About
No more excuses. Come home.
My name is Yuri. I made aliyah in 2021 with my family, from the United States, and I built Aliyahu because the hardest part of coming home was never the decision. It was everything after it.
Watch the story
Four minutes on what aliyah actually took, and why this exists.
The part nobody warns you about
Aliyah is the easiest big decision I ever made and the hardest thing I have ever done. The dream is clear. The logistics are a fog. The information contradicts itself from one page to the next. The appointment you need does not exist for three months. Benefits worth real money expire in silence because nobody told you the clock was running. Your salary resets and your Hebrew is not ready and you are supposed to be grateful and settled while quietly drowning in forms.
I lived that. Almost everyone I know who made aliyah has the same scars, and the maddening thing is that none of it is secret. The rules exist. The benefits exist. The deadlines exist. They are just scattered across a dozen stale PDFs, closed Facebook groups and government pages last updated years ago, presented as current, half of them wrong.
What we got wrong
I am not writing this from a distance. My wife, our three children and I made aliyah, and so did my mother. Between us we have made many of the expensive mistakes this site now warns about. A few of them, and where Aliyahu covers each one today:
Switching accountants five times in five years
Some were good at Israeli taxes. Some were good at US taxes. Nobody seemed good at both. We paid good money for poor guidance, and it cost us hundreds of thousands of shekels and two years to properly fix.
Now on Aliyahu:The US tax tail for olimFBAR and FATCA, every yearFiling taxes in Israel
Osek patur or osek murshe
I was burned more than once by bad accountant advice on how to register my own work. The wrong status cost me many thousands of shekels, and a level of frustration I will not try to describe on a family website.
Now on Aliyahu:Which osek status fits youRegistering as an osek
My mother’s container
She did not know to research the shipping company. She went months without her things, which were transferred to another city along the way. Then came the insane fees.
Now on Aliyahu:Shipping a lift and the customs exemption
My mother and Bituach Leumi
Bituach Leumi gave her a tiny pension, then kept cutting it, despite her age and her lack of Hebrew. She has been burned badly by the bureaucracy.
Now on Aliyahu:When a parent ages in IsraelYour Bituach Leumi registration
Groceries, ten minutes down the mountain
It took us two to three years to figure out that groceries a ten-minute drive down the mountain cost 40% less than what we pay in our neighborhood. Two to three years of paying the difference.
Now on Aliyahu:How the supermarket chains really differ (IsraelTop10, a separate savings register)
Clueless about the job market
I came with years of hiring people and running HR, and I was still clueless about the job market here.
Now on Aliyahu:Work first: finding a job in IsraelBuild an Israeli CV
And hundreds of smaller things
Being overcharged for a whole host of things. Return dates for things we bought. Deadlines to file for certain benefits. Nearly all of our benefits, which we did not know existed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
Now on Aliyahu:Your personal deadline planBenefits you are owed
Nefesh B’Nefesh dropped off a gift bag after we moved into our new place, and that was largely the last we heard from them. To be fair, I found three short-term jobs and gigs through their job board. But that is a website, not a detailed guide or human help. That gap is why this site exists.
These are our own experiences, not advice. The sourced, dated facts are on the pages linked from each one.
So I built the thing I needed
Aliyahu is the operating system I wish I had had: every benefit, deadline, rule and number in one place, each one dated, sourced and marked with how far you can trust it. When a fact goes stale, the site says so out loud instead of quietly lying to you. It runs the clocks that cost people thousands when they miss them. It tells you the truth about the Hebrew-only walls and the appointments and the income step-down, because a soft lie helps no one who is actually moving.
It is free. It has no ads. It has nothing to sell you and no marketplace skimming your decisions. It is one person keeping it current, funded by whoever decides it was worth a coffee.
Why I care this much
Because I believe in mass aliyah, and I am tired of watching good people talk themselves out of it over things that are, genuinely, solvable. Not the real fears, the ones that deserve respect. The logistics. The uncertainty. The not knowing where to start. Those are not reasons. Those are a documentation problem, and a documentation problem is exactly the kind of thing one determined person and a lot of careful work can fix.
So here it is, as good as I can make it. The excuses are gone. Make aliyah already.
Who is behind this
Yuri Kruman
I have immigrated twice. The first time I was nine, from Moscow to Lexington, Kentucky. The second time was 2021, from the United States to Haifa, with my wife and our three children. I grew up speaking Russian, I get by in Hebrew and I know what it is to decode a system you were not raised inside.
Professionally, I have been a chief HR officer three times and also a chief learning officer, and as an executive coach I have worked with more than 2,300 professionals (as of 2026). On The Muse I was a Master Coach, with 30+ five-star reviews across 134 engagements (as of 2021). I hold a J.D. from Cardozo and a B.A. with Distinction from the University of Pennsylvania.
Today I mentor olim one to one on a range of subjects. Aliyahu is that help written down, kept current and free for everyone.