Jacqueline’s Housing History Map

The first place I lived was in an apartment in Riverdale, The Bronx, New York City. My parents subdivided the space to accommodate their growing family. They took five bookcases in an L-shape with a doorway, attached a floor and ceiling, leaving enough room to hold a bed and trundle. The room was so small my parents had to take the door off the closet to get into the closet and the trundle would not completely open. This addition chopped the dining room in half. The apartment was rented from my mother’s parents, who owned it as a co-op (tenants own the building; each apartment is considered a share; you are the landlord and all owners hire someone to keep the place going). This was an affordable place for our household (my family paid around $525 a month in maintenance fees – heating included, paid for electricity, no building wide internet at the time, didn’t have cable but would have had to pay extra). We were in Riverdale to be close to Montefiore, where my mother worked (first as an intern, then as a resident, and then as a physician), and because it had a vibrant Jewish community. Religious Jews tend to live near each other to support kosher groceries and restaurants, Jewish schools, synagogues that are within walking distance, and to be able to carry out various other aspects of religious law like eiruv and mikveh[1]. Single, my mom moved into the apartment after her brother and his wife moved to Queens. When she got married, my dad moved in and over time my four siblings and I were born there. We moved in August 2003, because there the apartment felt cramped.

[1] Both are complex Jewish legal topics which, although I can explain further, did not seem necessary to do so in this context.  

2. When I was almost six my family moved into a four-bedroom house in Passaic, NJ. It is large for the price we paid (better than anything else on the market at the time) and appropriate for the household size. It was considered affordable, but not by much as my parents had to get a waiver from the bank to get permission to take out a mortgage this large as it was more than the recommended borrowing amount. Five years earlier, about a 15-minute walk from where we live, someone made an offer for a similar size house for 100,000 less (because of the housing bubble prices rose significantly). My parents wanted a suburban city and opted for Passaic over Monsey (Rockland County) and Far Rockaway (Queens), the other places with large Jewish communities they were considering, because more of their friends had moved here. Since my parents did not grow up Orthodox, their friends who also do not come from religious backgrounds are like family. On Shabbat and Jewish holidays when most of our neighbors are eating festive meals with cousins, grandparents and other relatives, we invite these families and they invite us to celebrate together. So far, we have lived here 14 and a half years and are not planning to move anytime soon. Although I still live at home, once I graduate and get married my goal is to move to Israel.
3.  This is my little brother standing on our lawn with our street in the background, after he finally got a haircut last summer.

In between high school and college I lived in Har Nof, Jerusalem. My seminary was called Bnos Avigail (which translates to Daughters of Abigail) and was open from September to June. As much as I would have loved to stay shana bet (year two), I knew I had to get back to the States so I would not lose my scholarship. When I deferred my submission by a year, Macaulay informed me that my application would be placed in the pool of general applicants and I would have to be accepted a second time. I took this risk once (thank G-d it paid off) but I didn’t think it would work a second time around. Har Nof (which means Mountain View) is a hilly suburb within the busy city of Jerusalem, one of the largest, most populous cities in Israel; my school was located on the Neve Campus, which has at least eight other girls’ programs for Jews of all backgrounds. My seminary provided dorms for the girls which took getting used to for us Americans and Canadians used to quiet, spacious, well air-conditioned living quarters. The price of seminary included housing, food, and tuition so when my family agreed to send me they considered the housing affordable.

 This is a picture of the Western Wall, an icon of Jerusalem, taken on a trip to Israel this past winter break.