“Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise the banner to
gather our exiles, and speedily gather us from the four corners
of the earth to our land.” –From the daily prayers Naomi is a 23
year-old major in languages at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. She is a new immigrant to Israel, arriving from
Hungary, and a newcomer to her identity as a Jew. Only two years
ago, Naomi would have never dreamed of coming to Israel. She was
a university student living with her parents in Szeged, near the
Romanian border. "This word `Jewish,' was not part of my
vocabulary. I knew nothing. I never even heard of Yom Kippur,"
relates Naomi. Her mother and grandmother had been inmates in a
concentration camp during World War II, but they never discussed
their experiences. Before the War, her grandmother lived as an
Orthodox Jew and her grandfather wore a shtreimel, the special
fur hat worn by Hasidim on Sabbath. Her grandfather was killed
by the Nazis when Naomi's mother was five years old. Returning
to their native land af