Yom Haatzmaut is, what, in two weeks? I need to contact Jeff and June and make sure we’re getting together.

Some habits die hard; some you never want to let go of. For eighteen years – with a few exceptions caused by temporary unavailability, epidemics, or wars – we and the Glazers, longtime friends from Teaneck, have spent quality time together on this notable day of the Israeli calendar. It just wouldn’t be the same without them. (And again, the lack of an index to posts about previous occasions is unfortunate.) When the four of us first arrived here, we began going to barbecues at friends of our friends in Rosh Haayin, which tradition continued until, out of the blue, the man and his wife were no longer living together, and we were left to fend for ourselves. Jeff picked up the slack for a few years at their home in The Gush, and then, by mutual consent, we would meet at a restaurant somewhere in Jerusalem. The dairy restaurant Piccolino was our venue of choice, until we had a better idea. One of the bands in which our friend Arvin plays the trumpet started performing at the First Station every Independence Day. Why don’t the Casdens and the Glazers meet up there, have lunch at a dairy restaurant, and mosey over to the bandstand in time to hear the music? That worked for several years, but not this year—for reasons we can only assume has something to do with ‘the situation.’

We couldn’t even go back to Piccolino; they would not be open. (Dairy restaurants don’t do well on this day.) Second choice: Japanika in the Cinema City Complex, where we have eaten from time to time. What time do they open on Yom Haatzmaut; it keeps changing. Can we make a reservation for 12:30? How about 1PM? For the record, they opened the doors around 1:15, with me getting more and more anxious by the minute. There isn’t much else open today, just in case. Also for the record, we were the only customers at the time, although the place did fill up in the next hour. We had the usual chit-chat to bandy about, including our thoughts about ‘the situation,’ but there was something else of concern. Where would our friends be living this time next year? It would be nice if they knew.

Jeff and June had started off life in The Land renting a medium size apartment near Rehov Jabotinsky in Jerusalem and then made their way down Route 60 to Elezar, a community of several hundred families more or less across the road from Efrat. They rented an apartment for two years, moved to another apartment – where they stayed for ten years – until the owner sold her and the Glazer’s apartments, and are now in their third rental apartment, whose owner is also trying to sell the property. Because he’s over-pricing it by a lot, he’s having trouble selling it, but, in the meanwhile, he’s offering our friends a lease for one year at a time. And will he keep raising the rent? They were supposed to meet with him that evening, but we understand the meeting was postponed. And if our friends can’t come to an understanding with their landlord, then what next? They really want to stay in their community, which by now is home sweet home, but rentals there are hard to come by, as is apparently true throughout the Gush. Their son has been encouraging them to move to Modiin where he lives, but, our friends, you guessed it, are tried and true members of the Oy Vey Club. Where are all their medical appointments? Jerusalem, of course, so Modiin is sort of out of the way.

We reached the critical part of our conversation. Let me set the stage by asking a question. In the previous paragraph, which would you say was the key word? That’s right: ‘rental,’ which is a touchy matter. Some of us were fortunate when we arrived. We had been able to sell our homes in The States and have enough money to buy something here for a ridiculous price. (As in, you pay as much for a three-bedroom apartment in a multi-story building in Ma’ale Adumim as it would cost for a house with a yard in Teaneck.) Other olim we know, through no fault of their own, just bad timing, were not so fortunate and have had no choice but to rent their living space, which wouldn’t have been so terrible back in the States, where renting an apartment in a big city is ‘a thing.’. I remember The Bronx back in the day, with neighborhoods chockablock with rental apartments in buildings where families stayed for decades, and, if there was a leaky faucet, you called down to the ‘super,’ who would come up and fix it.    Here it’s another world, one filled with diabolical absentee landlords, who are there to collect your hard-earned shekel while being otherwise AWOL. And if you’re lucky, they’re not trying to sell the apartment out from under you, leaving you at the mercy of yet another landlord in another apartment.

But there is always another consideration: personal preference. Supposing you are of a mindset that you’ve reached a certain age, the ‘I can’t be bothered’ stage, when purchasing and maintaining one’s own apartment seems to be too much trouble (I think Jeff was toying with this idea.)

It would be impolite to respond to this point of view by simply suggesting that having to move from one place to another when you least want to is itself a bother, and having to worry about it every day is even more of a bother. What I’ve usually done is emphasize the financial considerations. (Paying rent is like flushing your money down the toilet!)

A less dramatic method, which I’ve always employed, is to point out our own situation. We started out in the mid-80’s by coming up with $20,000 to put down on our first house in Caldwell, NJ. Now we have over 2,000,000 NIS in equity in our new apartment. There’s no way we could have done as well by putting our money somewhere else.

But one day, having nothing else on my mind(!), I wondered if my assumption made any sense; or was I just whistling Dixie – which I have been known to do from time to time, although Barbara hates it when I whistle. There are lots of sites on the internet that will do the calculations for you or else you can let some flavor of A.I. crunch the numbers for you. Either way it’s: A=P (1+r/n)nt.

If you start with $20,000 at 10% interest calculated once a year over 40 years, you wind up with $900,000. Whoa!!! That’s a lot more than I thought. But after my initial shock wore off, I began to reconsider the matter. Had I just compared apples to blueberry muffins, or something even more sinister, like lobster bisque?

It wouldn’t take much effort to poo-poo my methodology. When you’ve got a mortgage, you’re not just letting your initial investment accrue interest; you’re adding money every month into the kitty. On the other hand, where’s this 10% interest that I’ve projected coming from? And while you’re investing your virtual money in the stock market or some such, you still have to fork over rent money, unless you’re going to sleep in a tent in Central Park. You could consider some deeper calculations, like taking that $20,000 and doing some virtual investing, trying to match the Dow Jones average over forty years to see what you’d wind up with. To be honest, that’s more than my weary brain prepared to deal with. But feel free if you’re so inclined.

Maybe we should reconsider our approach to the matter. When Barbara and I first got married, we were living in a small two-bedroom apartment (one of which was my darkroom) in Jackson Heights, Queens. We bought our first house in Caldwell, N.J., moved from there to Passaic, and wound up in Teaneck before heading to The Land on a glorious day in July 2007. Each time we relocated it was because we were moving to a better situation, one of our choosing at a time of our choosing. When we arrived in Ma’ale Adumim, we took a considered step backward. Maybe we should rent something for a year to make sure we’re in the right part of town in the right part of the country in the right part of the world. Which turned into two years of being so unsettled that we didn’t even hang up any pictures on the wall and during which time the cost of real estate here skyrocketed. Our ‘we can probably buy something outright’ turned into ‘we can put down 50%.’ Water under the proverbial bridge. We’re here; we’re settled; we’re happy. We’re not moving ever again – although that’s what we said about our apartment on Hakeren. I guess that ‘never say never’ are words of wisdom.

We hadn’t heard from our friends what finally transpired with their landlord. They did meet; they’re OK for another year with the expected increase in rent. And then? Let’s collectively hope that their landlord can’t sell the apartment. I’d hate to think of them starting from scratch in another community and, God forbid, having to find another set of medical practitioners. We Oy Veyers deserve better.