Come on down for
v 451i E
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Country Hoed

Something Old,
Something New

Thursday, May 31st
7:30 pm in the Atrium

Huntington Woods family
makes a transition.

Featurin Country Western Music
By Don Rader & Al Savage

-

rail RSVP to limy at

248.352.0208
by May 28th

Bosmat and Eric Dovas meet the challenges of dual cultures.

JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR
Special to the Apple Tree

A

trending a Shabbat dinner
seemed so harmless, so natu-
ral to Bosmat Dovas that she
never thought it would
change her life. But it did.
Ten years ago, Dovas had moved to
Michigan from Kfar Saba, Israel, to learn
and practice her English. She needed the
linguistic skill to enter a university pro-
gram back home, so she decided that
after she served her requisite stint in the
army she would stay with friends in
Michigan.
One Shabbat early in Dovas' visit, her
friends invited Richard and Ruby
Kushner to dinner. The Kushners were
taken with Bosmat's beauty and person-
ality and suggested a shidduch, a match.
"I didn't think much of it," said Dovas,
recalling the evening. "They were nice
people and said that I should meet their
son."
Ruby's son, Eric, called Bosmat for a
date. And then another. And another.
You get the picture.
They were married two years later and
now have two children, 3-year-old Noam
and 2-year-old Talya. They live in
Huntington Woods.

The family is very much like many
other Israeli Americans in the Detroit
area. In fact, about 20,000 to 30,000
Israelis live in the Midwest, according to
the Consulate General of Israel's office in
Chicago. Some have married fellow
Israelis, but many marry Americans, an
official there said.
While the love the Dovases have for
each other is apparent, being an Israeli-
American family can have its challenges,
they admit. Although both were born
and raised as Jews, their individual expe-
riences with language, culture and land
have been vastly different.
Eric, for example, pretty much speaks
English with a tiny bit of Hebrew
thrown in here and there.
Bosmat, a Hebrew teacher at Temple
Emanu-El in Oak Park, barely spoke
English when she met Eric, but now is
much more fluent. She insists that their
children be bilingual and backs up that
choice by speaking to them in Hebrew
and stocking their video and book library
with about 90-percent Hebrew content.
"My son will listen to what his mother
says in Hebrew and he understands
what she is saying," Eric said. "He
knows more than I do. He will correct
me when I say it wrong."
Bosmat, on the other hand, has had to

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