Mexico, shopping at The Shuk in Jerusalem, the clean mountain air of Northern Italy… Some of my vacations, I’ll remember forever.

“You shall count for yourselves – from the morrow of the rest day (Pesach), from the day when you bring the omer (a measure of volume) of the waving – seven weeks, they shall be complete. Until the morrow of the seventh week you shall count, fifty days…” (Leviticus 23:15-16)

“But as much as they would afflict it, so it would increase and so it would burst forth; and they were disgusted because of the Children of Israel.”

 – Sh’mos 1:12

As twins, Yaakov and Esav shared the same DNA, the same nature, and yet they emerged as radically different people. One became a patriarch of our people and the other a great villain of Jewish history, the progenitor of Edom, the exile in which we remain until this very day.

And Hashem said to Avram, “Go for yourself from your land, from your birth place, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

– B’reishis 12:1

Raised in Brooklyn, Rochel grew up appreciating that she was Jewish, and that was about it. Her only connection to Orthodox Judaism came through deeply religious relatives who, later in life, had a profound influence on her. After meeting her husband at Harper College, their journey together led them around the world. In 1971, after being married for seven years, Rochel and her husband were living in Taiwan due to a Fulbright Fellowship, and it was there that their lives took an unexpected turn.