Ari Grazi was accustomed to large, boisterous Passover Seders with his parents, five siblings, nieces, and nephews. During that lonely COVID Seder of 2020, however, Grazi and his other single brother joined their parents for a quieter Seder, and he was able to concentrate on the words of the Haggadah.
“When I came to Le’shana haba’a b’Yerushalayim [next year in Jerusalem] at the end, I paused and thought to myself, ‘I can’t say this anymore without making an effort to get to Israel.’
“I didn’t have the good excuses our ancestors had of being trapped in another country, or the dangers of the journey, or hostile foreign powers ruling the land, or the economic difficulties of the early years of the state,” he says.
A few months later, he met Lübba Wintzer one Shabbat at Magen David of Manhattan, a Sephardi synagogue in New York’s Greenwich Village.
The daughter of a Russian mother and a German father (hence her Russian name with a German umlaut), Wintzer did not have a Jewish upbringing and found it easier to follow the prayers at a Sephardi shul, since every word is said aloud by the cantor. And Grazi was the cantor for the Mussaf service that day.
As a college student a few years earlier, Wintzer had taken a free two-week trip to Israel through the Jewish National Fund.
“I fell in love with the people and the culture, with the honesty and warmth. You feel the essence of the person you’re talking to, whereas in America they’re very nice but closed off. It was so amazing, that I decided I wanted to live there. And when Ari asked me out, I said, ‘If you don’t want to make aliyah, we’re not dating.’”
“Little did she know that maybe two months prior I had resolved to make aliyah,” says Grazi, 37.
Getting married and making aliyah
They married in September 2021, with parties in Ari’s parents’ summer home in Long Beach, Long Island, and in Lübba’s parents’ backyard in southern France. Two years later, after an extended pilot trip in 2022 to explore the country, they were on a Nefesh B’Nefesh flight to Israel. They live in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood.
“When Israelis hear we moved right before the war, they say, ‘Oh, bad timing.’ But if we have to be somewhere when Israel is under attack, and people need help, we’d rather be here,” says Grazi.
“We figure that you’re going to be sad and anxious anywhere. Here, we can be sad and anxious and at least do something to help: donate blood, give a smile to a soldier or the wife of a soldier, and deliver army equipment and medical supplies. We try to get involved as much as we can,” he says.
“So we feel blessed that we arrived when we did; if we’d been scheduled to come a few weeks later, maybe we would have put it off.”
WINTZER, 27, admits that right after Oct. 7, her mother urged her to leave Israel. However, after consulting with a rabbi regarding the requirement to honor one’s parents, she chose to stay and has no regrets.
“You have to find Hashem’s hand in all situations and make the best out of what is given to you. That’s how we try to live our lives as Israelis,” she says.
Due to her parentage, and growing up partly in France and partly in Florida, Wintzer – who has a graduate degree in international relations – can speak Russian, German, French, English, and passable Spanish. She’s honing her Hebrew at Ulpan L’Inyan.
These language skills landed her a job at Koren Publishers’ Maggid Books imprint as managing editor for translations from English into French, German, and Spanish. She’s also training to be a volunteer emergency medical technician with United Hatzalah.
On a recent call that she responded to along with other EMTs, the person in crisis was originally from France and was having difficulty speaking Hebrew under stress, so Wintzer translated.
“It was the moment I’d been waiting for, to use my languages in a medical situation to make someone’s life easier,” she says.
“And the family invited us for Shabbat dinner,” Grazi adds with a smile.
The couple has become used to this phenomenon.
“I was picking up a faucet at a plumbing store and the clerk read my name on the receipt and said, ‘My grandmother is a Grazi.’ And then I was at the car mechanic and told him my last name, and he said, ‘Grazi, that’s my name too.’ And, of course, we’ve been invited there for Shabbat meals,” Ari recounts.
Grazi’s family has roots in Eastern Europe and Aleppo. He grew up in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn and attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush. After a gap year at Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in Jerusalem, he studied international relations at New York University – as his future wife would do 10 years later – and studied abroad in Cairo for several months.
After graduating from university during the economic recession, Grazi and a close friend from yeshiva started Indiewalls in 2011, helping client hotels, hospitals, and offices buy curated fine art from local emerging artists. He continues supporting that business from abroad while studying to be an Israeli tour guide.
He is also learning in Semichat Chaver, an international interactive practical Halacha program, and is taking cantorial lessons “with a world-class chazan who owns a grocery store near Ben-Yehuda Street.”
Similarly, Grazi relates that one day a carpenter working in their apartment got on the phone and imparted a Torah lesson from Rebbe Nahman.
“Turns out, he’s in one of those ‘five minutes of Torah a day’ groups, and he’s actually the one giving the lesson on the weekly Torah portion. When he finished, he picked up his drill and got back to work,” Grazi recalls.
“Even with this horrific war, there’s not a day I don’t reassert how happy I am to be living here and reconfirm that it was the right decision and the place we want to be,” he says. “Anyone who’s not here, I just feel bad for them. They’re missing out on helping craft the future of the Jewish people and state.”
Wintzer sums it up: “I’ve had a very interesting life so far, and being in Israel is the pinnacle.” ■
Ari Grazi, 37, and Lübba Wintzer, 27, from Manhattan to Jerusalem,